Mannerisms

This should be the year of the solid state, flash-based laptop led by Samsung, Toshiba and Apple. Apple is said to be targeting the second half of the year for its introduction.

When the spot price of NAND flash is running at about $8 a gigabyte it's a bit cheeky of Fujitsu to offer a solid state version of its Lifebook laptop for $1,300 more than the HDD version.

Are the laptop manufacturers being clever in charging a fortune for the option of a solid state drive, or are they killing the market?

Despite spending an estimated $6 billion developing Vista, the new Microsoft OS is causing massive pain to early adopters.

An extraordinary row has broken out between Nicholas Negroponte, who heads up the Media Labs at MIT and Intel.

Asked what they had learned from eachother over the years, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates gave revealing answers at the All Things Digital industry conference in California last week.

Could EDA be used to solve the world's most difficult problems e.g. access to food and water, and ending disease and global warming? This is the intriguing thesis of Steven Levitan, Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, and Chairman of DAC being held this week in San Diego.

When the biggest solid state drives seen in laptops seem to be 32GB (Sony, Fujitsu, Dell etc) it comes as a pleasant surprise to see 256GB SSD modules on the market.

Sell the sizzle not the steak is advertising's oldest chiche. Amended for the tech sector, it's: 'Sell version 1.0 as though it's 3.0' Or even version 100.0.

It’s really good to see Intel doing the right thing and, what’s more, it’s good to see Intel apparently doing a U-Turn without blaming anyone else for it.

Sharp has produced a display capable of acting as a keyboard for a laptop computer. What, one wonders, would such a laptop computer look like?

At last, someone has done something special with solid state discs, and people are already raving about it, although it will not become available until next year.

I finally get my hands on an Asus Eee solid state mini-laptop and a fine thing it is.

A Manchester University group, called SpiNNaker, under the leadership of Professor Steve Furber, co-designer of the ARM microprocessor, may have cracked the key problem affecting the widespread adoption of the technology.

Extraordinary how an electronics product can appear from nowhere and take the world by storm. The Asus Eee is now sold out everywhere it was selling. Asus reckons it will sell nearly four million of the little laptops next year.

Just who are these Asus guys? Hard on the heels of its Eee laptop, apparently America’s most wanted Christmas present, is coming a laptop encased in bamboo.

Good news about that perky little Asus Eee, is that its manufacturer is inviting visitors to the Consumer Electronics Show next week to ‘join ASUS, Intel and Sprint to learn about the state of Wimax technology, preview next-generation mobile solutions (including the next generation Eee PC)’.

Maybe Intel’s miserable spat with the OLPC has had some good results, the world is now focussed on low-cost laptops.

Two of Gartner Dataquest’s predictions for the next four years could be feed off eachother: first, that Apple will double its unit market share in the US and Europe by 2011, and second, that half of all travelling workers will leave their laptops at home in favour of other devices by 2012.

The much-to-be-welcomed trend to tiny cheap wireless laptops is strengthening, with Elonex launching a £99 machine to go after the £200 machine of Asus, and others coming from Gigabyte, Medion, Gecube, E-Lead and Clevo.

Intel doesn’t do diversifications. Everyone knows that. Now and again it tries one, just for fun, a bit of video conferencing, ASICs, consumer products, wireless chips, a stab at NAND flash, but it soon pulls out to show that it’s only teasing.

Could Taiwan, Intel’s most fervent collaborator over the years, be preparing a second challenge to Intel’s x86 monopoly?

PC companies and PC dealers in Europe are said to be watching very closely the result of the EC's investigation into Intel's alleged malpractices in the European PC market. If , in the autumn, the EC decides against Intel, as it is rumoured in the German press that it will, then what may follow is a legal class-action brought by PC companies and dealers in Europe which have suffered financial loss from the alleged malpractices.

Everyone's scared of Google. That's one explanation of the Intel/HP/Yahoo move to collaborate in Cloud computing.

Word is that the Sealed Knot, who re-enact old battles, will be helping to re-create the famous Battle of Cambridge to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the founding of Acorn Computers, the iconic PC company whose architecture should have become the world PC standard instead of the crummy IBM PC architecture.  

The good news for the PC industry is that unit shipments grew 15 per cent in Q308 compared to Q307, according to Gartner Dataquest, the bad news is that a fair chunk of those shipments came from the tiny notebook market, e.g. the Asus eee, where units are cheap and profits elusive.

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Thanks for this to Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon, computer scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, and Hans Meuer of the University of Manheim who compiled the 32nd edition of the list of the world's TOP500 supercomputers.

2009 should be a hot year as ARM really comes into conflict with Intel. ARM-based chip-sets for netbooks are out from Freescale and Qualcomm, with the Freescale chip-set claiming significant advantages over Intel's Atom: 8 hours battery life (typically 3 hours on Atom); a $20 chip-set + peripherals for ARM vs a $60 cost for Atom; and an end-product price of $200 for an ARM-based netbook compared to the $400+ for an Atom-based netbook.

Twenty five years ago a country decided to try and get ahead of the rest of the world by investing nearly a billion dollars in developing a computer which would massively outperform contemporary computers.

Many years ago, the personal computer which everyone in the UK wanted to buy was not the IBM PC, or the Apple II, but the BBC Micro made by the Hermann Hauser-led start-up company, Acorn Computers of Cambridge. 

When Warren East, CEO of ARM, and Rich Beyer, CEO of Freescale, met up a couple of weeks back, one of the topics on the agenda was, most likely, an exchange views on the upcoming entry of ARM-based chip-sets into the netbook market.

Wow! Things are hotting up. Hard on the heels of Intel's CEO Paul Otellini saying last week that Intel has design-wins in smartphones, Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said Nokia is thinking of getting into laptops.

"We are looking very actively also at this opportunity," said Kallasvuo, " we don't have to look even for five years from now to see that what we know as a cellphone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging. Today we have hundreds of millions of people who are having their first Internet experience on the phone. This is a good indication."

Well that's about as strong as it gets that a CEO is going into a new area.

Suddenly, instead of just trying to knock ARM around, Intel is taking on someone its own size. If Nokia decides to step forward for the ARM + Linux formula for the netbook market, then Intel has a real fight on its hands.

Whatever you do, don't buy an Atom-based Netbook. That's because at least ten ARM-based Netbooks will be out on the High Street this year, according to Warren East, CEO of ARM.

What  is very odd is that DigiTimes of Taiwan is reporting that 'orders from the netbook and 3G handset segments will help drive foundry growth for the third quarter of 2009', while Intel reported that revenues for its netbook processor, Atom, were down by 27 percent in Q109 compared to the previous quarter.

How far should Microsoft feel threatened by Linux? Quite a bit, if ARM's CEO Warren East is to be believed.

Remember when IBM wouldn't make 386-based PCs because they'd cannibalise minicomputers? Well Compaq did, and IBM did eventually, and minis died, taking the likes of DEC with them.

Last week's Computex brought some interesting insights into the issue of whether Netbooks are the Trojan Horse which will prise open the Wintel monopoly.

Another day, another Netbook operating system. I thought we had Android for Netbooks and, if not Android, then XP or Windows 7 or, if you're a Linuxy x86 fan - Moblin. But Google is developing a new Netbook OS called Chrome.

Intel has gone berserk about operating systems. It's been working on Chrome, it's developed Moblin, it's historically wedded to Windows, it apparently worked on Android, it's linked with the Symbian-based Nokia, and it's just bought embedded OS developer WindRiver.

It would be a fine thing if the Netbook market turned out to be as disruptive to the computer industry status quo as some people think it might be. Rich Beyer, CEO of Freescale, reckons it's going to allow: "A new set of companies where anyone can win and grow into big companies."

According to the Commercial Times of Taiwan, both TSMC and UMC will be at 100% capacity utilisation for 65nm and 55nm processes by November, because of a flood of orders placed on them for ARM-based Netbook chips.

Well it's a bit of a turn up for the books to see Intel designing for power-efficiency but that's exactly what it told the Hot Chips Conference this week.

Sharp looks as though it's got the Netbook message with a 6 inch by 4 inch clamshell device running Ubuntu, weighing 400 grams, booting in three seconds and running for ten hours on a charge.

ARM's hard macro version of its Cortex A9, called Osprey, has been received by many as the processor that will challenge Atom for the Netbook/Smartbook/MID/UltraMobileComputing (whatever you like to call it) market.

Good news for the awaited ARM-based Netbook roll-out is that IBM has gone in with Canonical to make the latter's Ubuntu Linux operating system and IBM applications software available for Netbooks.

It's a bit of a facer to see Texas Instruments going frit on the Netbook market. But, according to Bloomberg earlier this week, TI's wireless boss, Greg Delagi, has chickened out of the Netbook market before the Netbook market got started.

Despite Texas Instruments chickening out of the Netbook market saying it doesn't fancy competing with Intel, there are feistier players seeing disruptive traction in the new format.

Where better, I thought, to track down that elusive beast, the ARM-based Netbook, than the ARM Tech Con in Santa Clara, last week.

That New York is bringing anti-trust charges against Intel is a good thing. It shows the findings of guilty by the anti-trust authorities in Korea, Japan and Europe were not anti-American, and it means Intel may now be forced to change its ways.

Well Arun Demeure was right on this one - the first ARM-based Netbook looks like coming from a wireless carrier rather than a traditional computer manufacturer.

A Microsoft developer has stated on his Linked-In entry that he has been working on Windows 8 and it has a 128-bit kernel.

Could the ARM-based Netbook be about to happen? A Chinese OEM called Menq has produced one called EasyPC, while the launch of an initial version of Google's Chrome OS is said to be only a week away.

Good news for the eager band of ARM-based Netbook spotters, is that a general manager from the ODM spin-off from Asus, called Pegatron Technology, said the company has received a 'large volume' of orders for 'Smartbooks' (the name given to ARM-based Netbooks) from 'a number of clients'.

At long last Moore's Law is beginning to apply to laptops. Last week it was the $80 Menq. This week, under the beguiling strap-line: 'Small, Slow, Sufficient', it's the $99 CherryPal.

When Intel paid AMD $1.25 billion to buy off the civil anti-trust case which AMD had brought against Intel, it was thought that, with AMD as chief complainant now out of the way, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) might drop its criminal investigation into Intel's alleged anti-competitive behaviour.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm a bit thick. What are the 'new technologies of awareness'?

Could a Californian start-up called Agnilux (meaning Fire and Light) be working on ARM-based processors for servers?

That elusive beast, the ARM-based Netbook - or Smartbook as some like to call it - could have been spotted at CES.

Is the ARM - Globalfoundries tie-up significant? Some people like the Wall Street Journal this morning, seem to think so.

One of the Laws of ICs has been that processing capability improves by 1,000 times every 15 years.

Acer is leading the charge in the PC market, growing 21% last year, and taking the No.2 slot from Dell in Q4.