News for Tuesday, 10 February 2009

After having announced a calamitous quarter, Intel wants to go forward as fast as possible. They have announced their intention to invest 7 billion dollars in order to hasten its transition towards engraving at 32nm.
This sum will be invested in the two next years in order to put its American factories at this level. It will make it possible to reduce by 71% the size of the chips for an equal number of transistor. Thus, they will be able to produce more and this will lower the unit costs and will allow them to make significant margins again.
Of course, the second goal is to leave thin competition as far as possible behind, AMD having hardly started to produce CPU in 45nm.

According to iLounge, Google decided not to implement multitouch in Android following a request (in short a polite injunction) by Apple not to go in this direction.
This information coming from a Google developer has not been confirmed. If it proves to be true, one can see that Apple will attacks all those who offer mobiles having multitouch interface and they are legion, the iPhone having defined a new reference concerning gestures.

Intel has revealed its Roadmap concerning the engraving of the processors in 32nm that will be followed in 2010.
The foundry will give up the processors equipped with 4 cores:
- at the entry level and for the portables, they will offer of Core i7 which will also contain a graphic part about which we know little.
- For the high-end, the processors will have at least 6 cores, this number becoming the new reference for Intel and they will also offer CPUs that containing more.
It will be a real challenge for the developers and we understand better why Apple wanted to make a pause in the addition of functions to Mac OS X and instead to devote itself to manage the multiplication of the processors as well as possible. Without this, one would find a situation where the additional cores would spend most of their time awaiting instructions that would never arrive.

Until now, the increase in the power of the computers rests primarily on the increase in the number of transistors present in the processors. Things advance since one manages to engrave the chips even more finely and fit in more transistors and thus it is possible to keep the CPU a reasonable size. It is however obvious that as one approaches the physical limit; this is given by the size of the atoms below which one will not be able to go below. Unless a radically different solution is found, one will enter a phase of stagnation. Even though some have started on the optical computer, one is still far from knowing how to build something functional. But the revolution could come from elsewhere, such as the probabilistic processors. Initially, these seem opposed to everything currently believed in data processing. To summarize these probabilistic processors, they allow inaccuracies exchange to an increase in speed. A probabilistic processor manufactured by professor Krishna Palem at the University of Rice is thus 7 times faster than a traditional processor and consumes 30 times less power.
It is currently impossible to consider how to use this processor in the position of a CPU, experiments will be tried using other technologies not requiring perfect precise details, like video and audio processing. The tiny defects would not be perceptible.
It could be just the processor needed by video cards since the 30x reduction in power and heat from the current level (that is the pits) would be very welcome.

Google just released Google Sync, a beta version of a new free web application/service that let you synchronize your contacts and calendar on your phone with your Google account.
You can:
• Get Google Calendar events on your device
• View multiple Calendars in different colors
• Synchronize your Contacts with Google
• Have changes pushed directly to your phone

Features
Synchronize your contacts. Get your Google contacts quickly and easily to your iPhone. With Sync, you can have access to your address book at anytime and place that you need it.
Get calendar alerts. Using your iPhone's native calendar, you can now access multiple Google calendars, and be alerted for upcoming appointments with sound or vibration.
Always in sync. Your calendar and contacts stay synchronized whether you access them from your iPhone or from your computer. Add or edit contacts or calendar entries right on your device or on your Google account on the web.
However, Google Sync uses the Microsoft© Exchange ActiveSync© protocol. When setting up a new Exchange ActiveSync account on your iPhone, all existing Contacts and Calendar events will be removed from your phone. Please make sure to back up any important data before you set up Google Sync.

Google keeps expanding its free web apps and services, now targeting indirectly part of MobileMe features with a free solution. For sure, Google is also releasing such service for the forthcoming Android-based mobile phones, but many iPhone owners not willing to pay the premium price of MobileMe might find the Google calendar Push function just good enough for their usage.

Toshiba will unveil at the ISSC its new version of the FeRAM (Ferroelectric Random Access Memory), now able to deliver up to 1.6 GB/s. Toshiba expects this new RAM format to replace in the future the current SDRAM used in our computer.

While SDRAM requires to be continuously powered to store data, the FeRAM does not require any power consumption for such purpose. One can consider it as a memory module hybrid between the SDRAM and the NAND flash memory. However, one should not get too much excited, and it is unclear how long it will still take for Toshiba to get this technology out of its R&D labs. To reach mass production and large adoption, FeRAM will need to reach performance level of the current SDRAM while minimizing the cost of this technology.

D.Gustin proposes a nice trick, aka "bidouille" to preserve our power cords of our power unit or iPod cables, known to become quickly curled before degrading irreversibly.

To avoid that it becomes as the c able shown on this photo and lead to a short circuit, he offers an easy way, by recycling the metal spring found in pencil. You simply insert it along the cord, and then install it in the critical area. That's it, so simple and so efficient.

The market of the optical peripherals was already going badly before the beginning of the economic crisis and this has made a recovery even more difficult.
Even though the manufacturers had for one moment counted on a strong demand for Blu-ray peripherals, they still have some waiting to do. It must thus create something new using the old and find something to restart the sales of DVD burners. Their new creed is burning at 24x.
Nec thus announced a new handful of chips that will make it possible for the burners to support this speed on the DVD and to burn CDs at 48x.

In same time, LiteOn announced the release of 24x burners for April.
Alas, the gain one can obtain from these increases speeds is marginal since the maximum rotation speed is not really obtained for the disks.