I personally enjoyed very much the iPhone 3GS presentation when TomTom Inc. presented their software/hardware add-ons that will allow you to use the iPhone as fully functional Navigation System. The question is how long companies like Garmin can sit monopolizing the market and provide little more than radical incrementalism in it’s new product offerings. About a year ago there were four competitors in the personal navigation market: Garmin, TomTom and Navigon with Magellan kind of in the background. Navigon has ended it’s production of devices but will sell it’s software to anyone willing to license it. Magellan is still creeping around, but has been superceeded by Garmin long ago. So TomTom and Garmin beat each others heads in on a quarterly basis. TomTom really did innovate in the software end of things providing all kinds of aids like telling you which road lane to take on the highway, or help at difficult intersections. As they rolled these out, Garmin would just sit back and eventually respond with a similar feature. Slowly by attrition trying to bleed away the advantage of TomTom. Worse yet, Garmin entered into a project to design a brand new cell phone with all the software and gps components integrated into it. THAT folks is the Garmin strategy. They will own the production of the device and the software or nothing at all. TomTom has taken a rather different approach and is kind of taking a cue from Navigon. They took the Apple iPhone Application development environment and ported the software into it. Now the GPS chip of the iPhone can be fully accessed and used to turn the iPhone into a TomTom Go!
Oh how I wish Garmin had seen this coming. Worse yet, they will not adapt their strategy. It’s full steam ahead on the cell phone and they are sticking to it. Ericsson is helping them design it, and it won’t be out for another year. Which shows the perilous position they are in. With the blistering pace of product introductions in the Navigation market, wouldn’t Garmin have learned that a 2 year design cycle on a cell phone is going to KILL the product once it’s released? And worse yet, as the tastes change, who is going to give up their iPhone just to have the privilege of owning the Garmin branded cell phone. I swear that product is dead on arrival and Garmin needs to pay off it’s contract with Ericsson and bury all the prototypes built so far. End it, end it now.
“It’s more like a desperate move. Now that you have the iPhone and the Pre, it’s just too late,” Mr. Blin said. Smartphones equipped with GPS “are the model moving forward that is going to be successful.”
Toshiba currently bonds several traditional flash chips into a multi-chip stacked package. The Apple iPhone 3GS is an example of one manufacturer using this seemingly cutting edge technology. In one chip Toshiba has achieved 32GBytes of storage. But size is always a consideration for portable devices like cell phones. So how do you continue increasing the storage without making the chip too thick?
Enter the nirvana of 3D CMOS manufacturing. SanDisk and Toshiba both have aquired companies who dabbled in the 3D chip area. And I’m not talking multi-chip modules, stacked on on top of another in a really thin profile. These would be laid down one metallic layer at a time in the manufacture process, achieving the thinnest profile theoretically possible. So if you are like me and amazed that 32GBytes of Flash can fit in one chip, just wait. The densities are going to improve even more. But it’s going to be a few years into the future. Three years of development and research is going to be needed to make the 3D Flash chip a manufacturable product.
The basic idea is to stack layers of flash memory atop one another to build a higher capacity chip more cheaply than by integrating the same number of cells into a single layer chip. The stacked chip would also occupy a smaller area than a single layer chip with the same capacity.
The answer to the question in this picture to the left is a resounding NO! All bets are being placed on Apple using a custom processor for it’s version of a Tablet PC. This is interesting in that everyone in the Technology Computer Gizmo/Gadget news circles has pursued this as a story starting last week.
China Times Daily apparently is hinting a new Mac Tablet is being manufactured for release in October of this year. I’m surprised they decided to go with a custom processor for the tablet. But given the ultra-competitiveness of the Wintel netbook market, CPUs are the next big thing in product differentiation. There are manufacturers now using Google’s Android cell phone OS paired with cell phone processors from ARM and Motorola for a new generation of battery conserving netbooks. Most of those products are targeted at the Pacific Rim market and will never see the American market at all. Which made me sad because I would love to have a netbook with extra long battery run times.
I have adapted much of my computer needs to what can be delivered through a network, web-browser and web apps. So the netbook to me is a nice analog to a cell phone and I’ve been waiting to jump into the market until some bigger innovations occured. Maybe this product will help shift the market the way the iPhone has done for cell phones. And with their new found CPU designs maybe product differentiation will even be easier.
However, hairy eyeball of experience rears it’s ugly head and takes the shine of this buzzing hive of technology press bees. Enter Mark Sigal @ O’Reilly.com. Mark doesn’t think the tablet is the real story, but that the iPod Touch IS the Mac Tablet right here, right now. Given Mark Sigal’s earlier survey of the mobile computing landscape he proposes a unified matrix of Apple computing products rather than phone vs. computer. So the longer one waits, the less we have to worry about whether we should be buying a Tablet or an iPhone. Personally I think the bigger screen and the new CPU from PA-Semi does warrant some extra attention. I think we’re going to see either longer battery run times, or maybe mix of iApps and iLife and iWork on the same happy device. But, who knows? We all have to wait until October.
The VentureBeat note says that Apple divided the PA-Semi designers between two projects: ARM-based mobile phone processors on the one hand and a tablet processor, possibly ARM-based as well, on the other.
So we are looking at an Apple CPU-powered Mac tablet with touchscreen functionality and an October launch. The timing is said to be suitable for sales in the lead up to Christmas. Neither the manufacturers nor Apple are saying anything.
Everyone has been weighing in on the Google announcement of Chrome. Why last night even the News Hour on PBS did a short sales job on Google. They called it “Cloud Computing could Transform Data storage, Internet use”. The idea was selling software as an online service with all your data housed on the servers of a remote data center might change the software publishing business. The timing of this story on the heels of Chrome OS was a little too convenient. I wouldn’t have minded so much by Google CEO Eric Schmidt makes two appearances in the piece to argue on behalf of Google’s view of the Future of Computing. In some ways the whole piece comes of as a sales promotion for Cloud Computing.
Meanwhile on the Interwebs, I have entered into at least one discussion with an avid Google user who is swallowing the Google propaganda. I pointed out how poorly the first generation netbooks sold once unsuspecting or naively hopeful buyers tried to use them with the default Linux derived OSes installed on them. I’m not saying the majority of the early adopters were unprepared to adapt to a new operating system. But in fact after trying to adapt, they gave up and returned the computers. A mad scrambe occured to get a version of Windows on the next revs of the netbooks and voila! Microsoft entered a new market for the so-called ‘netbooks’ completely without trying. That is the end user/market inertia equivalent of falling into riches. Microsoft never saw this market, instead concentrated on the desktops and smart phones. Out of nowhere Asus and Acer along with all the other Taiwan manufacturers created a new product, trying to make it cheap they chose a Linux derived operating system. But the customer is always right. The customer learned how to use a computer on a Windows OS of some sort, old habits die hard.
So will Chrome OS beat the odds and succeed where Acer and Asus failed? Will they drive the next wave of innovation and make an OS that a Windows user won’t find unusable? I doubt it for a number of reasons. First off let’s address what you get with Windows in the ‘multimedia’ category. You buy a Windows OS, you get a whole layer of stuff in there called DirectX. It helps you play games, play audio, watch video all that stuff. You move from Windows to a Linux derived OS you get a loose aggregation of individual progams some of which play certain file types. Some require special program language libraries to be installed to work properly. There’s many dependencies, vast differences in the User Interfaces, and darned little of it is integrated into a seamless whole. If Google can bridge that gap, maybe the transition won’t be so onerous for the new Google Chrome OS users.
“Chrome is basically a modern operating system,” Mr. Andreessen said.
The first wave of netbooks relied on various versions of the open-source Linux operating system, and major PC makers like Hewlett-Packard and Dell have backed the Linux software. Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has worked on developing a Linux-based operating system called Moblin as well. The company has aimed the software at netbooks and smartphones in a bid to spur demand for its Atom mobile device chip.
There is nothing cooler than discovering you can take a feed from one bit of RSS and plug it into another service and slowly create your own custom feeds based on simple keyword filters. But that service is here today using the mechanism of ‘pipes’ ala Unix style input/output of character streams from one application into another. Take for instance in Unix the ability list the contents of a folder in a long detailed format:
ls -al
Now what good is that if there’s a thousand files that get spit back in your face? Now add the power of Unix pipes, and the search command known as ‘grep’
ls -al | grep interestingThings*.txt
So now I can take the output of the first command and rather than send that output directly to my computer screen, I ‘pipe’ i t over to the grep command and let it do a search in real time on all that text output. I get a list of things as a result:
interestingThings1.txt
interestingThingsFoo.txt
etc.
So Yahoo Pipes extends this metaphor into the real of http and rss/xml feeds of data from Twitter, Blogs, Web based RSS news readers and allows you to find stuff as soon as it is sent out for mass consumption on the Interwebs. And like all things, it also allows you to add your own personal spin by blogging about that which you have discovered through the Yahoo Pipes. Flame On!
For example, suppose I wanted to search for news on Google, specifically about Chrome. There could be useful things popping up at any minute, and I could easily miss them (like leaked screenshots!) This is what you could consider doing:
* Create a twitter search for #google
* Subscribe to the RSS feed of that search
* Send the RSS feed to the pipes, where it is filtered for the word “chrome”
* Subscribe to the RSS feed that comes out of the pipes
Now you can monitor any breaking developments about chrome as they happen (more or less)!
This is the real power of the web 2.0 stuff, the ability to make your own stuff. No longer will we have to rely on any one place to get info. I am using twitter, google, and yahoo to get my information here!
You may remember High School chemistry class when the topic of reactive metals came up. My teacher had a big slab of pure sodium he kept in a jar under kerosene. The reason for that was to prevent any water, even humidity in the air from reacting with that pure metallic sodium. He would slice pieces off of the sodium to make the surfaces completely free of tarnish. Then pull out the pieces with forceps. And in a display of pyrotechnics and sound and fury, he would place the metal in a flask of water. And it would fizz violently racing around on the surface of the water. It was reacting with the water creating Lye (NaOH-Sodium Hydroxide) and Hydrogen Gas(H2). He would then light the gas to show it was really combustible Hydorgen gas.
Well, Lithium is also a very reactive metal too. Which means it has lots of energy stored up in it that can be tapped to do useful things, like being a battery electrode. Lithium Ion batteries exploit this physical trait to give us the highest energy density batteries on the market save for some exotic specialty chemistries, like Zinc Air. Lithium Ion uses all kinds of tricks to keep the water and moisture out of the mix inside the battery. However these tricks take away from the total energy density of the battery. So now the race is on to use pure metallic lithium in a battery without having to use any tricks to protect it from water.
A company based in Berkeley, CA, is developing lightweight, high-energy batteries that can use the surrounding air as a cathode. PolyPlus is partnering with a manufacturing firm to develop single-use lithium metal-air batteries for the government, and it expects these batteries to be on the market within a few years. The company also has rechargeable lithium metal-air batteries in the early stages of development that could eventually power electric vehicles that can go for longer in between charges.
Things are really beginning to heat up now that Toshiba and Samsung are making moves to market new SSD products. Intel is also revising it’s product line by trying to move it’s SSDs to the high end process technology at the 32nm design rule. Moving from 50nm to 32nm is going to increase densities, but most likely costs will stay high as usual for all Intel based product offerings. Nobody wants SSDs to suddenly become a commodity product. Not yet.
Intel is expected to bring forward the projected doubling of its SSD capacities to as early as next month.
The current X18-M and X25-M solid state drives (SSDs) use a 50nm process and have 80GB and 160GB capacities with 2-bit multi-level cell (MLC) technology. A single level cell (SLC) X25-E has faster I/O rates and comes in 32GB and 64GB capacities.
Imagination is the name of the of company making the wicked cool low power graphics chip called PowerVR SGX. In the handheld manufacturing market Imagination scored two huge design wins. First was the Apple iPhone and iTouch. Second is the Palm Pre. It is very encouraging that the designers at Palm chose the PowerVR in order to create the iPhone killer. No doubt Palm benefited directly from inside knowledge of the iPhone when they hired former Apple VP Jon Rubinstein to head this new iPhone killer project at Palm.
Now Apple realizes it needs to protect it’s competitive advantage. They are sinking some several million dollars in Imagination stock to prevent any hostile takeover of their strategic partner. Even more interesting than this move on Apple’s part is Intel has already staked a huge claim on Imagination without having a single design win to announce. There’s some word out that future netbooks will use an integrated PowerVR chip. But the next revision of the Atom CPU and chipset will definitely have PowerVR integrated in, scoring some bigger more strategic design wins on the low power front. Intel hopes to best Apple at the low end, low power, long battery duration category.
The investment is considered important for Apple, which uses only PowerVR graphics in its iPhone and iPod touch devices. Its most recent launch, the iPhone 3GS, uses a PowerVR SGX video core now believed to be the SGX535.
Back in the days of Byte magazine still being published, there was a lot of talk and speculation about new technology to create smaller microchips. Some manufacturers were touting Extreme UV, some thought X-rays would be necessary. In the years since then a small modification of existing manufacturing methods was added.
“Immersion” lithography, or exposing lithography masks using water as the means of transmission rather than air was widely adopted to shrink things down. Dipping everything into optically clear water helps keep the UV light from scattering, the way it would if it were travelling through air or a simple vacuum. So immersion has become widespread, adding years to the old technology. Now even the old style UV processes are hitting the end of their useful life times.And Intel is at last touting Extreme UV as the next big thing.
Note this article from April 22, 2008. Intel was not at all confident in how cost effective Extreme UV would be for making chips on it’s production lines. The belief is EUV will allow chips to shrink from 32 nanometers down to the next lower process design rules. According to the article that would be the 22nm level, and would require all kinds fo tricks to achieve. Stuff like double-patterning, phase-shifting, and pixellated exposure masks in addition to immersion litho. They might be able to tweak the lens material for the exposure source, they might be able to tweak the refractive index of the immersion liquid. However the cost of production lines and masks to make the chips is going to sky-rocket. Brand new chip fab plants are still on the order of $1Billion+ to construct. The number of years the cost of those fabrication lines can be spread out (amortization) is not going to be long enough. So it looks like the commoditization of microchips will finally settle in. We will buy chips for less and less per 1,000, until they are like lightbulbs. It is very near the end of an era as Moore’s law finally hits the wall of physics.
iSuppli is not talking about these problems, at least not today. But what the analysts at the chip watcher are pondering is the cost of each successive chip-making technology and the desire of chip makers not to go broke just to prove Moore’s Law right.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 