Carpet Bomberz Inc.

The card will use the Marvell 88SE9455 RAID controller that will interface with the SandForce 2200-based daughter cards that can be added to the main controller on demand. This will allow for user-configurable drive sizes from between 60GB and 2TB in size, allowing you to expand your storage as your need for it increases.

via More PCI-express SSD cards coming to OS X | MacFixIt – CNET Reviews.

Other World Computing

I’m a big fan of Other World Computing (OWC) and have always marveled at their ability to create new products they brand on their own. In the article they talk about a new Mac compatible PCIe SSD. It sounds like an uncanny doppleganger to the Angelbird board announced about 2 years ago and started shipping last Fall 2011. The add-on sockets especially remind me of the ugpradable Angelbird board especially. There are not many PCIe SSD cards that have sockets for Flash memory modules and Other World Computing would be the second one I have seen since I’ve been commenting on these devices when they hit the consumer market. Putting sockets on the board makes it easier to come into the market at a lower price point for users where price is most important. However at the high end capacity is king for some purchasers of PCIe SSD drives. So the oddball upgradeable PCIe SSD fills a niche that’s for sure.

Performance projections for this card are really good and typical of most competing PCIe SSD cards. So depending on your needs you might find this perfect. Price however is always harder to pin down. Angelbird sold a bare PCIe card with no SSDs for around $249. It came with 32GB onboard for that price. What was really nice was the card used SATA sockets set far enough apart to place full sized SSDs on the card without crowding each other. This brought the possibility of slowly upgrading to higher speed drives or larger capacity drives over time to the consumer market.

Welcome to Wings from Angelbird - Mac comaptible PCIe SSD

But what’s cooler still is Angelbird’s card allowed it to run under ANY OS, even Mac OS as it was engineered to be a a free standing computer with a large Flash memory attached to it. That allowed it to pre-boot into an embedded OS before handing over control to the Host OS whatever flavor it might be. I don’t know if the OWC card works similarly, but it does NOT use SATA sockets or provide enough room to plug in SSD drives. The plug-in modules for this device are mSATA style sockets used in tablets and netbook style computers. So the modules will most likely need to be purchased direct from OWC to peform capacity upgrades over the life of the PCIe card itself. Prices have not yet been set according to this article.

Related articles

• Marvell brews ARM-based native PCIe SSD Controller IC: 88NV9145 handles direct PCIe to NAND Flash I/O for high-performance, low-overhead SSD designs (denalimemoryreport.wordpress.com)
• OWC gives Mac Pro users the first PCI Express SSD option (9to5mac.com)
• Angelbird’s Wings PCIe-based SSD preview and benchmarks (engadget.com)

Famously proprietary Microsoft never dared to extract a tax on every piece of software written by others for Windows—perhaps because, in the absence of consistent Internet access in the 1990s through which to manage purchases and licenses, there’d be no realistic way to make it happen.

via The PC is dead. Why no angry nerds? :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It.

While true that Microsoft didn’t tax Software Developers who sold product running on the Windows OS, a kind of a tax levy did exist for hardware manufacturers creating desktop pc’s with Intel chips inside. But message received I get the bigger point, cul-de-sacs don’t make good computers. They do however make good appliances. But as the author Jonathan Zittrain points out we are becoming less aware of the distinction between a computer and an applicance, and have lowered our expectation accordingly.

In fact this points to the bigger trend of not just computers becoming silos of information/entertainment consumption no, not by a long shot. This trend was preceded by the wild popularity of MySpace, followed quickly by Facebook and now Twitter. All platforms as described by their owners with some amount of API publishing and hooks allowed to let in 3rd party developers (like game maker Zynga). But so what if I can play Scrabble or Farmville with my ‘friends’ on a social networking ‘platform’? Am I still getting access to the Internet? Probably not, as you are most likely reading what ever filters into or out of the central all-encompassing data store of the Social Networking Platform.

Like the old World Maps in the days before Columbus, there be Dragons and the world ends HERE even though platform owners might say otherwise. It is an Intranet pure and simple, a gated community that forces unique identities on all participants. Worse yet it is a big brother-like panopticon where each step and every little movement monitored and tallied. You take quizzes, you like, you share, all these things are collection points, check points to get more data about you. And that is the TAX levied on anyone who voluntarily participates in a social networking platform.

So long live the Internet, even though it’s frontier, wild-catting days are nearly over. There will be books and movies like How the Cyberspace was Won, and the pioneers will all be noted and revered. We’ll remember when we could go anywhere we wanted and do lots of things we never dreamed. But those days are slipping as new laws get passed under very suspicious pretenses all in the name of Commerce. As for me I much prefer Freedom over Commerce, and you can log that in your stupid little database.

Cover via Amazon

Related articles

• Now You Can Tether Your iPhone to Your Laptop Without a Monthly Fee (readwriteweb.com)
• Did Steve Jobs Favor or Oppose Internet Freedom? (scientificamerican.com)
• Apple pulls iTether from App Store, cites carrier burden (macnn.com)
• The Personal Computer Is Dead (technologyreview.in)

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The big question is endurance, however we wont see a reduction in write cycles this time around. IMFTs 20nm client-grade compute NAND used in consumer SSDs is designed for 3K – 5K write cycles, identical to its 25nm process.

via AnandTech – Intel and Micron IMFT Announce Worlds First 128Gb 20nm MLC NAND.

If true this will help considerably in driving down cost of Flash memory chips while maintaining the current level of wear and performance drop seen over the lifetime of a chip. Stories I have read previously indicated that Flash memory might not continue to evolve using the current generation of silicon chip manufacturing technology. Performance drops occur as memory cells wear out. Memory cells were wearing out faster and faster as the wires and transistors got smaller and narrower on the Flash memory chip.

The reason for this is memory cells have to be erased in order to free them up and writing and erasing take a toll on the memory cell each time one of these operations is performed. Single Level memory cells are the most robust, and can go through many thousands even millions of write and erase cycles before they wear out. However the cost per megabyte of Single Level memory cells make it an Enterprise level premium price level for Corporate customers generally speaking. Two Level memory cells are much more cost effective, but the structure of the cells makes them less durable than Single Level cells. And as the wires connecting them get thinner and narrower, the amount of write and erase cycles they can endure without failing drops significantly. Enterprise customers in the past would not purchase products specifically because of this limitation of the Two level memory cell.

As companies like Intel and Samsung tried to make Flash memory chips smaller and less expensive to manufacture, the durability of the chips became less and less. The question everyone asked is there a point of diminishing return where smaller design rules, thinner wires is going to make chips so fragile? The solution for most manufacturers is to add spare memory cells, “over-providing” so that when a cell fails, you can unlock a spare and continue using the whole chip. The over -provisioning no so secret trick has been the way most Solid State Disks (SSDs) have handled the write/erase problem for Two Level memory cells. But even then, the question is how much do you over-provision? Another technique used is called wear-levelling where a memory controller distributes writes/erases over ALL the chips available to it. A statistical scheme is used to make sure each and every chip suffers equally and gets the same number of wear and tear apllied to it. It’s difficult balancing act manufacturers of Flash Memory and storage product manufacturers who consume those chips to make products that perform adequately, do not fail unexpectedly and do not cost too much for laptop and desktop manufacturers to offer to their customers.

If Intel and Micron can successfully address the fragility of Flash chips as the wiring and design rules get smaller and smaller, we will start to see larger memories included in more mobile devices. I predict you will see iPhones and Samsung Android smartphones with upwards of 128GBytes of Flash memory storage. Similarly, tablets and ultra-mobile laptops will also start to have larger and larger SSDs available. Costs should stay about where they are now in comparison to current shipping products. We’ll just have more products to choose from, say like 1TByte SSDs instead of the more typical high end 512GByte SSDs we see today. Prices might also come down, but that’s bound to take a little longer until all the other Flash memory manufacturers catch up.

Image via Wikipedia: Wiring of a Flash Memory Cell

Related articles

• IMTF exposes its incredible shrinking NAND (go.theregister.com)

A new report claims Apple has continued to investigate implementing USB 3.0 in its Mac computers independent of Intels plans to eventually support USB 3.0 at the chipset level.

via AppleInsider | Rumor: Apple investigating USB 3.0 for Macs ahead of Intel.

This is interesting to read, I have not paid much attention to USB 3.0 due to how slowly it has been adopted by the PC manufacturing world. But in the past Apple has been quicker to adopt some mainstream technologies than it’s PC manufacturing counterparts. The value add is increased as more and more devices also adopt the new interface, namely anything that runs the iOS. The surest sign there’s a move going on will be whether or not there is USB 3.0 support in the iOS 5.x and whether or not there is hardware support in the next Revision of the iPhone.

And now it appears Apple is releasing two iPhones, a minor iPhone 4 update and a new iPhone 5 at roughly the same time. Given reports that the new iPhone 5 has a lot of RAM installed, I’m curious about how much of the storage is NAND based Flash memory. Will we see something on the order of 64GB again or more this time around when the new phones are released.  The upshot is for instances where you can tether your device to sync it to the Mac, with a USB 3.0 compliant interface the file transfer speed will make the chore of pulling out the cables worth the effort. However, the all encompassing sharing of data all the time between Apple devices may make the whole adoption of USB 3.0 seem less necessary if every device can find its partner and sync over the airwaves instead of over iPod connectors.

Still it would be nice to have a dedicated high speed cable for the inevitable external Hard drive connection necessary in these days of the smaller laptops like the Macbook Air, or the Mac mini. Less space internally means these devices will need a supplement to the internal hard drive, one even that the Apple iCloud cannot fulfill especially considering the size of video files coming off each new generation of HD video cameras. I don’t care what Apple says but 250GBs of AVCHD files is going to sync very,…very,… slowly. All the more reason to adopt USB 3.0 as soon as possible.

Related articles

• USB 3.0 to get high-power charging for notebooks, tablets (electronista.com)
• New iPhone will have 1GB of RAM, dual-mode chip, report says (electronista.com)
• Report: Apple Considering USB 3.0 For Macs (macstories.net)
• Tsohiba Canvio drives get USB 3.0, Windows cloud option (electronista.com)

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Of course, there are already turn-by-turn GPS apps for iOS, Android and other operating systems, but having an augmented reality-based navigational system thats native to the phone is pretty unique.

via Augmented Reality Maps and Directions Coming to iPhone.

In the deadly navigation battle between Google Android and Apple iOS a new front is being formed, Augmented Reality. Apple has also shown that it’s driven to create a duplicate of the Google Maps app for iOS in an attempt to maintain its independence from the Googleplex by all means possible. Though Apple may re-invent the wheel (of network available maps), you will be pleasantly surprised what other bells & whistles get thrown in as well.

Enter the value-added feature of Augmented Reality. Apple is now filing patents on AR relating to handheld device navigation. And maybe this time ’round the Augmented Reality features will be a little more useful than marked up Geo Locations. To date Google Maps hasn’t quite approached this level of functionality, but do have most of the most valuable dataset (Street View) that would allow them to also add an Augmented Reality component. The question is who will get to market first with the most functional, and useful version of Augmented Reality maps?

Related articles

• Iris transparent tablet concept, augmented reality meets scanning (slashgear.com)
• Augmented Reality: Sander Veenhof Augmentizer (wired.com)
• Qualcomm Offers Devs Augmented Reality SDK for iOS (phonescoop.com)
• Sony website uses augmented reality to test TVs in rooms (electronista.com)

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Rumors of an ARM-based MacBook Air are not new. In May, one report claimed that Apple had built a test notebook featuring the same low-power A5 processor found in the iPad 2. The report, which came from Japan, suggested that Apple officials were impressed by the results of the experiment.

via AppleInsider | Apple seen merging iOS, Mac OS X with custom A6 chip in 2012.

Following up on an article they did back on May 27th, and one prior to that on May 6th,  AppleInsider does a bit of prediction and prognosticating about the eventual fusion of iOS and Mac OS X. What they see triggering this is an ARM chip that would be able to execute 64-bit binaries across all of the product lines (A fabled ARM A-6). How long would it take to do this consolidation and interweaving? How many combined updaters, security patches, Pro App updaters would it take to get OS X 10.7 to be ‘more’ like iOS than it is today? Software development is going to take a while and it’s not just a matter of cross-compiling to an ARM chip from a software based on Intel chips.

Given that 64-bit Intel Atom chips are already running on the new Seamircro SM10000 (x64), it won’t be long now I’m sure before the ARM equivalent ARM-15 chip hits full stride. The designers have been aiming for a 4-core ARM design that will be encompassed by the ARM-15 release real soon now (RSN). The next step after that chip is licensed and piloted, tested and put into production will be a 64-bit clean design. I’m curious to see if 64-bit will be applied across ALL the different product lines within Apple. Especially when the issue of power-usage and Thermal Design power (TDM) is considered, will 64-bit ARM chips be as battery friendly? I wonder. True Intel has jumped the 64-bit divide on the desktop with the Core 2 Duo line some time ago and made them somewhat battery friendly. But they cannot compare at all to the 10 hours+ one gets on a 32-bit ARM chip today using the iPad.

Lastly, App Developers will also need to keep their Xcode environment up to date and merge in new changes constantly up to the big cutover to ARM x64. No telling what that’s going to be like apart from the previous 2 problems I have raised here. Apple in the 10.7 Lion run-up was very late in providing the support and tools to allow the developers to get their Apps ready. I will say though that in the history of migrations in Apple’s hardware/software, they have done more of them, more successfully than any other company. So I think they will be able to pull it off no doubt, but there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. And hopefully we’ll see something better as the end-users of the technology, something better than a much bigger profit margin for Apple (though that seems to be the prime mover in most recent cases as Steve Jobs has done the long slow fade into obscurity).

If ARM x64 is inevitable and iOS on Everything too, then I’m hoping things don’t change so much I can’t do things similarly to the way I do them now on the desktop. Currently on OS X 10.7 I am ignoring completely:

1. Gestures
2. Misson Control
3. Launch Pad
4. AppStore (not really because I had to download Lion)

Let’s hope this roster doesn’t get even longer over time as the iOS becomes the de facto OS on all Apple Products. Because I was sure hoping the future would be brighter than this. And as AppleInsider quotes from May 6th,

“In addition to laptops, the report said that Apple would ‘presumably’ be looking to move its desktop Macs to ARM architecture as well. It characterized the transition to Apple-made chips for its line of computers as a ‘done deal’.”

Related articles

• Wired.com’s story about Jeffries & Co. analyst: Peter Misek (www.wired.com)
• Read MacNN’s coverage of the same story (www.ipodnn.com)
• Slashdot’s blurb about this prediction and commentary (www.slashdot.com)
• Apple to incrementally deliver iCloud, new features for Mac and iOS users – Apple Insider (news.google.com)

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Apple may be working on bringing augmented reality views to its iPad thanks to a newly discovered patent filing with the USPTO.

via Apple patents hint at future AR screen tech for iPad | Electronista. (Originally posted at AppleInsider at the following link below)

Original Article: Apple Insider article on AR

Just a very brief look at a couple of patent filings by Apple with some descriptions of potential applications. They seem to want to use it for navigation purposes using the onboard video camera. One half the screen will use the live video feed, the other half is a ‘virtual’ rendition of that scene in 3D to allow you to find a path or maybe a parking space in between all those buildings.

The second filing mentions a see-through screen whose opacity can be regulated by the user. The information display will take precedence over the image seen through the LCD panel. It will default to totally opaque using no voltage whatsoever (In Plane switching design for the LCD).

However the most intriguing part of the story as told by AppleInsider is the use of sensors on the device to determine angle, direction, bearing to then send over the network. Why the network? Well the whole rendering of the 3D scene as described in first patent filing is done somewhere in the cloud and spit back to the iOS device. No onboard 3D rendering needed or at least not at that level of detail. Maybe those datacenters in North Carolina are really cloud based 3D rendering farms?

Related articles

• Apple patent applications surface for stylus pens on iPad and iPhone (slashgear.com)
• You: Apple Files Patents for Augmented Reality, Transparent Screen – Mobiledia (news.google.com)

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Anyways, I predict a semi-chaos, where – for example- a 3 fingers swipe from left to right means something completely different in Apple than in any other platform. We are already seeing signs of this in Android, and in the new Windows 8.Also, users will soon need “cheat sheets” to remember the endless possible combinations.Would be interesting to hear other people’s thoughts.

via User Interface Issues.

After the big WWDC Keynote presentation by Steve Jobs et. al. the question I have too is what’s up with all the finger combos for swiping. In the bad old days people needed wire bound notebooks to tell them all about the commands to run their IBM PC. And who can forget the users of WordPerfect who had keyboard template overlays to remind themselves of the ‘menu’ of possible key combos (Ctrl/Alt/Shift). Now we are faced with endless and seemingly arbitrary combinations off finger swipes/pinches/flicks etc.

Like other readers who responded to this question on the Macintouch message boards, what about the bad old days of the Apple 1 button mouse? Remember when Apple finally capitulated and provided two mice buttons (No?) well they did it through software. Just before the Magic Mouse hit town Apple provided a second mouse button (at long last) bringing the Mac inline for the first time with the Windows PC convention of left and right mouse buttons. How recently did this happen? Just two years ago maybe, Apple introduced the wired and wireless version of the Mighty Mouse? And even then it was virtual, not a literal real two button-ness experience either. Now we have the magic mouse with no buttons, no clicking. It’s one rounded over trackpad that accepts the Lionized gestures. To quote John Wayne, “It’s gettin’ to be Ri-goddamn-diculous”.

So whither the haptic touch interface conventions of the future? Who is going to win the gesture arms race? Who is going to figure out less is more when it comes to gestures? It ain’t Apple.

Image via Wikipedia

The schedules may help back mounting beliefs that the iPhone 5 will 64GB iPhone 4 prototype appeared last month that hinted Apple was exploring the idea as early as last year. Just on Tuesday, a possible if disputed iPod touch with 128GB of storage also appeared and hinted at an upgrade for the MP3 player as well. Both the iPhone and the iPod have been stuck at 32GB and 64GB of storage respectively since 2009 and are increasingly overdue for additional space.

via Toshiba unwraps 24nm flash memory in possible iPhone 5 clue | Electronista.

Toshiba has revised its flash memory production lines again to keep pace with the likes of Intel, Micron and Samsung. Higher densities and smaller form factors seemed to indicate they are gearing up for a big production run of the highest capacity memory modules they can make. It’s looking like a new iPhone might be the candidate to receive newer multi-layer single chip 64GB Flash memory modules this year.

A note of caution in this arms race of ever smaller feature sizes on the flash memory modules, the smaller you go the less memory read/write cycles you get. I’m becoming aware that each new generation of flash memory production has lost an amount of robustness. This problem has been camouflaged maybe even handled outright by the increase in over-provisioning of chips on a given size Solid State Disk (sometimes as low as 17% more chips than that which is typically used when the drive is full). Through careful statistical modeling and use of algorithms, an ideal shuffling of the deck of available flash memory chips allows the load to be spread out. No single chip fails as it’s workload is shifted continuously to insure it doesn’t receive anywhere near the maximum number of reliable read write cycles. Similarly, attempts to ‘recover’ data from failing memory cells within a chip module are also making up for these problems. Last but not least outright error-correcting hardware has been implemented on chip to insure everything just works from the beginning of the life of the Solid State Disk (SSD) to the finals days of its useful life.

We may not see the SSD eclipse the venerable kind off high density storage, the Hard Disk Drive (HDD). Given the point of diminishing return provided by Moore’s Law (scaling down increases density, increases speed, lowers costs), Flash may never get down to the level of density we enjoy in a typical consumer brand HDD (2TBytes). We may have to settle for other schemes that get us to that target through other means. Which brings me to my favorite product of the moment, the PCIe based SSD. Which is nothing more than a big circuit board with a bunch of SSD’s tied together in a disk array with a big fat memory controller/error-correction controller sitting on it. In terms of speeds using the PCI Express bus, there are current products that beat single SATA 6 SSDs by a factor of two. And given the requirements of PCI, the form factor of any given module could be several times bigger and two generations older to reach the desired 2Terbyte storage of a typical SATA Hard Drive of today. Which to me sounds like a great deal if we could also see drops in price and increases in reliability by using older previous generation products and technology.

But the mobile market is hard to please, as they are driving most decisions when it comes to what kind of Flash memory modules get ordered en masse. No doubt Apple, Samsung and anyone in consumer electronics will advise manufacturers to consistently shrink their chip sizes to increase density and keep prices up on final shipping product. I don’t know how efficiently an iPhone or iPad use the available memory say on a 64GByte iTouch let’s say. Most of that goes into storing the music, TV shows, and Apps people want to have readily available while passing time. The beauty of that design is it rewards consumption by providing more capacity and raising marginal profit at the same time. This engine of consumer electronics design doesn’t look likely to end in spite of the physical limitations of shrinking down Flash memory chips. But there will be a day of reckoning soon, not unlike when Intel hit the wall at 4Ghz serial processors and had to go multi-core to keep it’s marginal revenue flowing. It’s been very lateral progress in terms of processor performance since then. It is more than likely Flash memory chips cannot get any smaller without being really unreliable and defective, thereby sliding  into the same lateral incrementalism Intel has adopted. Get ready for the plateau.

Related Articles

• Toshiba introduces new embedded-NAND flash memory in 24nm process (physorg.com)
• Toshiba’s 24nm SmartNAND could mean 64GB iPhone 5 (geek.com)

Image by Forrestal_PL via Flickr

“Could Apple be opening up the platform more?” he asked. “What happens to NVIDIA? Why support for cards that aren’t in Macs yet? Will the 2011 Sandy Bridge iMacs contain one or more of these new 6xxx cards?”

via AppleInsider | Expanded GPU support in Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6.7 hints at future Mac hardware.

This is an interesting tidbit of news. A Macintosh hacker has discovered within the most recent update of Mac OS X 10.6 a number of hardware drivers for ATI graphics cards that do not ship and are currently ‘unsupported’ on the Mac. Anyone who has attempted to buy after market, third party OEM graphics cards for Macs know this is treacherous minefield to navigate. The principle problem being Apple absolutely positively does not want people sticking any old graphics card in the Macintosh Pro towers. Or even in old legacy towers going back to the first PowerPC/PCI based Macs. No, you must buy direct from Apple the bona fide supported hardware with drivers they supply. In a pinch you might be able to fake it with a PC graphics card that has had its BIOS flashed to make it appear to be a genuine Apple part.

But now if Apple is just bundling up a bunch of drivers for various and sundry graphics cards (albeit from one supplier: ATI), is it possible you could finally buy any card you wanted and it would work? That would be big news indeed for any owner of an end-user upgradeable Macintosh Pro owner and welcome news at that. I’m hoping that this news continues to develop and Apple comes out with a policy or strategy statement heralding a change in past policy towards peripheral manufacturers. More devices being supported would be a great thing.

Related Articles

• 10.6.7 has new AMD video card support, perhaps for new iMacs (9to5mac.com)
• Mac OS X may natively support “PC” Radeon graphics cards (arstechnica.com)