News for Friday, 7 March 2008

Source: CDR Info

Michael Langbehn, the spokesman of the Blu-ray group has indicated in an interview that he does not believe that the price of Blu-Ray player was the last obstacle to the mass adoption of this format, however their cost would decline significantly before the holiday season. He also indicates that we will not see real mass market adoption until drives are sold for under € 300.
Stan Glasgow, CEO of Sony, had a fairly similar statement. They believed that we can hope to have players around € 200 in the course of 2009.
It is most important that the number of manufacturers (and production) of blue laser diodes continues to grow strongly, enough-so to lower the still-too-high price for these components. If more manufacturers move into this market, it will create new competition to fill that which has disappeared with the death of the HD-DVD format.

As we have the iTunes Store for music and movies, the iPhone will have its own store named "AppStore". iPhone owners will be able to buy and/or download application directly from the handheld.
No doubt that the AppStore should generate substantial revenue for Apple, there will be no other way to obtain iPhone application. Apple will take care of everything, and will pay 70% back to the developers. For iPhone freeware, Apple will distribute them for free on the AppStore.
For developers, the iPhone and its SDK might well be the new heaven as the Palm was more than 10 years ago. John Doerr, from KPCB funds, claims to have already secured 100 millions USD to be invested support developers for creating iPhone applications. This will for sure have an impact on Apple shares, as well as the overall perception by the analysts of the iPhone SDK and its business model.
The iPhone SDK appears to be complete, in summary it is a revised Xcode, packed with iPhone-dedicated API, including the usual Xcode development environment: interface builder, APIs, graphic and code libraries, and even a Mac application allowing you to debug your iPhone application without having an iPhone! The iPhone OS seems to be an entire OS, not a strange or quick and dirty port of a desktop computer OS. Developers will be able to develop all kind of application, from 3D games to consumer and Pro-oriented applications.
This is a second birth for the iPhone, the first one being a mix between the iPhone launch and the demonstration of its power when it was jailbreaked. For sure competitors will have to come with serious improvement on both the software and hardware sides, and one can now better understand why Microsoft was desperately trying to push all mobile manufacturers to adopt Windows Mobile for their devices.
The iPhone and the related Store, SDK and services, might well be repeating the success story of the iPod with iTunes; and the impact could be much larger when one consider how mobile phone have invaded our every day’s life. Last but not least, the success of iPhone applications will probably push or help developers to code application for OS X, and that way Apple may win on both side: iPhone sales and penetration while increasing numbers of developers for the Mac OS X platform.
Bien entendu, plus que l'iPhone, ceci aura de fortes conséquences sur les parts de marché du Mac. Obligeant les développeurs à travailler dessus, il ne pourra que les inciter à développer également des logiciels pour OS X.

A report from François.

I jsut received my MacBook Pro 2.6GHz sporting a 200GB HD spinning at 7200rpm, and I quickly performed some benchmarks(QuickBench, XBench and CINEBENCH R10) :)
XBench 1.3 :
Results 130.51
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.2 (9C2028)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model MacBookPro4,1
Drive Type Hitachi HTS722020K9SA00
CPU Test 174.13
GCD Loop 304.15 16.03 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 147.22 3.50 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 120.48 3.97 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 217.81 37.93 Mops/sec
Thread Test 311.47
Computation 355.77 7.21 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 276.98 11.92 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 165.41
System 192.57
Allocate 301.07 1.11 Malloc/sec
Fill 155.56 7563.91 MB/sec
Copy 171.55 3543.20 MB/sec
Stream 144.97
Copy 138.52 2860.99 MB/sec
Scale 137.66 2843.96 MB/sec
Add 152.66 3252.03 MB/sec
Triad 152.49 3262.20 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 189.17
Line 194.19 12.93 Klines/sec <50% alpha>
Rectangle 215.32 64.28 Krects/sec <50% alpha>
Circle 169.65 13.83 Kcircles/sec <50% alpha>
Bezier 184.53 4.65 Kbeziers/sec <50% alpha>
Text 187.82 11.75 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 174.97
Spinning Squares 174.97 221.96 frames/sec
User Interface Test 297.02
Elements 297.02 1.36 Krefresh/sec
Disk Test 41.20
Sequential 72.11
Uncached Write 101.78 62.49 MB/sec <4K blocks>
Uncached Write 100.99 57.14 MB/sec <256K blocks>
Uncached Read 36.79 10.77 MB/sec <4K blocks>
Uncached Read 116.81 58.71 MB/sec <256K blocks>
Random 28.84
Uncached Write 9.92 1.05 MB/sec <4K blocks>
Uncached Write 84.48 27.05 MB/sec <256K blocks>
Uncached Read 72.61 0.51 MB/sec <4K blocks>
Uncached Read 81.53 15.13 MB/sec <256K blocks>

QuickBench 2.1 :
QuickBench™ 2.1 Test Results File
©2003 Intech Software Corp.
Test file created on jeudi 6 mars 2008 at 12:39:14
Test Volume name: Macintosh HD
Xfer Size Sequential Read Sequential Write Random Read Random Write
1 KByte 440.000 KB/sec 153.000 KB/sec 76.000 KB/sec 60.000 KB/sec
2 KBytes 6.800 MB/sec 2.821 MB/sec 5.379 MB/sec 2.738 MB/sec
4 KBytes 17.330 MB/sec 8.579 MB/sec 5.227 MB/sec 8.516 MB/sec
8 KBytes 34.160 MB/sec 16.312 MB/sec 25.218 MB/sec 17.299 MB/sec
16 KBytes 45.408 MB/sec 37.587 MB/sec 38.742 MB/sec 29.660 MB/sec
32 KBytes 59.512 MB/sec 47.034 MB/sec 62.600 MB/sec 44.783 MB/sec
64 KBytes 76.462 MB/sec 63.639 MB/sec 75.392 MB/sec 61.425 MB/sec
128 KBytes 90.618 MB/sec 74.716 MB/sec 98.178 MB/sec 75.734 MB/sec
256 KBytes 102.956 MB/sec 82.172 MB/sec 52.071 MB/sec 85.511 MB/sec
512 KBytes 110.455 MB/sec 91.620 MB/sec 51.206 MB/sec 26.941 MB/sec
1024 KBytes 114.331 MB/sec 78.048 MB/sec 42.827 MB/sec 60.647 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 2 MB Read: 40.162 MB/sec Write: 96.749 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 3 MB Read: 118.366 MB/sec Write: 99.189 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 4 MB Read: 83.598 MB/sec Write: 100.097 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 5 MB Read: 119.970 MB/sec Write: 99.224 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 6 MB Read: 90.221 MB/sec Write: 84.437 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 7 MB Read: 46.403 MB/sec Write: 74.566 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 8 MB Read: 49.130 MB/sec Write: 77.878 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 9 MB Read: 48.915 MB/sec Write: 72.715 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 10 MB Read: 50.339 MB/sec Write: 79.992 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 20 MB Read: 60.051 MB/sec Write: 64.541 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 30 MB Read: 55.105 MB/sec Write: 62.610 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 40 MB Read: 56.943 MB/sec Write: 62.085 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 50 MB Read: 58.364 MB/sec Write: 62.331 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 60 MB Read: 58.269 MB/sec Write: 62.930 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 70 MB Read: 57.838 MB/sec Write: 63.081 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 80 MB Read: 57.755 MB/sec Write: 60.614 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 90 MB Read: 57.702 MB/sec Write: 63.625 MB/sec
Extended Test Size: 100 MB Read: 57.992 MB/sec Write: 63.485 MB/sec

CINEBENCH R10 :
CINEBENCH R10
****************************************************
Tester :
Processor :
MHz :
Number of CPUs : 2
Operating System : OS X 32 BIT 10.5.2
Graphics Card : NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT OpenGL Engine
Resolution : 1440x900
Color Depth : 32-bits
****************************************************
Rendering (Single CPU): 3009 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 5679 CB-CPU
Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.89
Shading (OpenGL Standard) : 5358 CB-GFX

****************************************************

The new MacBook Pro is really silent, and does not "overheat"

without being a revolution, this is a true evolution, and especially for the HD performance level.

One had to expect it; Samsung announced that it is withdrawing from the market of (expensive) hybrid players capable to read Blu-ray format and also HD-DVD.
It is absolutely incredible the speed that the HD-DVD is disappearing.
Already, large stores such as FNAC have banished them from their shelves and catalogues.
At this rate, in a couple of weeks there will only be a bitter taste left for those who have pushed this format. However we can guarantee that this bitter taste will take much longer to pass away.

Apple's Scott Forstall, VP of iPhone Software, took the opportunity of today's Roadmap Event to showcase five new third-party apps.
It has been said many times that the iPhone runs the very same OS X as can be found on the Macintosh, but today's demonstrations have proven that the power of the operating system is truly present within the handset. In addition to that, Apple flaunted the ease of bringing full-powered desktop-class applications to the iPhone using its XTools-based iPhone SDK.
First to debut was the much-anticipated game Spore. Yes, Spore - the game which allows one to conquer the universe starting their existence as a measly single-cell organism - has been ported to the iPhone. It is allegedly somewhat stripped down, and performance was a little choppy, but it's still Spore! On top of that, development time was stated to be about two weeks. This certainly bodes well for the ease of porting software to the iPhone.
Second on the roster was salesforce.com's SalesForce. Sure it's not a performance blockbuster, but it does have the ability to access up-to-the-minute sales data on the fly, natively build charts and graphs, and interact with certain iPhone features like Google Maps.
Third to be showcased was AOL's popular instant messaging application, AIM. The iPhone version is capable of managing multiple conversations simultaneously, allowing a user to switch between them by "swiping." The app even allows a user to update their away message and buddy icon, the latter of which chooses from photos stored on the iPhone itself. AIM's development took a shockingly short 5 days to reach a working state.
The fourth application shown was a medical app called Epocrates. Built on an SQLite database, the program allows one to find information on different medications or even search for pills based on color, shape and size. Again, it wasn't a performance app, but rather showed off the iPhone's ability to interact with a database.
The final preview shown was for Super Monkey Ball. The Sega game, which features a monkey rolling around inside a ball, uses the iPhone's unique accelerometer to navigate through levels. The surprising part is that Sega actually had to fly in a designer to improve the game's graphics to match the iPhone's capabilities! Eye-witnesses stated that the art was beautiful and the framerates were smooth. (Smooth-running & beautiful 3D games... are we talking about the same Apple, here?)
All-in-all, Apple seemed to do an impressive job flaunting the potential capabilities of the iPhone and the ease of their new SDK. They have certainly piqued interest in a large number of developers (evidenced by the crashing of Apple's developer website following today's announcements) and have opened the door to what seems to be transforming into a more and more mainstream platform.