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LAS VEGAS — Intel is preparing a new line of processing, graphics and wireless technologies aimed in part at bringing video to consumers — and preventing them from copying it.

The content protection scheme, known as “Intel Insider,” is a feature built into its second-generation Core processors, which Intel unveiled Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show here.

The feature will prevent playback or copying of HD video content through insecure channels within a PC. For example, video can be delivered to a secured HDMI port, but not over an unsecured PCI bus. It also provides a mechanism for online content providers to recognize Intel Insider computers, and deliver copy protected content only to them.

“It’s like an armored truck, if you will,” Intel marketing director Josh Newman told Wired. “It’s a way of securing the content once it’s inside the PC.”

The second-generation chips, which will retain the Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 nomenclature used in the current generation of chips, feature enhanced graphics processing capabilities aimed at delivering better 3-D image rendering for games, faster image editing as well as improved HD video processing. They are made with Intel’s 32nm manufacturing process and incorporate its high-k metal gate transistor technology.

In a demo, Intel showed a “video thumbnail” browser that let users browse through dozens of simultaneously-playing video clips. Intel says the chips can support playback of 7 or 8 HD video streams simultaneously, and can transcode and downsize a two-hour HD video to iPhone format in 5 or 10 minutes — without tying up the processor, so you can continue to use your computer during the operation.

Quad-core versions of the chips will be available on Jan. 9, with dual-core versions to follow in February. PC manufacturers will soon introduce more than 500 laptop and desktop models using the chips, according to Intel.

Intel says the chips will also be more power efficient, leading to longer battery life and enabling thinner, lighter and cooler notebooks.

They will all include an enhanced “Intel Turbo Boost” technology that reassigns CPU and graphics processing resources as needed to provide improved performance to applications, such as games.

But it’s the Intel Insider feature that has movie studios excited.

“Now that Intel has made it more secure, we’re able to provide new releases and popular catalog titles in full HD to the PC,” said Warner Home Entertainment Group president Kevin Tsujihara, in a press release.

Although Intel Insider prevents end-user copying and playback, Intel is pitching the feature as one that’s beneficial to consumers, presumably because it will make movie studios and TV networks more comfortable about selling or renting their content online, thus opening the door to more content. It also doesn’t require people to enter complicated authentication codes — the authentication all happens in the background.

“We’re trying to be user-centric,” Intel senior vice president Tom Kilroy told Wired in a pre-briefing.

In addition to Warner, Twentieth Century Fox will also use Intel Insider to distribute content. CinemaNow will also support the feature.

See Also:

• Intel Threatens to Sue Anyone Who Uses HDCP Crack
• Apple Bends to Studios, Adds Copyright Protection to MacBooks
• Intel Touts ‘WiDi’ for Connecting PCs, TVs

An award-winning writer specializing in technology, science and business, Dylan Tweney is a senior editor at Wired.com and publisher of tinywords, the world’s smallest magazine.
Follow @dylan20 and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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This week Brian X. Chen and I get all giddy and excited about the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, aka CES.

CES is a weeklong preview of what kinds of gadgets you’ll see in 2011. We’ll be there from January 4-9, blogging right here on Gadget Lab.

Tablets are likely to big at CES this year, just as they were in 2010. But in 2011, we think manufacturers’ promises might even come true.

LG, MSI, Motorola and Toshiba are all rumored to be releasing tablets. HP, which acquired Palm earlier this year, is also planning to release a webOS-based tablet in the coming year — but we’re not expecting to see it at CES.

Intel and AMD are both working on next-generation processors, including Intel’s “Sandy Bridge” CPUs and AMD’s “Fusion” line of chips that combine CPU capabilities and graphics processing in a single package. What’s that mean for you? Lower power, longer-lasting netbooks and tablets.

Look for dual-core smartphones to boost the processing power in your pocket, largely on the basis of Nvidia’s Tegra processor.

There will be lots of 3-D televisions at the show, but what we’re more excited about is the advent of more 3-D cameras and camcorders, like one that Fujifilm introduced in 2010. If you could actually make your own 3-D pictures and movies easily, you might have a reason to buy 3-D displays like the Nintendo 3DS or — who knows? — any one of the increasing number of 3-D TVs.

Like the show? You can also get theGadget Lab video podcast on iTunes, or if you dont want to be distracted by our unholy on-camera talent, check out theGadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Labvideo oraudio podcast feeds

Or listen to the audio: Gadget Lab audio podcast #98 (.mp3 or .ogg)

An award-winning writer specializing in technology, science and business, Dylan Tweney is a senior editor at Wired.com and publisher of tinywords, the world’s smallest magazine.
Follow @dylan20 and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Add the ‘made in China’ tag to yet another gadget: the world’s fastest supercomputer. China says it has the most powerful computing system — a machine called Tianhe-1A.

The supercomputer uses 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs (graphics processing units) and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs and is capable of clocking 2.507 petaflops or 2,507 trillion floating point calculations per second.

The Tianhe-1A will take the top spot from the U.S. Cray XT5 aka Jaguar that’s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The Jaguar can clock 1.759 petaflops and is built using 37,376 AMD processors.

The Tianhe-1A is interesting because it combines CPU and GPUs — much like desktop PCs — to create the world’s most powerful machine. In fact, Nvidia, claims if its GPUs weren’t used, then it would have taken 50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to create a comparable computer.

The Tianhe-1A was designed by the National University of Defense Technology in China and will be operated as an open access system for large scientific computations.

The use of GPUs in high performance computing is on the rise. Once seen in PCs used largely for multimedia and gaming, GPU-based computing has become more popular among researchers for its ability to offer raw computing power. While CPU are critical to a PC for their ability to interact with the different computing elements such as memory and disk drives, GPUs can perform specialized tasks especially related to graphics and visual computations that working in tandem with CPUs can speed up computing.

The CPU-GPU combination also helps keep up power efficiency. The system consumes 4.04 megawatts, three times less than what it would have if it were built entirely with CPUs, claims Nvidia.

Overall, the Tianhe-1A is a computing monster. It has 262 terabytes of memory and is housed in 140 refrigerator-sized cabinets.

Photo: Nvidia

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Netflix and Hulu make great alternatives to cable TV. The downside: You’ve got to tether a computer to your TV with some kind of cable.

Fortunately, if you’re getting tired of the cord snaking from your laptop to your entertainment center, there’s an alphabet soup of technologies angling to help you out.

Not so fortunately, these technologies are varied and largely incompatible.

Consumers today can choose from WHDI, wireless HD, WiDi, wireless USB and Wi-Fi Direct. Confused? Check out our guide to these emerging wireless streaming-media technologies.

WHDI

Wireless Home Digital Interface, or WHDI, was finalized in 2009 to give consumers a way to link the PC to the TV. Think of it as the wireless equivalent of HDMI. The technology has a latency of less than 1 millisecond, which means it’s good enough not just for watching movies but should also work well to stream games from your browser to the TV.

WHDI can stream 1080p video at up to 3 Gbps (gigabits per second). All you need is a wireless HDI dongle that can plug into your laptop and a little receiver that goes behind the TV. That set will cost about $150 and will be available early next year.

Meanwhile, TV makers such as Sharp and LG are rolling out TVs with built-in support for WHDI standard.

Slowly, the WHDI consortium hopes to convince PC makers integrate WHDI chips into laptops, similar to the way Wi-Fi chips are built in today.

WirelessHD

While other wireless technologies focus on streaming content from the PC to the TV, WirelessHD targets the most common electronic eyesore in homes: the black HDMI cables that snake out from behind the TV towards the set-top box, PC or the DVD player.

If built into TV sets, WirelessHD can offer fast data transfers of up to 10 GBps to 28 Gbps. That makes it the fastest of the lot for point-to-point data transfer.

So far, TV makers such as Panasonic, LG and Vizio have said they will offer wireless-HD–enabled sets by the end of the year.

Wireless USB

When the familiar USB port decides to go wireless, it means steaming-media companies can piggyback on to a powerful, widely understood technology.

Wireless USB is based on the Ultra-WideBand (UWB) radio platform. It can send data at speeds of 480 Mbps at distances of up to 10 feet and 110 Mpbs at up to 32 feet. Companies such as Logitech already offer UWB-based kits that can be used to connect your PC to the TV.

A startup called Veebeam launched a box that uses wireless USB to stream internet video from your laptop to the TV.

Wireless USB is more powerful for point-to-point connectivity than traditional Wi-Fi, because it offers more bandwidth and less interference, says Veebeam. It estimates 420 Mbps bandwidth for its wireless USB implementation.

WiGig

Picture yourself downloading a 25-GB Blu-ray disc in less than a minute. That’s what WiGig can do for you, says the Wireless Gigabit Alliance. The Alliance is a consortium of electronics companies that has established a specification for a wireless technology. WiGig could offer users data-transfer speeds ranging from 1 Gbps to 6 Gbps — or at least 10 times faster than todays Wi-Fi.

The alliance had hoped to make WiGig commonplace by the end of the year, but it has been slow going for the standard, which has not been implemented in any consumer products.

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by Chris Foresman, Ars Technica

At long, long last, the Macbook Air has been updated. But if you were hoping for enough CPU muscle in the new models to keep a bunch of Flash-addled webpages from bringing the entire portable to its knees, then you’re going to be sorely disappointedthe Core 2 Duo is still with us in the new models. In fact, the 11″ Macbook Air actually trails its predecessor in clockspeed, while the 13″ model hasn’t changed at all.

Given that Apple really went all-out to upgrade the rest of the Air package, the choice of a geriatric CPU is a giant slap in the face to Intel’s latest portable processor options. Apple looked at Arrandale, Intel’s 32nm CPU with a northbridge/GPU combo integrated into the same package, and said, “No thanks, but do you have any more of the really old chips?” Ouch.

We hate to say we told you so, but we told you sotwice, even.

When Intel unveiled the Arrandale ULV parts for ultraportables a few months back, it was obvious that they were not destined for the Macbook Air. The problem wasn’t so much the CPU part of Arrandaleeven though the ULV variant is indeed deficient in the cache and clockspeed departments when compared to the Core 2 Duothe problem is the GPU.

The multicore GPU integrated into the NVIDIA 320M handily spanks the (admittedly improved) Intel integrated graphics glued onto the Core i-series processors. And it’s also compatible with OpenCL, something Intel has yet to support in its IGPs. Apple argued that the improved graphics power of the 320M was more important than improved CPU processing power when designing the recent 13″ MacBook Pro updatethat same logic (though you may disagree with the decision) still applies here.

That’s not the only problem. The dual-chip packages are considerably larger than the small-outline packages for the low-voltage Core 2 Duos originally introduced on the first MacBook Air. Even with the integrated northbridge and GPU, Arrandale processors still require a separate controller. The combination simply couldn’t fit on the MacBook Air’s minuscule logic board. Instead of giving up room to shoehorn in updated processors, Apple instead chose to improve the MacBook Air’s battery capacity. With seven hours of promised life without any need for an external battery, it can be argued that this is a useful trade-off.

Finally, we have to consider the 11″ MacBook Air. While its bigger brother offers a 1.86GHz or 2.13GHz CPU, the smaller sibling is left with just 1.4GHz or 1.6GHz options. The reason for the difference here is simple: thermal design. The slower processors clock in at just 10W TDP (7W less than those used in the 13″ models) making it much easier to cool the inside of the tiny 11.6″ casing.

The combination of Core 2 Duo processor and NVIDIA 320M graphics is more powerful than the Atom and Intel IGP combo used in notebooks of similar size. While some comparable ultraportables use newer Arrandale chips in them, most also cost significantly more than the revised MacBook Air models. Apple decided to trade maximum performance for increased battery life and portability and still offer a lower price than the previous generation. Whether that tradeoff is worth it (and we’ll be checking this as we review the new models) is up to users to decide.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

Photo by Brian X. Chen / Wired.com.

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The iPad is the hottest holiday gift this season but one group of companies are unhappy about it. Chip makers Intel and AMD are feeling the pain from iPad sales as the tablet eats into consumer demand for notebooks.

“In the last quarter or two the tablet has represented a disruption in the notebook market,” Dirk Meyer, president and CEO of AMD told financial analysts Thursday. “If you ask five people in the industry you’ll get five different answers as to what degree there’s been cannibalization by tablets of either netbooks or notebooks.”

But the bottomline is that the iPad has cannibalized even the sales of laptops.

AMD is not alone in viewing the iPad as disruptive to the traditional laptop business. Earlier this week Intel CEO Paul Otellini told analysts that the iPad will “probably” hurt PC notebook sales. In the long term, though, Otellini believes the iPad will help expand the category of consumer electronics–much like what netbooks did.

But there’s one major difference. So far, all the two major tablets–the iPad and the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Tab and Research In Motion’s PlayBook–don’t use chips from the traditional PC chipmakers.

“Intel is starting to manage expectations better, admitting that iPad would cannibalize PC growth, but it has made the case that it is well positioned in other tablets,” Mark Lipacis, an analyst with Morgan Stanley wrote in a research note. “We remain challenged to find Intel-based non-Apple tablets which can drive meaningful revenues for Intel.”

Since Apple launched the iPad in April, the company has sold more than 3 million devices and has given the category a second lease on life. Other companies such as Dell, Samsung and BlackBerry maker RIM have announced new tablets but the iPad remains the market leader for now. Meanwhile, the halo effect from the iPad has spurred PC sales for Apple. Apple overtook Acer to become the number three PC maker in the U.S. in the last quarter, according to IDC.

“Apple’s influence on the PC market continues to grow, particularly in the U.S., as the company’s iPad has had some negative impact on the mini notebook market,” says Bob O’Donnell, IDC vice president for clients and displays. “But, the halo effect of the device also helped propel Mac sales and moved the company into the number three position in the U.S. market.”

For AMD and Intel, that can’t be good news. Unlike the netbook category, whose rise helped propel sales of chips for these companies, the explosive growth of tablets could help reduce their influence–unless they jump on to the trend.

And that’s exactly what Intel is hoping to do with its MeeGo operating system. MeeGo is a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices that Intel has developed along with Nokia. A key executive departure and news that smartphones running the operating system wont be available until sometime next year has left Intel and Nokia fighting to stay on course with Meego.

But already a German company WeTab is offering a MeeGo based tablet.

Intel says more tablets based on MeeGo will hit the market next year. Ultimately, tablets will become “additive to the bottom line, and not take away from it,” Otellini told analysts.

But unless some Intel-chip based tablets come to market soon that may be in danger of becoming just wishful thinking.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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It hasn’t been smooth sailing for MeeGo, Intel and Nokia’s combined effort to develop a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices. A key executive departure and news that smartphones running the operating system won’t be available until sometime next year has left Intel and Nokia fighting to stay on course.

“The community around MeeGo is very strong,” Suzy Ramirez, an Intel spokesperson told Wired.com. “We are on schedule and MeeGo will be available for TVs and in-car entertainment systems soon, and other devices next year.”

MeeGo hashad a tough week. On Tuesday, Ari Jaaksi, the vice-president of Nokia’s MeeGo division, confirmed he will leave the company for “personal reasons.” Last month, Nokia went through a change of guard when CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo stepped down to be replaced by former Microsoft executive Stephen Elop.

A Nokia spokesperson has said the company’s MeeGo roadmap remains unchanged.

Meanwhile, Intel vice-president Doug Fisher told Forbes that the company expects to show the first smartphones running MeeGo operating systems early next year and have them in hands of consumers by mid-2011.

“All this has added confusion to MeeGo’s prospects, especially given the tremendous stride being made by alternative operating systems such as Android and iOS,” said Avi Greengart, an analyst with research and consulting firm Current Analysis. “Given the management changes at Nokia and the possibility that MeeGo phones could be delayed, it leaves question marks about the future of MeeGo.”

Over the last three years, the rise of smartphones and the growing popularity of tablets and streaming media players has opened the doors for new operating systems that can promise a better user experience. For instance, Android, which launched in 2008 for smartphones, has now spread to tablets and has even birthed Google TV, a platform that combines cable TV programming with sites from the internet.

MeeGo hopes to do something similar. But it started small. Last year Intel started a project called Moblin that would be a Linux-based operating system designed specifically for netbooks. Separately, Nokia had been working on a Linux-based software platform called Maemo for smartphones and tablets.

At the Mobile World Congress conference in February this year, the two companies decided to combine efforts and spawn a new OS called MeeGo. MeeGo is now hosted by the Linux Foundation and has expanded its reach to phones, tablets, TVs and even in-car entertainment systems.

Both companies desperately want to control a next-generation mobile OS. Nokia has heavily relied on Symbian, which enjoys massive popularity worldwide but is saddled with an archaic, needlessly complicated interface that hasn’t adapted well to the world of touchscreen phones. And Intel has seen success supplying its Atom chips to the netbook market, but hasn’t made significant inroads into smartphones; it’s hoping that an OS might help it leverage its chip business into a new market.

In the next few weeks, Intel plans to release a version of the nascent OS so developers can start creating the user interface required to put MeeGo on different devices. MeeGo with an Intel-developed skin is expected after that. MeeGo will have its first developers’ conference in Ireland in November.

“From a product perspective, we expect to show smartphones and tablets on MeeGo in mid-2011,” says Ramirez.

But Greengart isn’t convinced that plans for MeeGo won’t change again. Intel is dependent on Nokia to deliver the hardware that will bring MeeGo to consumers and Nokia’s big management changes could affect MeeGo’s future, he says.

So far, Nokia has said that it plans to use the Symbian OS for low and mid-level smartphones and build MeeGo into high-end devices that are more focused on computing.

“The problem is that Nokia executives, including the CEO who talked about this strategy just a week or two ago, are not there. And who knows what’s going in the company,” says Greengart. “The future of MeeGo depends on how much Nokia and Intel are willing to stick to their plans in a fast-changing world.”

Photo: MeeGo Phone browser (Steve Paine/Flickr)

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Intel has joined the parade of companies trying to beam video to your TV. The chip maker is betting on ‘WiDi,’ its technology for streaming media wirelessly from the PC to the TV.

Intel’s WiDi, which is short for “wireless display,” will remove the pain of stringing HDMI cables between the TV and the laptop.

“This display technology extends the laptop screen to the TV,” says Randy Stude, who handles gaming strategy for Intel. “You don’t need cables or to buy a single-purpose gadget to make the connection.”

Intel showed the WiDi technology at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco earlier this week.

The technology will come pre-loaded in new laptops. Already 44 models sold at Best Buy have the WiDi technology. But consumers will need to buy an additional $100 adapter from Netgear to complete the connection to the TV. Add a wireless remote such as Loop or Glide TV, and consumers can watch web content on a big screen 25 feet to 30 feet away.

Intel is just the latest in a long list of companies that are trying to make it easier for consumers to watch web video in their living room. Companies such as Apple, Boxee and Roku have offered streaming media players for web video enthusiasts.

In May, Google launched Google TV, a new set-top-box platform based on Googles Android operating system that will combine cable programming with access to online photo sites, gaming and music.

Earlier this week, start-up Veebeam introduced a streaming media box that uses wireless USB to connect the laptop to the TV. Veebeam estimates 420 Mbps speeds for wireless USB and offers both 720p and 1080p high-definition video options.

Intel has chosen Wi-Fi to stream content wirelessly. Wi-Fi doesn’t require line of sight and it can reach about 9 Mbps speeds, says Stude. It is much slower than wireless HDMI that can offer speeds of upto 500 Mbps.

Intel’s software will work on all laptops using Arrendale based core i3, i5 and core i7 technologies. But they will have to have Intel’s 802.11-n chips.

“It’s more flexible than a Boxee box or Apple TV,” says Stude. “You are not limited to just a few types of content and put in a walled garden.”

The wireless streaming is currently to limited to 720p resolution and it can’t handle Blu-ray content. Stude says Intel plans to support higher resolution video in the future.

But first, Intel will have to survive the extremely competitive and crowded market. It will have to steal consumers’ attention away from the soon to launch Google TV and the newly introduced $100 Apple TV.

Intel hopes its clout in the PC market will put it ahead of competitors. In bundling the software and chips into the laptop, Intel may have a distribution channel that few of its competitors can match.

But to get there, it will have to find a way to cut price and integrate the $100 Netgear adapter into the laptop.

Photos: Priya Ganapati/Wired.com

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Small always-on handheld devices equipped with low-power sensors could signal a new class of “context-aware” gadgets that are more like personal companions.

Such devices would anticipate your moods, be aware of your feelings and make suggestions based on them, says Intel.

“Context-aware computing is poised to fundamentally change how we interact with our devices,” Justin Rattner, CTO of Intel told attendees at the company’s developer conference.

“Future devices will learn about you, your day, where you are and where you are going to know what you want,” he added. “They will know your likes and dislikes.”

Context-aware computing is different from the simple sensor-based applications seen on smartphones today. For instance, consumers today go to an app like Yelp and search for restaurants nearby or by cuisine and price. A context-aware device would have a similar feature that would know what restaurants you have picked in the past, how you liked the food and then make suggestions for restaurants nearby based on those preferences. Additionally, it would be integrated into maps and other programs on the device.

Researchers have been working for more than two decades on making computers be more in tune with their users. That means computers would sense and react to the environment around them. Done right, such devices would be so in sync with their owners that the former will feel like a natural extension of the latter.

“The most profound technology are those that disappear,” Mark Weiser, chief scientist at Xerox PARC and father of the term “ubiquitous computing” told in 1991 about context awareness in machines. “They are those that weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life.”

Making this possible on PCs has proved to be challenging, says Rattner. But the rise of smartphones and GPS-powered personal devices could change that.

“We now have the infrastructure needed to make context-aware computing possible,” says Rattner.

The next step is smarter sensors, say Intel researchers. Today, while smartphones come equipped with accelerometers and digital compasses, the data gathered from these sensors is used only for extremely basic applications.

“Accelerometers now are used to flip UI,” says Lama Nachman, a researcher at Intel. “But you can go beyond that to start sending human gait and user behavior.”

For instance, sensors attached to a TV remote control can collect data on how the remote is held by different users and build profiles based on that. Such a remote, of which Intel showed a prototype at the conference, could identify who’s holding the remote and offer recommendations for TV shows based on that.

Overall, context-aware devices will have to use a combination of “hard-sensing,” or raw physical data about a user (such as where you are), and “soft-sensing” information about the user, such as preferences and social networks, to anticipate needs and make recommendations. This creates the cognitive framework for managing context.

On the hardware side, context-aware computing will call for extremely energy-efficient sensors and devices. Devices will also have to change their behavior, says Rattner.

“We can’t let devices go to sleep and wake them up when we need them,” he says. “We will need to keep the sensory aspects on them up and running at all times and do it at minimum power.”

So far, context-aware computing hasn’t found commercial success, says Intel. But as phones get smarter and tablets become popular, the company hopes users will have a device where apps disappear and become part of the gadget’s intelligence.

Photo: Intel CTO Justin Rattner holds up a prototype sensor that could help enable context aware computing in devices/ (Priya Ganapati/Wired.com)

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Most of us can’t fully succumb to our technolust until we’ve seen a finished gadget in use. Here’s the dirty secret, though — none of your perverted fantasies about multiple-touchscreen smartphones can be realized until someone makes a dual-core chip that would know what to do with them. Samsung’s new Orion 1GHz dual-core ARM microprocessor could make those kinky dreams come true.

Samsung announced the new chip in a press release today; it will be pushed out to “select customers in the fourth quarter of 2010″ and go into “mass production in the first half of 2011.”

So what’s the big deal? We’ve had dual-core processors in our laptops for years! Ah, but those processors are way too big and power-hungry for mobile standards. You don’t want to strap your laptop’s battery to your phone, do you? By necessity, mobile chips are all about small size and low power-consumptions. That’s why IBM’s working on mobile chips with super-sleep modes and Intel just went ahead and bought smartphone chipmaker Infineon just to get in the game, as Gadget Lab reported last week.

But wait — haven’t Qualcomm and Texas Instruments already announced their dual-core processors for mobile devices? And didn’t LG even announce today that they’re going to start packing graphics champ NVidia’s Tegra 2 dual-core processor into smartphones? This can’t just be about mobile multicore processors.

How right you are. This is where we have to unpack those other big numbers attached to the Orion’s specs. The real gem of the Orion is its video processing. Part of this is just the multicore processing; lightweight single-core mobile chips can’t really handle true high-definition (1080p) video. Like the Tegra, the Orion can. What’s more, it’s got an “onboard native triple display controller architecture that compliments multi-tasking operations in a multiple display environment.” Translation: three-way. Smartphones with multiple screens that can display different video to each screen, plus output an entirely different video to a third. These chips are polymorphously perverse.

So that’s the truth about these chips. A smartphone or tablet’s hardware body and capacitative touchscreen are just pretty clothes and suggestive sunglasses. Once you strip those away away, all of the hot, sinewy action is happening underneath.

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ATI, the Canadian graphics-chip company born back in 1985, is dead. After being acquired by AMD in 2006, and spending the intervening four years locked in the Californian chip-maker’s cellar, forced to try on dresses that “make it look purty”, the deed has finally been done: the ATI name has been erased from all products.

The acquisition brought one of the Big Two GPU-makers (the other is NVIDIA) into the AMD’s CPU business, but ATI managed to keep its name on its inventions until today. From now on, there will still be Radeon and FirePro cards, but they’ll be called AMD Radeon and AMD FirePro.

Why? AMD is moving firmly into combined CPU-GPU systems, which put everything together for energy and space savings. Think of the Intel GMA 950 which was used in MacBooks and Mac Minis, along with PC hardware. These “integrated graphics” systems share the main RAM with the CPU, further saving money but also offering lesser performance. AMD decided that these combined systems would be too confusing with all the different branding, and dropped ATI like the hot girl drops the dork with a car after they arrive together at the school prom.

Best of all, AMD has redesigned the stickers for its chips, and there are actually two sets. One drops all mention of even the AMD name, replacing it with the word “graphics” so when its discrete graphics cards ship in Intel boxes, the names won’t clash. So goes the complex corporate maze that lies behind those ugly stickers found on all PCs.

AMD jettisons ATI brand name, makes Radeon its own [The Tech Report]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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A new research breakthrough from Intel combines silicon chips and lasers to transmit data at 50 gigabits per second — and someday, maybe as fast as a terabit per second.

The 50 Gbps speed is enough to download an HD movie from iTunes, or up to 100 hours of digital music, in less than a second.

The technology, known as silicon photonics, can be used as a replacement for copper wires to connect components within computers, or between computers in data centers.

“The fundamental issue is that electronic signaling relying on copper wires is reaching its physical limits,” says Justin Rattner, chief technology officer for Intel, which announced the breakthrough Tuesday. “Photonics gives us the ability to move vast quantities of data across the room or planet at extremely high speeds and in a cost effective manner.”

Photonics refers to the generation, modulation, switching and transmission of light and can be done using lasers or light emitting diodes.

Over the next two years, Intel hopes to perfect the technology, including improving the efficiency of the lasers, the packaging and assembly of the silicon chips, and the manufacturing techniques needed to churn out millions of these modules.

“We have a good sense of the challenges here and what it takes to put all the components together, so we expect the technology to be widely deployed by the middle of the decade,” says Mario Paniccia, director of the Photonics technology lab at Intel.

Copper cables are the lifeblood of computing today. But they are limited in their length because of the signal degradation that comes with using them over distances.

“At speeds of 10 Gbps and higher it is difficult to move electrons fast enough and with enough signal strength to beat the tradeoffs,” says Rattner.

This limits the design of computers, forcing processors, memory and other components to be placed just inches from each other, says Intel. The alternative is to transmit data over optical fiber, but that is expensive and limited in its use currently.

“It’s not an issue if you are using only a few of them in an undersea cable,” says Rattner, speaking about optical fiber cables. “But if you want to have optics widespread, from consumers to supercomputers, the cost has to be taken down or it is not practical.”

That’s where integrated silicon photonics could step in. Using silicon-based chips and the same manufacturing process currently used for those chips, photonics modules could replace copper connections.

It could change how computers and data centers are designed in the future, says Intel. Earlier this year, the company showed its Light Peak technology that uses optics to deliver bandwidth of 10 Gbps and higher. Silicon-based photonics can go much higher, reaching tera-scale data rates, says Intel.

Here’s how the silicon photonics prototype works to achieve the 50 Gbps rate. Each module has a silicon transmitter and a receiver chip. The transmitter chip has four lasers whose light beams travel into an optical modulator. The modulator encodes data onto them at 12.5 Gbps. The four beams are then combined to output a total data rate of 50 Gbps.

The receiver chip at the other end of the link separates the four optical beams and directs them into photo detectors. The detectors convert the data back into electrical signals.

“In the labs, we ran this for 27 hours with no errors and transferred about a petabit of data,” says Paniccia. “And all this at room temperature with no fancy cooling.”

The silicon-based photonics chip could be used within a computer or to communicate from server to server in a data center. “If we are talking about CPU-to-memory connection, we would take our photonics chip and put it close to the CPU to bypass the copper interconnects,” says Paniccia. “For now we are not talking about integrating with the CPU.”

As the next step, Intel researchers are trying to increase the data rate by boosting the modulator speed and increasing the number of lasers per chip.

“If you increase the data rate of the modulator and put more than four lasers on a chip you can scale the whole thing,” says Paniccia. “The 50 Gbps rate is just the beginning.”

Photo: A 50Gbps Intel Photonics module/Intel

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

If you think Intel chips are just for PCs, take a look at this touchscreen kiosk that the company has created for retailers.

The hulk of metal, plastic and glass looks like a Star Trek prop but it promises to replace the traditional CRT monitors with green-tinted screens that are still at the check out point in most stores.

The kiosk tries to bring the best features of online shopping, such as recommendations, history and easy check-out to retail stores, says Ryan Parker, director of marketing and architecture. We first wrote about this last year but Intel had a polished and slicker-than-ever demo ready Wednesday.

When a customer swipes a card or slides their purchase across the horizontal screen, the display will show the price and payment options –which include the option to pay by cellphone. As you scan the items, the kiosk also makes recommendations on what else you can buy and gives you a quick snapshot of it.

The entire kiosk is powered by Intel’s Core2Duo processors and it uses a solid state drive that helps the overall system work faster and consume less power than existing registers. The chips also include Intel’s vPro technology, a virtualization technology that Intel builds into the chip itself, to make it secure and easy to manage.

The whole set-up is pretty neat, especially when you compare it to the self-check out counters at a Safeway or Lowes. But I can also see something like this potentially slowing down the check out process and longer lines at exit are not something consumers want.

Intel says it retailers don’t have to buy this whole idea as it is. They can pick the pieces they want and integrate it into their existing stores.

Photo: Stefan Armijo/Wired.com

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

For the last few months, Intel has been offering us tantalizing tidbits about its upcoming chips for smartphones. Now we have a sneak peek of the device from Europe.

Steve Paine, who edits the Carrypad and UMPC portal got his hands on a prototype smartphone running Intel’s chips and MeeGo, a Linux-based operating system developed by Intel and Nokia.

Intel’s smartphone chip codenamed Moorestown, is based a processor based on the company’s Atom platform. Moorestown for cellphones has been created to be extremely power efficient, yet pack enough computational muscle for multimedia features such as video conferencing and HD video, says Intel.

Intel had hoped to have the first phones featuring its chips in hands of consumers later this year but last week, the company said the devices are expected to launch early next year.

Though Intels chips power most desktops and notebooks, Intel chips are absent in smartphones. Almost all smartphones are today use chips based on Intel rival ARMs architecture.

There’s no word yet on performance and how Intel chips are handling multimedia content.

Meanwhile, Intel has also been working with Nokia to bring the MeeGo OS to market. Last year Intel had been working on Moblin, a Linux-based operating system designed specifically for netbooks. Separately, Nokia had been working on a new Linux-based software platform called Maemo for smartphones and tablets.

At the Mobile World Congress conference in February this year, Intel and Nokia announced they had combined efforts and spawned a new OS called MeeGo. MeeGo is hosted by the Linux Foundation and is designed to live on phones, netbooks and TVs.

Paine says Intel and Nokia have now released version 1.1 of MeeGo that includes the the handset user experience or UX available to developers for review. MeeGo will have its first developers conference in Ireland in November.

The protoype phone running MeeGo has an interesting user interface. MeeGo is still in pretty early stages so we will have to wait and see if other handsets manufacturers will take a shine to it and MeeGo it can become an alternative to Android.

Meanwhile, check out Paine’s photos of the Intel prototype to get an early sense of what MeeGo looks like on the phone.

Photo: Intel prototype phone/Carrypad

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Meet HERB, a robot from Intel’s research labs that can fetch drinks, get a pack of chips and sort dishes. HERB or the Home Exploring Robotic Butler is a project from Intel’s personal robotics group.

The robot sits on a tricked-out Segway base and has arms that are driven by cables to allow it to be extremely dexterous. A spinning laser on the top of the robot help generates 3-D data so robot can identify objects. There’s also a camera to help it “see.”

“It (the robot) looks big but it will fit through most doorways,” says Siddhartha Srinivasa, an Intel researcher who is working on the project. “It’s about a foot longer than the human wingspan.”

Users can tell HERB what they need using an iPhone interface that the team built. There’s also a voice recognition program in the works so you can just tell the robot loud what you want it to do.

The HERB project has been in the works for nearly four years. Intel showed the robot’s latest features at its annual research day fest on Wednesday.

HERB is just one of the many robotics project that is trying to teach machines how to do everyday tasks. Willow Garage, a Palo Alto, California based startup has a robot called PR2 that is being trained to sort laundry and fold towels.

The idea is to teach robots to go beyond carefully structured and repetitive tasks so they can move beyond factories.

Check out the video of HERB at work. HERB doesn’t move fast but if you could just sit on the couch and have it bring a bottle of beer every time, a few seconds delay shouldn’t bother you that much.

Photo: HERB/ Priya Ganapati

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

A research project from Intel can turn any surface into a touchscreen. Instead of propping up a tablet or putting a touchscreen computer in your kitchen, picture yourself tapping on the countertop to pull menus, look up recipes and add items to a shopping list.

“There’s nothing absolutely special about the surface and it doesn’t matter if your hands are dirty,” says Beverly Harrison, a senior research scientist at Intel. “Our algorithm and a camera set-up can create virtual islands everywhere”

Intel demoed the project during the company’s annual research day fest on Wednesday to show touchscreens can go beyond computing and become a part of everyday life.

The project uses real-time 3-D object recognition to build a model of almost anything that’s placed on the counter and responds by offering a a virtual touchscreen-based menu. For instance, when you put a slab of meat on the counter or a green pepper, they are identified and a virtual menu that includes recipes for both are shown.

“The computer in a real-time builds a model of the color, shape, texture of the objects and runs it against a database to identify it,” says Harrison, “and it requires nothing special to be attached on the steak or the pepper.”

Smartphones have turned touch into a popular user interface. Many consumers are happy to give the BlackBerry thumb a pass and instead swipe and flick their finger to scroll. New tablets are also likely to make users kind beyond a physical keyboard and mouse.

But so far, touchscreens have been limited to carefully calibrated pieces of glass encased in the shell of a phone or a computer.

Intel researchers say that won’t be the case in the future. Ordinary coffee tables in the living room could morph into a touchscreen when you put a finger on it and show a menu of music, video to choose from. Or a vanity table in the bathroom could recognize a bottle of pills placed on it and let you manage your medications from there.

Some companies are trying to expand the use of touchscreens. For instance, Displax, a Portugal-based company, can turn any surface flat or curved into a touch-sensitive display by sticking a thinner-than-paper polymer film on that surface to make it interactive.

Intel research labs tries to do away with the extra layer. Instead, researchers there have created a rig with two cameras, one to capture the image of the objects and the other to capture depth. The depth cameras help recognize the objects and the difference between the hand touching the table or hovering over it. A pico projector helps beam the virtual menus. The cameras and the pico projector combination can be packaged into devices just a little bigger than your cellphone, says Harrison. Sprinkle a few of these in different rooms and point them on tables and the system is ready to go.

At that point, the software program that Harrison and her team have written kicks in. The program, which can run on any computer anywhere in the house, helps identify objects accurately and create the virtual menus. Just make a wide sweeping gesture to push the menu off the counter and it disappears. There’s even a virtual drawer that users can pull up to store images and notes.

Harrison says all this will work on almost any surface including glass, granite and wood.

“The key here is the idea requires no special instrumentation,” she says.

Still it may be too early to make plans to remodel the kitchen to include this new system. The idea is still in the research phase, says Harrison, and it may be years before it makes it to the real world.

Photo: A countertop acts as a touchscreen display/Priya Ganapati

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Intel’s attempt to get inside cellphones will take just a little bit longer.Though the company had hoped to get smartphones with Intel chips in the hands of consumers this year, it is likely that the first phones powered by Intel will debut early next year.

Mobile handsets featuring Intel processors are likely to be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in January next year or at the Mobile World Congress conference in February.

“That would clearly be the window of opportunity for us,” Intel CTO Justin Rattner told Wired.com.

In May, Intel showed its new chip codenamed ‘Moorestown’ for mobile devices. The company said the chip would be extremely power efficient, while offering enough processing power for features such as video conferencing and HD video.

Though Intel’s chips power most desktops and notebooks, the company’s silicon is glaringly absent in the fast growing category of smartphones and tablets. Worldwide, companies shipped 54.7 million smartphones in the first quarter of 2010, up 56.7 percent from the same quarter a year ago, estimates IDC. Most talked about smartphones today from companies such as Motorola and HTC are powered by chips based on Intel rival ARM ’s architecture.

Intel has tried its hand in the phone-chip business earlier, with little success. In 2006, the company sold its XScale ARM-based division to Marvell. More recently, it tried to pitch its current generation of Atom processors to smartphone makers but the chips were not accepted because they consumed too much power for phone use.

‘Moorestown’ processors can beat the competition, says Intel. Rattner hopes the chips will also go beyond smartphones and into tablets.

So far, Apple has sold more than 3 million iPads in just three months since the product’s launch. Apple uses its own chip for the iPad.

Rattner says tablets using Intel chips are on their way and will be available to consumers by the end of the year.

“Almost all the tablets at Computex (a trade show for PC makers held in Taiwan every year) were Intel-based devices,” he says. “There’s a tremendous amount of interest and activity in the tablet space.”

Yet Rattner says he is “cautious” in his hopes for the tablet market. Rattner does not own an iPad but has an iPhone 3G S.

“A lot of people are saying that the tablet is the next netbook,” he says. “I am not so sure.” More than 85 million netbooks have been sold, since the devices became popular about three years ago.

Netbooks appealed to consumers because of their price, portability and their ability to offer a computing experience comparable to a notebook, say Rattner.

“With tablets, their utility remains to be seen,” he says. “The first generation of tablets including are missing some important things. The absence of a camera is especially baffling in the iPad.”

The iPad may have its flaws but for consumers it’s the only choice for now–unless you count the very flawed JooJoo.

Some tablet makers were waiting for ‘Moorestown’ chips but Intel has already started production and handing it to manufacturers, says Rattner.

“Apple’s gotten everyone’s attention and they have set that bar,” he says. “For others now coming to market, they have to have something substantially more capable than the iPad and it is going to take time to get there.”

Photo: (liewcf/Flickr)

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews