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Category: computers

Interesting pre-announced products that may or may not ship, and may or may not have an impact on desktop/network computing

  • Apple A5 from the Apple TV 3 – and an iPad 2! » Chipworks

    Pictures of the two different A5 chips
    From: 9to5mac, the two Apple A5 cpus in question

    Not only did Apple roll out a new processor that was not what it was advertised to be, but it also snuck in a new process technology for the manufacturing of this new A5. The previous generation A5, part number APL0498, was manufactured on Samsung Semiconductors’ 45 nm LP CMOS process. This new A5 processor is manufactured on Samsung’s new 32 nm high-k metal gate, gate first, LP CMOS process technology.

    via Update – Apple A5 from the Apple TV 3 – and an iPad 2! » Technology Blog » Chipworks.

    Check out the article at the Chipworks website, just follow the link above. They have a great rundown of what they discovered in their investigation of the most recent Apple A5 chips. These chips are appearing in a newly revised AppleTV but have also appeared in more recently manufactured Apple iPad 2 as well. There was some amount of surprise that Apple didn’t adopt a shrunk down die ruling for the A5X used in the iPad 3. Most of the work went into the integrated graphics of the A5X as it was driving a much higher rez ‘Retina’-like display.

    Very, very sneaky of Apple to slip in the next generation smaller die size on a ‘hobby’ product like the Apple TV. This is proof positive that when someone says something is a hobby, it isn’t necessarily so. I for one am both heartened and intrigued that Apple is attempting to get a 32nm processor out there on their ‘low power’ low cost products. Now that this part has also been discovered in the more recently constructed Apple iPad 2 units, I wonder what kind of heat, battery life differences there are versus an early model iPad 2 using the A5 part number APL0498?

    Keeping up with the Samsungs is all important these days and Apple has got to keep its CPU die rulings in step with the next generation of of chip fabrication giants. Intel is pushing 22nm, Samsung has been on 32nm for a while and then there’s Apple sitting 1 or 2 generations behind the cutting edge. I fear this may have resulted in some of the heat issues that were first brought to people’s attention by Consumer Reports weeks after the introduction of the iPad 3. With any luck and process engineering speed, the A5X can jump ship to the 32nm fabrication line at Samsung sooner rather than later.

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  • Apple A5X CPU in Review

    Apple Inc.
    Apple Inc. (Photo credit: marcopako )

    A meta-analysis of the Apple A5X system on chip

    (from the currently shipping 3rd Gen iPad)

    New Ipad’s A5X beats NIVIDIA Tegra 3 in some tests (MacNN|Electronista)

    Apple’s A5X Die (and Size?) Revealed (Anandtech.com)

    Chip analysis reveals subtle changes to new iPad innards (AppleInsider-quoting Anandtech)

    Apple A5X Die Size Measured: 162.94mm^2, Samsung 45nm LP Confirmed (Update from Anandtech based on a more technical analysis of the chip)

    Reading through all the hubbub and hand-waving from the technology ‘teardown’ press outlets, one would have expected a bigger leap from Apple’s chip designers. A fairly large chip sporting an enormous graphics processor integrated into the die is what Apple came up with to help boost itself to the next higher rez display (so-called Retina Display). The design rule is still a pretty conservative 45nm (rather than try to push the envelope by going with 32nm or thinner to bring down the power requirements). Apple similarly had to boost its battery capacity to make up for this power hungry pixel demon by almost 2X more than the first gen iPad. So for almost the ‘same’ amount of battery capacity (10 hours of reserve power), you get the higher rez display. But a bigger chip and higher rez display will add up to some extra heat being generated, generally speaking. Which leads us to a controversy.

    Given this knowledge there has been a recent back and forth argument over thermal design point for iPad 3rd generation. Consumer Reports published an online article saying the power/heat dissipation was much higher than previous generation iPads. They included some thermal photographs indicating the hot spots on the back of the device and relative temperatures. While the iPad doesn’t run hotter than a lot of other handheld devices (say Android tablets). It does run hotter than say an iPod Touch. But as Apple points out that has ALWAYS been the case. So you gain some things you give up some things and still Apple is the market leader in this form factor, years ahead of the competition. And now the tempest in the teapot is winding down as Consumer Reports (via LA Times.com)has rated the 3rd Gen iPad as it’s no. 1 tablet on the market (big surprise). So while they aren’t willing to retract their original claim of high heat, they are willing to say it doesn’t count as ’cause for concern’. So you be the judge when you try out the iPad in the Apple Store. Run it through its paces, a full screen video or 2 should heat up the GPU and CPU enough to get the electrons really racing through the device.

    A picture of the Apple A5X
    This is the new System on Chip used by the Apple 3rd generation iPad

  • ARM Wants to Put the Internet in Your Umbrella | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

    Image representing Wired Magazine as depicted ...
    Image via CrunchBase

    On Tuesday, the company unveiled its new ARM Cortex-M0+ processor, a low-power chip designed to connect non-PC electronics and smart sensors across the home and office.

    Previous iterations of the Cortex family of chips had the same goal, but with the new chip, ARM claims much greater power savings. According to the company, the 32-bit chip consumes just nine microamps per megahertz, an impressively low amount even for an 8- or 16-bit chip.

    via ARM Wants to Put the Internet in Your Umbrella | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.

    Lower power means a very conservative power budget especially for devices connected to the network. And 32 bits is nothing to sneeze at considering most manufacturers would pick a 16 or 8-bit chip to bring down the cost and power budget too. According to this article the degree of power savings is so great in fact that in sleep mode the chip consumes almost no power at all. For this market Moore’s Law is paying off big benefits especially given the bonus of a 32bit core. So not only will you get a very small lower power cpu, you’ll have a much more diverse range of software that could run on it and take advantage of a larger memory address space as well. I think non-PC electronics could include things as simple as web cams or cellphone cameras. Can you imagine a CMOS camera chip with a whole 32bit cpu built in? Makes you wonder no just what it could do, but what ELSE it could do, right?

    The term ‘Internet of Things‘ is bandied about quite a bit as people dream about cpus and networks connecting ALL the things. And what would be the outcome if your umbrella was connected to the Internet? What if ALL the umbrellas were connected? You could log all kinds of data, whether it was opened or close, what the ambient temperature is. It would be like a portable weather station for anyone aggregating all the logged data potentially. And the list goes on and on. Instead of Tire pressure monitors, why not also capture video of the tire as it is being used commuting to work. It could help measure the tire wear and setup and appointment when you need to get a wheel alignment. It could determine how many times you hit potholes and suggest smoother alternate routes. That’s the kind of blue sky wide open conjecture that is enabled by a 32-bit low/no power cpu.

    Moore's Law, The Fifth Paradigm.
    Moore’s Law, The Fifth Paradigm. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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  • AMD Snatches New-Age Server Maker From Under Intel | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

    Image representing AMD as depicted in CrunchBase
    Image via CrunchBase

    Chip designer and chief Intel rival AMD has signed an agreement to acquire SeaMicro, a Silicon Valley startup that seeks to save power and space by building servers from hundreds of low-power processors.

    via AMD Snatches New-Age Server Maker From Under Intel | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.

    It was bound to happen eventually, I guess. SeaMicro has been acquired by AMD. We’ll see what happens as a result as SeaMicro is a customer of Intel’s Atom chips and now most recently Xeon server chips as well. I have no idea where this is going or what AMD intends to do, but hopefully this won’t scare off any current or near future customers.

    SeaMicro’s competitive advantage has been and will continue to be the development work they performed on that custom ASIC chip they use in all their systems. That bit of intellectual property was in essence the reason AMD decided to acquire SeaMicro and hopefully let it gain an engineering advantage for systems it might put out on the market in the future for large scale Data Centers.

    While this is all pretty cool technology, I think that SeaMicro’s best move was to design its ASIC so that it could take virtually any common CPU. In fact, SeaMicro’s last big announcement introduced its SM10000-EX option, which uses low-power, quad-core Xeon processors to more than double compute performance while still keeping the high density, low-power characteristics of its siblings.

    via SeaMicro acquisition: A game-changer for AMD • The Register.

    So there you have it Wired and The Register are reporting the whole transaction pretty positively. Looks on the surface to be a win for AMD as it can design new server products and get them to market quickly using the SeaMicro ASIC as a key ingredient. SeaMicro can still service it’s current customers and eventually allow AMD to up sell or upgrade as needed to keep the ball rolling. And with AMD’s Fusion architecture marrying GPUs with CPU cores who knows what cool new servers might be possible? But as usual the nay-sayers the spreaders of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt have questioned the value of SeaMicro and their original product he SM-10000.

    Diane Bryant, the general manager of Intel’s data center and connected systems group at a press conference for the launch of new Xeon processors had this to say, ““We looked at the fabric and we told them thereafter that we weren’t even interested in the fabric,” when asked about SeaMicro’s attempt to interest Intel in buying out the company. To Intel there’s nothing special enough in the SeaMicro to warrant buying the company. Furthermore Bryant told Wired.com:

    “…Intel has its own fabric plans. It just isn’t ready to talk about them yet. “We believe we have a compelling solution; we believe we have a great road map,” she said. “We just didn’t feel that the solution that SeaMicro was offering was superior.”

    This is a move straight out of Microsoft’s marketing department circa 1992 where they would pre-announce a product that never shipped was barely developed beyond a prototype stage. If Intel is really working on this as a new product offering you would have seen an announcement by now, rather than a vague, tangential reference that appears more like a parting shot than a strategic direction. So I will be watching intently in the coming months and years if needed to see what if any Intel ‘fabric technology’ makes its way from the research lab, to the development lab and to final product shipping. However don’t be surprised if this is Intel attempting to undermine AMD’s choice to purchase SeaMicro. Likewise, Forbes.com later reported from a representative from SeaMicro that their company had not tried to encourage Intel to acquire SeaMicro. It is anyone’s guess who is really correct and being 100% honest in their recollections. However I am still betting on SeaMicro’s long term strategy of pursuing low power, ultra dense, massively parallel servers. It is an idea whose time has come.

    Image representing Intel as depicted in CrunchBase
    Image via CrunchBase
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  • Hope for a Tool-Less Tomorrow | iFixit.org

    I’ve seen the future, and not only does it work, it works without tools. It’s moddable, repairable, and upgradeable. Its pieces slide in and out of place with hand force. Its lid lifts open and eases shut. It’s as sleek as an Apple product, without buried components or proprietary screws.

    via Hope for a Tool-Less Tomorrow | iFixit.org.HP Z1 worstation

    Oh how I wish this were true today for Apple. I say this as a recent purchaser of a Apple re-furbished iMac 27″. My logic and reasoning for going with the refurbished over new was based on a few bits of knowledge gained reading Macintosh weblogs. The rumors I read included the idea that Apple repaired items are strenuously tested before being re-sold. In some cases return items are not even broken, they are returns based on buyers remorse or cosmetic problems. So there’s a good chance the logic board and lcd have no problems. Now reading back this Summer just after the launch of Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), I read about lots of problems with crashes off 27″ iMacs. So I figured a safer bet would be to get a 21″ iMac. But then I started thinking about Flash-based Solid State Disks. And looking at the prohibitively high prices Apple charges for their installed SSDs, I decided I needed something that I could upgrade myself.

    But as you may know iMacs over time have never been and continue to remain not user up-gradable. However, that’s not to say people haven’t tried or succeeded in upgrading their own iMacs over the years. Enter the aftermarket for SSD upgrades. Apple has attempted to zig and zag as the hobbyists swap in newer components like larger hard drives and SSDs. Witness the Apple temperature sensor on the boot drive in the 27″ iMac, where they have added a sensor wire to measure the internal heat of the hard drive. As the Mac monitors this signal it will rev-up the internal fans. Any iMac hobbyist attempting to swap out a a 4TByte or 3TByte drive for the stock Apple 2TByte drive will suffer the inevitable panic mode of the iMac as it cannot see its temperature sensor (these replacement drives don’t have the sensor built-in) and assumes the worst. They say the noise is deafening when those fans speed up, and they never, EVER slow down. This Apple’s attempt insure sanctity through obscurity. No one is allowed to mod or repair, and that means anyone foolish enough to attempt to swap their internal hard drive on the iMac.

    But, there’s a workaround thank goodness and that is the 27″ iMac whose internal case is just large enough to install a secondary hard drive. You can slip a 2.5″ SSD into that chassis. You just gotta know how to open it up. And therein lies the theme of this essay, the user upgradable, user friendly computer case design. The antithesis of this idea IS the iMac 27″ if you read these steps from iFixit and the photographer Brian Tobey. Both of these websites make clear the excruciating minutiae of finding and disconnecting the myriad miniature cables that connect the logic board to the computer. Without going through those steps one cannot gain access to the spare SATA connectors facing towards the back of the iMac case. I decided to go through these steps to add an SSD to my iMac right after it was purchased. I thought Brian Tobey’s directions were just slightly better and had more visuals pertinent to the way I was working on the iMac as I opened up the case.

    It is in a word a non-trivial task. You need the right tools, the right screwdrivers. In fact you even need suction cups! (thankyou Apple). However there is another way, even for so-called All-in-One style computer designs like the iMac. It’s a new product from Hewlett-Packard targeted for the desktop engineering and design crowd. It’s an All-in-One workstation that is user upgradable and it’s all done without any tools at all. Let me repeat that last bit again, it is a ‘tool-less’ design. What you may ask is a tool-less design? I hadn’t heard of it either until I read this article in iFixit. And after having followed the links to the NewEgg.com website to see what other items were tagged as ‘tool-less’ I began to remember some hints and stabs at this I had seen in some Dell Optiplex desktops some years back. The ‘carrier’ bracket for the CD/DVD and HDD drive bays were these green plastic rails that just simply ‘pushed’ into the sides of the drive (no screws necessary).

    And when I considered my experience working with the 27″ iMac actually went pretty well (it booted up the first time no problems) after all I had done to it, I consider myself very lucky. But it could have been better. And there’s no reason it cannot be better for EVERYONE. It also made me think of the XO Laptop (One Laptop Per Child project) and I wondered how tool-less that laptop might be. How accessible are any of these designs? And it also made me recall the Facebook story I recently commented on about how Facebook is designing its own hard drive storage units to make them easier to maintain (no little screws to get lost and dropped onto a fully powered motherboard and short things out). So I much more hope than when I first embarked on the do it yourself journey of upgrading my iMac. Tool-less design today, Tool-less design tomorrow and Tool-less design forever.

    Image representing Hewlett-Packard as depicted...
    Image via CrunchBase
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  • Facebook Shakes Hardware World With Own Storage Gear | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

    Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
    Image via CrunchBase

    Now, Facebook has provided a new option for these big name Wall Street outfits. But Krey also says that even among traditional companies who can probably benefit from this new breed of hardware, the project isn’t always met with open arms. “These guys have done things the same way for a long time,” he tells Wired.

    via Facebook Shakes Hardware World With Own Storage Gear | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.

    Interesting article further telling the story of Facebook’s Open Compute project. This part of the story concentrates on the mass storage needs of the social media company. Which means Wall Street data center designer/builders aren’t as enthusiastic about Open Compute as one might think. The old school Wall Streeters have been doing things the same way as Peter Krey says for a very long time. But that gets to the heart of the issue, what the members of the Open Compute project hope to accomplish. Rack Space AND Goldman Sachs are members, both contributing and getting pointers from one another. Rack Space is even beginning to virtualize equipment down to the functional level replacing motherboards with a Virtual I/O service. That would allow components to be ganged up together based on the frequency of their replacement and maintenance. According to the article, CPUs could be in one rack cabinet, DRAM in another, Disks in yet another (which is already the case now with storage area networks).

    The newest item to come into the Open Compute circus tent is storage. Up until now that’s been left to Value Added Resellers (VARs) to provide. So different brand loyalties and technologies still hold sway for many Data Center shops including Open Compute. Now Facebook is redesigning the disk storage rack to create a totally tool-less design. No screws, no drive carriers, just a drive and a latch and that is it. I looked further into this tool-less phenomenon and found an interesting video at HP

    HP Z-1 all in one CAD workstation

    Along with this professional video touting how easy it is to upgrade this all in one design:

    The Making of the HP Z1

    Having recently purchased a similarly sized iMac 27″ and upgrading it by adding a single SSD drive into the case, I can tell you this HP Z1 demonstrates in every way possible the miracle of toolless designs. I was bowled over and remember back to some of my memories of different Dell tower designs over the years (some with more toolless awareness than others). If a toolless future is inevitable I say bring it on. And if Facebook ushers in the era of toolless Storage Racks as a central design tenet of Open Compute so much the better.

    Image representing Goldman Sachs as depicted i...
    Image via CrunchBase
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  • Daring Fireball: Mountain Lion

    Wrestling with Mountain Lion

    And then the reveal: Mac OS X — sorry, OS X — is going on an iOS-esque one-major-update-per-year development schedule. This year’s update is scheduled for release in the summer, and is ready now for a developer preview release. Its name is Mountain Lion.1

    via Daring Fireball: Mountain Lion.

    Mountain Lion is the next iteration of Mac OS X. And while there are some changes since the original Lion was released just this past Summer, they are more like further improvements than real changes. I say this in part due to the concentration on aligning the OS X apps with iOS apps for small things like using the same name:

    iCal versus Calendar

    iChat versus Messages

    Address book versus Contacts

    Reminders versus Notes

    etc.

    Under the facial, superficial level more of the Carbonized libraries and apps are being factored out and being given full Cocoa libraries and app equivalents where possible. But one of the bigger changes, one that’s been slipping since the release of Mac OS X 10.7 is the use of ‘Sand-boxing’ as a security measure for Apps. The sand-box would be implemented by the Developers to adhere to strict rules set forth by Apple. Apps wouldn’t be allowed to do certain things anymore like writing to an external Filesystem, meaning saving or writing out to a USB drive without special privileges being asked for. Seems trivial at first but on the level of a day to day user of a given App it might break it altogether. I’m thinking of iMovie as an example where you can specify you want new Video clips saved into an Event Folder kept on an external hard drive. Will iMovie need to be re-written in order to work on Mountain Lion? Will sand-boxing hurt other Apple iApps as well?

    Then there is the matter of ‘GateKeeper’ which is another OS mechanism to limit trust based on who the developer. Apple will issue security certificates to registered developers who post their software through the App Store, but independents who sell direct can also register for these certs as well, thus establishing a chain of trust from the developer to Apple to the OS X user. From that point you can choose to trust either just App store certified apps, independent developers who are Apple certified or unknown, uncertified apps. Depending on your needs the security level can be chosen according to which type of software you use. some people are big on free software which is the least likely to have a certification, but still may be more trustworthy than even the most ‘certified’ of AppStore software (I’m thinking emacs as an example). So sandboxes, gatekeepers all conspire to funnel developers into the desktop OS and thus make it much harder for developers of malware to infect Apple OS X computers.

    These changes should be fully ready for consumption upon release of the OS in July. But as I mentioned sandboxing has been rolled back no less than two times so far. First roll-back occurred in November. The most recent rollback was here in February. The next target date for sandboxing is in June and should get all the Apple developers to get on board  prior to the release of Mountain Lion the following month, in July. This reminds me a bit of the flexibility Apple had to show in the face of widespread criticism and active resistance to the Final Cut Pro X release last June. Apple had to scramble for a time to address concerns of bugs and stability under Mac OS X 10.7 (the previous Snow Leopard release seemed to work better for some who wrote on Apple support discussion forums). Apple quickly came up with an alternate route for dissatisfied customers who demanded satisfaction by giving copies of Final Cut Pro Studio 7 (with just the Final Cut Pro app included) to people who called up their support lines asking to substitute the older version of the software for a recent purchase of FCP X. Flexibility like this seems to be more frequent going forward which is great to see Apple’s willingness to adapt to an adverse situation of their own creation. We’ll see how this migration goes come July.

    Mac OS X logo
    Image via Wikipedia
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  • Buzzword: Augmented Reality

    Augmented Reality in the Classroom Craig Knapp
    Augmented Reality in the Classroom Craig Knapp (Photo credit: caswell_tom)

    What it means. “Augmented reality” sounds very “Star Trek,” but what is it, exactly? In short, AR is defined as “an artificial environment created through the combination of real-world and computer-generated data.”

    via Buzzword: Augmented Reality.

    Nice little survey from the people at Consumer Reports, with specific examples given from the Consumer Electronics Show this past January. Whether it’s software or hardware there’s a lot of things that can be labeled and marketed as ‘Augmented Reality’. On this blog I’ve concentrated more on the apps running on smartphones with integrated cameras, acclerometers and GPS. Those pieces are important building blocks for an integrated Augmented Reality-like experience. But as this article from CR shows, your experience may vary quite a bit.

    In my commentary on stories posted by others on the Internet, I have covered mostly just the examples of AR apps on mobile phones. Specifically I’ve concentrated on the toolkit provided by Layar to add metadata to existing map points of interest. The idea of ‘marking up’ the existing landscape for me holds a great deal of promise as the workload is shifted off the creator of the 3D world to the people traveling within it. The same could hold true for Massively Multiplayer Games and some worlds do allow the members to do that kind of building and marking up of the environment itself. But Layar provides a set of data that you can call up while merely pointing the cell phone camera at a compass direction and then bring up the associated data.

    It’s a sort of hunt for information, sometimes it’s well done if the metadata mark-up is well done. But like many crowd-sourced efforts some amount of lower quality work or worse vandalism occurs. But this should keep anyone from trying to enhance the hidden data that can be discovered through a Layar enhanced Real World. I’m hoping the mobile phone based AR applications grow and find a niche if not a killer app. It’s still early days and mobile phone AR is not being adopted very quickly but I think there’s still a lot of untapped resources there. I don’t think we have discovered all the possible applications of mobile phone AR.

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  • SeaMicro adds Xeons to Atom smasher microservers • The Register

    Theres some interesting future possibilities for the SeaMicro machines. First, SeaMicro could extend that torus interconnect to span multiple chassis. Second, it could put a “Patsburg” C600 chipset on an auxiliary card and actually make fatter SMP nodes out of single processor cards and then link them into the torus interconnect. Finally, it could of course add other processors to the boards, such as Tileras 64-bit Tile Gx3000s or 64-bit ARM processors when they become available.

    via SeaMicro adds Xeons to Atom smasher microservers • The Register.

    SeaMicro SM10000
    SeaMicro SM10000 (Photo credit: blogeee.net)

    Timothy Prickett Morgan writing for The Register, has a great article on SeaMicro’s recent announcement of a Xeon-based 10U server chassis. Seemingly going against it’s first two generations of low power massively parallel server boxes, this one uses a brawny Intel Xeon server chip (albeit one that is fairly low power and low Thermal Design Point).

    Sad as it may seem to me, the popularity of the low power, massively parallel cpu box must not be very lucrative. But a true testament to the flexibility of their original 10U server rack design is the ability to do a ‘swap’ of the higher power Intel Xeon cpus. I doubt there’s too many competitors in this section of the market that could ‘turn on a dime’ the way SeaMicro has appeared to do with this Xeon based server. Most often designs will be so heavily optimized for a particular cpu, power supply and form factor layout that changing one component might force a bigger change order in the design department. And the product would take longer to develop and ship as a result.

    So even though I hope the 64bit Intel Atom will still be SeaMicro’s flagship product, I’m also glad they can stay in the fight longer selling into the ‘established’ older data center accounts worldwide. Adapt or die is the cliche adage of some technology writers and I would mark this with a plus (+) in the adapt column.

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  • Tilera preps many-cored Gx chips for March launch • The Register

    “Were here today shipping a 64-bit processor core and we are what looks like two years ahead of ARM,” says Bishara. “The architecture of the Tile-Gx is aligned to the workload and gives one server node per chip rather than a sea of wimpy nodes not acting in a cache coherent manner. We have been in this market for two years now and we know what hurts in data centers and what works. And 32-bit ARM just is not going to cut it. Applied Micro is doing their own core, and that adds a lot of risks.”

    via Tilera preps many-cored Gx chips for March launch • The Register.

    Tile of a TILE64 processor from Tilera
    Image via Wikipedia

    Tilera is preparing to ship a 36 core Tile-Gx cpu in March. It’s going to be packaged with a re-compiled Linux distribution of CentOS on a development board (TILEencore). It will also have a number of re-compiled Unix utilities and packages included, so OEM shops can begin product development as soon as possible.

    I’m glad to see Tilera is still duking it out, battling for the design wins with manufacturers selling into the Data Center as it were. Larger Memory addressing will help make the Tilera chips more competitive with Commodity Intel Hardware data center shops who build their own hardware. Maybe we’ll see full 64bit memory extensions at some point as a follow on to the current 40bit address space extensions currently. The memory extensions are necessary to address more than the 32bit limit of 4GBytes, so an extra 8 bits goes a long, long way to competing against a fully 64bit address space.

    Also considering work being done at ARM for optimizing their chip designs for narrower design rules, Tilera should follow suit and attempt to shrink their chip architecture too. This would allow clock speeds to ease upward and keep the thermal design point consistent with previous generation Tile architecture chips, making Tile-Gx more competitive in the coming years. ARM announced 1 month ago they will be developing a 22nm sized cpu core for future licensing by ARM customers. As it is now Tilera uses an older fabrication design rule of around 40nm (which is still quite good given the expense required to shrink to lower design rules). And they have plans to eventually migrate to a narrower design rule. However ideally they would not stay farther behind that 1 generation from the top-end process lines of Intel (who is targeting 14nm production lines in the near future).

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