thecentercanhelp.com

While the latter statement seems like typical marketing spin, it’s more than just spin in Intel’s case. The largest chipmaker in the world is in a competitive position because it already supplies many of a PC’s core components including the processor, chipset, communications silicon, and in some cases, the graphics processor. Add the main storage device to the mix, and–with the exception of an optical drive and screen–that’s all the core component in a notebook PC.

Intel Flash/SSD capacity: Intel and Micron have a joint venture called IM Flash Technologies. Both companies are currently making flash on a 50-nanometer process with plans to move to 40nm later this year. There are three NAND flash fabrication plants and one more currently being built in Singapore. The Intel-Micron venture provides funding for the development of silicon technology and the capacity to produce that silicon, according to Winslow. But marketing and end-product decisions are “absolutely separate,” he said.

(Credit:
Intel Corp.)

Intel believes 2008 is the year of the SSD. (See SSD primer below.) “For the first time, flash is going into the compute environment. In the last nine years or so when it experienced all of its growth, this has been in digital cameras and USB keys,” Winslow said. But now flash memory, in the form of SSDs, will be used as the main storage device in PCs. “When you’re putting all your critical applications and data into notebook or server (SSDs), who knows those markets better than the manufacturer that’s supplying the world with CPUs,” Winslow added.

With new competition, drive speeds will jump. Currently, the fastest SSDs from companies like Samsung approach 100MB/second for reading data. “What I can tell you is ours is much better than that,” Winslow said. Hard drives typically read data at about half this speed.

Intel doesn’t enter markets gently. Its new high-capacity solid-state drives (SSDs) are expected to jolt a market currently dominated by Samsung, Toshiba, and SanDisk.

SSD Primer, Part 1: SSDs are based on flash memory chip technology and have no moving parts. Hard-disk drives (HDDs), in contrast, use read-write heads that hover over spinning platters to access and record data. With no moving parts, SSDs avoid both the risk of mechanical failure and the mechanical delays of HDDs. Therefore, SSDs are generally faster and more reliable. The catch is the cost: SSDs are currently much more expensive than HDDs.

Also, like Samsung, Intel sees SSDs playing a role in the server market as a “performance accelerator.” Winslow said that Intel recently did a video-on-demand demonstration where it streamed 4,000 videos simultaneously. Just to do the streaming (not to store the video), it took 62 15,000 RPM (very high-performance) hard drives, he said. “We were able to replace those 62 hard drives with 10 SATA (SSD) technology drives,” he said.

“When Intel launches its…products, you’ll see that not all SSDs are created equal,” Winslow said. “The way the SSDs are architected, the way the controller and firmware operates makes a huge difference,” he said, referring to the chip (controller) that manages the SSD and software (firmware) that the controller uses.

At the moment, Intel offers small-capacity chip-level (what are called Thin Small Outline Packages or TSOPs) technology that provides end-product sizes ranging up to 16GB. But this modest line of products will get a big boost in the second quarter when Intel offers 1.8- and 2.5-inch SSDs ranging from 80GB to 160GB in capacity, said Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel. Intel’s new SSDs will compete with Samsung, for example, which is slated to bring out a 128GB SSD in the third quarter.

“We will be supplementing our product line with a SATA offering,” he said. Serial ATA, or SATA, is an interface used in high-performance hard disk drives. Intel’s products will be based on the SATA II specification that offers speeds of 3 gigabits (Gb) per second. Samsung is now shipping 64GB SSDs to Dell using the same technology.

But to be competitive with hard drives, SSD prices have to come down–a lot. In many cases, upgrading from a hard drive to an SSD in a notebook can mean paying an extra $1,000. Intel, like Samsung and Toshiba, sees steep declines in cost in the next two years. “Price declines are historically 40 percent per year,” Winslow said. “And in 2009, a 50 percent reduction, then again in 2010.”

Intel's current offering: the Z-P140 PATA solid-state drive.

SSD Primer, Part 2: Intel will be shipping in the second quarter a Multi-Level Cell or MLC solid-state drive. This is a more sophisticated technology than current Single-Level Cell or SLC. The advantage is larger capacity since MLC uses multiple levels per cell to allow more bits to be stored. The disadvantage is more complexity which can result in lower performance. “Inherently, MLC is slower and inherently fewer write cycling endurance,” Winslow said. Intel, however, has technology that will get around these problems, he said.

Finally, Winslow addressed the price collapse in the flash market in general–a topic that generated a lot of press after the Intel analyst meeting on Wednesday. “A majority of flash is being sold in very cyclical consumer electronics devices. Q1 and Q2 are soft quarters,” he said. On top of this, suppliers continue to shrink manufacturing process technologies, leading to more capacity at lower cost, he said.

(Credit:
Kevin Ho)

Video recording iPhone applications from down under - Polar Bear Farm's offering

Polar Bear Farm, working with a reversed engineered SDK, have created two prototype applications that caught my eye. Of course, this coming from someone who thinks hacking involves coughing and jailbreaking involves Folsom prison. But with that said, the New Zealander guys (and they are literally guys) from Polar Bear Farm demoed a search function for iPhones that searches contacts and calendars. Beyond that, and more ambitious are their video recording feature (still in development) and even more ambitious peer to peer poker (with other players) using your
iPhone as your hand of cards instead of actual physical cards. While the video compression details haven’t been worked out (each second being about 3 MB is a bit excessive) and the poker applications a twinkling in their eyes, outfits like Polar Bear were my first exposure to the types of outfits really innovating with the iPhone. I wonder what’s in the pipeline….

The focus on renovation is partly driven by the downturn in the building industry but also a raft of building efficiency mandates coming from national or state governments, said Catherine Palmer, the marketing manager for Architecture, Engineering & Construction solutions at Autodesk.

From there, an application called Ecotect Analysis allows an architect to input various data, such as weather patterns and available daylight, and to see the environmental impact of different design choices. That building model can then be imported into a hosted application, called Green Building Studio, which will tell the user how the building will perform in terms of energy use, carbon emissions, and water.

For example, a company could use Ecotect analysis to simulate how much electricity could be generated by solar panels or how much daylight is available for internal lighting. Green Building Studio can then analyze how those choice will impact the environmental performance with data such as projected energy costs and water use.

Autodesk now offers two add-on products to its Revit Architecture building-information modeling application to capture existing building data in a 3-D model and then simulate possible changes.

Last year, Autodesk acquired two companies that had developed analytical tools intended to bring more hard numbers to sustainable design efforts. When used with Autodesk’s existing applications, professionals such as architects, designers, and contractors can get a snapshot of how existing buildings perform in terms of energy and water use and can simulate the impact of architectural changes.

The company has designed its sustainable analysis products for architects and building professionals and contractors working on new construction or renovations. But the tools could also be used to monitor whether green building investments measure up to expectations, which is often not the case. Energy-service companies, for example, need to quantify efficiency improvements to secure financing, said Palmer.

(Credit:
Autodesk)

Wanted: good building data

There are a number of examples of commercial buildings that have been retrofit to be more efficient. The Empire State Building, for example, did a $20 million conversion which is expected to lower energy consumption by 38 percent. Autodesk’s office here is a LEED-certified Platinum level building. Rather than tear down an existing structure, the company used the shell of existing building and remade the interior with a number of green-building features, such as light sensors, more sustainably produced materials, and the use natural daylight to cut down on artificial lighting.

WALTHAM, Mass.–Green buildings aren’t only for well heeled individuals and corporate headquarters. There’s an ocean of existing buildings ripe for an efficiency makeover.

Autodesk executives declined to give a price for the software but a third-party review indicated that Revit Architecture’s suggested retail price was about $5,500.

That price and the training required means that individual homeowners are unlikely to use the software. But the commercial market is very large: Autodesk estimates that $400 billion a year will be spend on commercial renovations.

During a demonstration on Monday, Autodesk technical marketing manager Chico Membreno showed how designers and architects can quickly convert photos of an existing building into a 3-D model in Revit.

About 40 percent of energy use and greenhouse emissions come from buildings in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. And about 85 percent of the buildings that existing today will be around in 2050, Palmer said.

“A lot of people use rules of thumb,” Membreno said. “This empowers the architect and gives them data to back up their design decisions.”

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)

In Autodesk's lobby in Waltham, Mass, the company chose to display a number of projects, including printed three-dimensional models (on top) and a multi-layered map of a city that shows both buildings and underground infrastructure such as subways.

For example, the federal government earlier this month issued an executive order (click for PDF) that mandates that all new federal buildings built by 2030 need to be net zero energy, or generate as much as they consume. Many of these regulations also apply to renovating existing buildings, Palmer said.

Autodesk, a company best known for its AutoCAD three-dimensional design software, has spent the past year developing extensions to its existing products focused on green renovations of existing commercial buildings, company executives said here on Monday.

A screen shot from Ecotect, an application acquired by Autodesk that allows architects to measure and plan the environmental impact of design decisions. Based on an information model, the application here shows the heat gain inside a building from different sources, such as ventilation and the sun, during different times of the year.

The challenge with these efficiency retrofit projects is that the tools to analyze the potential savings in energy, water, or materials are slow or inaccurate, according to Autodesk executives. A building owner may compile current energy use in a spreadsheet, for example, which is not connected to the building-management system or design software.

Green building retrofits are 5 percent to 9 percent of the commercial building marketplace now but are projected to grow to more than 20 percent in five years, according to a recent report from SmartMarket.

(Credit:
Samsung)

Tuesday’s laptop announcement from Samsung includes specialized models for travelers and business users, but what about the average home user who wants a solid laptop at a relatively low price? That’s where the 13-inch Q310 and 16-inch R610 come in: neither as flashy as the ultraportables nor as rugged as the business models, the Q- and R-series laptops provide middle-of-the-road components and feature sets inside of attractive cases (featuring Samsung’s “touch of color” design) at prices from $1,000 to $1,250.

Though it has a 13.3-inch display, the Samsung Q310 is a bit more modest than the company’s sleek X360. Weighing 4.4 pounds and measuring 1.5 inches thick, the Q310’s chunkier design and traditional LCD display help keep its price low, while its high-end looks will help it appeal to mainstream users who want an attractively designed laptop. Samsung is offering two fixed configurations of the Q310: a $1,199 version incorporates a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 processor and a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive, and a $1,249 version bumps the processor to a 2.26GHz Intel Core2 Duo P8400 and the hard drive to 320GB. Both models include integrated Intel X4500 graphics, 4GB of 800MHz RAM, and a built-in DVD burner.

For true media lovers, the Samsung R610 offers a 16-inch display with the 16:9 aspect ratio that’s ideal for viewing HD video content. The laptop also has an ExpressCard/54 slot that lets you add a TV tuner. Otherwise, the R610 is a fairly typical budget entertainment laptop, with a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 processor, 4GB of 800MHz RAM, 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9200M GS graphics, and a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive. The single fixed configuration is priced at $1,049.

Both the Q310 and R610 will be available by mid-November at such online retailers as NewEgg, Buy.com, CDW, and Amazon.

The Apple MacBook Air is a seminal computer. There I said it. I’m not going to pretend that my opinion is the final word (or anything close to it) but I will weigh in by saying it’s a ground-breaking product. After using it for about two months, here’s why.

(Note: I am not a
Mac enthusiast. This is the first Apple I’ve ever owned.)

This is not a CNET review. The CNET review is here.

MacBook Air

(Credit:
Apple)

1. Very thin, very light but comparatively fast. That’s no mean feat. Subnotebooks I’ve had in the past (e.g., the Compaq Evo N400c) were thin and light but slow. Usually compromised by an ultra-slow hard disk drive (more on that below). The Air is not a speed demon but it’s not slow either. (It uses a full-blown Core 2 Duo 1.8-GHz processor not a slower ultra-low-voltage processor). Granted, this is a subjective evaluation. But day-to-day subjective experience matters too.

2. Solid state drive (SSD): The SSD is revolutionary. At first, I thought the SSD was, at best, a fascinating novelty. But it has turned out to be one of the most practical, useful hardware improvements to a notebook computer since the active-matrix color liquid crystal display, in my opinion. I can’t overstate enough that hard drive bottlenecks have been virtually eliminated. I could give a number of examples but here’s the most salient: No disk thrashing. On my other (faster, high-end) PC notebook, lots of open applications means lots of disk activity. Which slows everything down. This has not happened on the Air. A blessing.

3. Sturdy. For a sub-one-inch-thin notebook, it feels remarkably solid. Enough said.

4. Battery life. The consensus is that the Air’s battery life is bad to awful. I can only compare the battery life against the other PC notebooks I use. The Air beats them all. For what I do on the Air (a lot of open windows, occasional moderate Web development, writing), it lasts anywhere from three to five hours. In this sense, I agree with this post that says using the Air as your main, do-everything computer (which I do not do) is missing the point of what the Air is intended to be (and will result in lousy battery life).

5. Looks. You can’t beat the aesthetics. The Starbucks status factor can’t be ignored.

Notes. Obviously, the Air has its (well-publicized) shortcomings. I will mention three: It can get hot occasionally, the keyboard is OK but not great, and the high price is off-putting. But I will say this: for a cutting-edge, groundbreaking design, it has surprisingly few faults. (The fact that it has few ports and no optical drive has not fazed me one bit.)

Here’s another take at Macworld.

IBM and Saudi Arabia’s national research and development organization have created a joint nanotechnology lab to develop new technologies in solar power, seawater desalination, and recyclable materials.

An agreement to create the Nanotechnology Centre of Excellence, established by the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology and IBM Research, was signed last week in a ceremony in Riyadh.

The lab is one of several indicators that oil-rich Middle East nations are moving rapidly into clean tech.

The oil minister of Saudi Arabia, Ali al-Nuaimi, told the French oil newsletter Petrostrategies that “one of the most important sources of energy to look at and to develop is solar energy,” according to an AFP report.

Last November, OPEC members created a $750 million fund to do research on carbon capture and storage.

And the head of the Masdar Clean Tech Fund, based in Abu Dhabi, last month was named “Cleantech leader of the year,” at last week’s Cleantech Forum. The fund is behind Masdar City, which is being called the first sustainable city.

For IBM, the joint nanotechnology lab is part of the company’s Big Green Innovations initiative to develop environmental technology.

Virtual Iron, a start-up aiming to commercialize the open-source Xen virtualization software, has raised $20 million.

The investment include Highland Capital Partners, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital, and SAP Ventures, the Lowell, Mass.-based company said. Total funding for the company now has reached $65 million, the company said Monday.

Virtual Iron had “dramatic growth” over the last 12 months, and the new funding round was at a higher valuation, the company said. It didn’t release particulars, but did cite IDC statistics saying that spending on server virtualization is growing at 60 percent per year and that Virtual Iron is growing faster than the overall market.

Virtual Iron also grown internationally, with 40 percent of revenue from outside North America, and has distributor deals with Avnet and Tech Data.

Virtual Iron competes chiefly with virtualization powerhouse VMware. However, it looks like the company has its sights set more on the host of second-tier alternatives, including Citrix Systems’ XenSource, Microsoft’s forthcoming Hyper-V, and Parallels’ forthcoming Parallels Server.

“Virtual Iron is the only competitor to VMware in the market that has the features to support the high-value use cases for virtualization such as dynamic workload management, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery,” said David Skok, a general partner at Matrix Partners.

(Credit: Mooneythinks)

CNN is now printing one-off American Apparel headline T-shirts. The new feature (in beta) allows you to order them from the CNN web site — with the headline, time-stamp, and CNN logo on it.

Pretty cool. CNN gets it. Their T-shirt campaign exhibits all the key ingredients of contemporary marketing genius.

Instant: Merchandising in real-time, tangibly tied with world news.

Artificially scarce: The headlines are only available to be printed while the headline is in the current news section.

Customizable/hackable: The T-shirts are customizable. You can put your own headline on them simply by changing the text in the URL.

Personal: The message is clear — you are the news.

Convergent: Digital and physical domain converge. You can wear online news on your body.

Social: The T-shirts are perfect conversation starters (”Why this headline?;” “Where were you when that happened”?) or outlets for political statements (”Clinton endorses Obama”).

Viral: Because it’s social, it’s viral.

(Credit:
Harman Kardon)

Today’s audiovisual receivers are complicated things. They can be a real pain to use, have excruciatingly complicated menu systems, and many don’t even accommodate turntables! Point is if you’re mostly interested in playing music do yourself a big favor and buy a stereo receiver.

Like Harman Kardon’s new HK 3490 two times 120 watt receiver ($449). In my opinion Harman makes the best sounding AV receivers, and I have every reason to expect their stereo models to be even better. The engineers invested in a high-performance phono preamp, pre-out/main-in jacks, and high-current amplification. You also get front panel access to bass & treble controls, dual subwoofer outputs and if you ever miss surround sound switch on the Dolby Virtual Speaker processing that simulates surround from two speakers.

You can, of course, use the HK 3490 with a 2.0 or 2.1 channel home theater system.

Dell notebooks will be available in retail stores in India for the first time, the company said Tuesday.

The company hinted that it would make this move last week, saying it planned to increase its presence in China and India, two of the world’s biggest emerging markets for computers. Dell already has a relationship with one of China’s largest retail chains, Gome.

Some Inspiron notebooks will be sold through Indian retailer Croma.

(Credit:
Dell)

In the announcement, Dell said it plans to offer Inspiron desktops and notebooks, and XPS notebooks through Indian electronics outlet Croma. Dell has a presence in India, but prior to this announcement, only via direct sales channels where customers could call or order a PC online.

The move to make its PC available in retail stores follows a strategy the company began laying out almost a year ago when it first announced it would offer some PCs through Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club. Since then the Texas PC maker has added U.K. electronics retailer Carphone Warehouse, Bic Camera in Japan, Gome in China, Staples, and Best Buy.