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• Consumer Electronics Show 2007

  Consumer Electronics Show 2007 One Laptop Per Child The green and white OLPC laptops were seen at the Marvell booth. Marvell makes the wireless chips for the project. Shuttle Goes Big With a Tower Computer - Slide Show Playstation 3 hard to find on CES show floor You Let Me Down, Bill - Keynote Analysis Eat this, Quad FX: Here's an 8-core desktop! Join our discussion on this topic More Articles January 11, 2007 HD DVD versus Blu-ray - The porn industry says HD DVD The $100 laptop in detail - Slideshow Microsoft says Crysis will be Vista's Halo January 10, 2007 Need to port VHS to DVD or casettes to MP3? Hands on with Vista: An OS X clone or the best Windows yet? Your cellphone can re-route you around traffic jams TI Has Its Cake and Eats It With DLP and LED Displays The Unusual Stuff TI Introduces Slim LED-Backlit DLP RPTV With 100,000:1 Contrast Ratio January 9, 2007 Warner announces HD DVD - Blu-ray combo disc The Edge handheld - Not so true wireless Internet Belkin connects one DVI monitor to two computers Harman Kardon announces GPS/PMP combo TomTom to offer portable GPS device to the automotive industry Dell wants more internet bandwidth Dell goes Green, introduces optional plant a tree purchase option Dell intros 3.2 GHz quad-core enthusiast PC Microsoft and Ford promise to sync your life CarMD finds the problem, then tells you what parts and labor should cost Aliph's Jawbone headset and Noise Shield sound too good to be true iRecord - Just another frivolous iPod add-on or a valuable accessory? Ritek showcasing writable HD DVD, Blu-ray discs Sony shows OLED TV prototypes Toshiba offering four embedded NAND flash solutions Eat This, Quad FX: Here's An 8-core Desktop! Shuttle Goes Big With a Tower Computer - Slide Show Westinghouse Shows Off The Quad HDTV January 8, 2007 Roadmaster shows programmable license plate frame Playstation 3 hard to find on CES show floor DirecTV to offer 100+ HD channels by the end of the year Windows Vista gets an updated fingerprint reader Microsoft intros fancy gaming keyboard Microsoft, Broadcom aim to lower cost of HD DVD players VoodooPC introduces new Envy gaming notebook iRobot unveils programmable robot Motorola aims to raise the level of personalization for mobile devices Motorola, Sprint-Nextel to bring Wimax to Chicago Intel rolls out new quad-core processor Core 2 Quad Q6600 MSN pairs up with Garmin to offer local data on GPS devices Yahoo launches Go for Mobile 2.0 on Motorola RAZR's Lensbabies bend SLR lenses EA Mobile comes of age, Tetris still addictive Making use of those cool new cell phone features: ShoZu Hitachi touts HDD/DVD hybrid camcorder and a $2500 50" LCD Webaroo promises free offline browsing Asus demoing UWB HDMI connection system D-Link puts draft 11n in new networked media player First horseman of apocalypse in Las Vegas Ruckus Wireless intros 'Video-Grade' USB wireless adapter OQO releases model 02 UMPC HD DVD slams Blu-ray, talks innovation Netgear and BitTorrent team up on high-definition content delivery PC users not hungry for terabyte drives ViewSonic highlights widescreen LCD monitors and iPod front projector Microsoft to showcase remote-controlled USB handsets and UMPCs You let me down, Bill - keynote analysis Bill Gates Unleashes Windows Home Server AMD unleashes second generation of Live! platform Sony plans next Blu-ray attack at HD DVD Sony hits one million shipped PS3s, hints at new features AOL Video to run on Sony's TVs January 7, 2007 Palm launches Treo 750 smartphone Samsung launches UMPC with flash hard drive JVC first to offer HD HDD videocam Battle of the 108"ers Philips AmBX to bring light, wind and good vibrations to gamers Philips goes ambi-extreme LG puts "aggressive" sticker on 71" plasma TV VoodooPC to show off AMD's Quad FX with 18 ft. screens Toshiba to offer 1080p HD DVD player for $600 Keep the bad guys away with full disk encryption Netgear refreshes Zetera-based NAS New HD media player from Netgear Netgear intros standalone Skype / PSTN DECT phone LG to roll out dual-format Blu-ray/HD DVD player in Q1 LG jumps into iPod accessory land with ultra-cool deck Nobint Falcon showcases 3D touch device - think a mouse, only better Even Duracell is in the iPod accessory market now A full keyboard for a normal sized phone Shure tries to be more consumer friendly with sane-priced quality earphones 3D gaming, surround sound, and waterproof accessories Linksys gets into the consumer NAS game Slideshow: Terabyte, hybrid HDD and beyond Want wireless Internet access at CES? Then pay $400 Growing pains at the Consumer Electronics Show First live demo of mobile Wimax January 6, 2007 LG more serious about 1080p MSI rings in second wave of AMD Live! entertainment PCs MSI to release second notebook with crystal inlays The battle for the digital home - analyst opinion January 5, 2007 A preview of what you can expect to see on the showfloor Toshiba to ship HD DVD writer in February Hitachi announces 1 TB hard drive Corel updates DVD Copy 5 with iPod, Vista support Proton to introduce two more full HDTVs BenQ to debut new DLP projectors Lacie announces $1150 Blu-ray burner January 4, 2007 Sandisk surprises with Flash hard drive announcement Hybrid hard drives promoted through industry alliance Logitech integrates computer speakers with iPod dock LG to unveil combo Blu-ray - HD DVD player MSI to showcase AMD Live! systems Samsung develops double-sided LCD A floating iPod sound system for your swimming pool Toshiba to show fuel cell-powered MP3 player Toshiba to debut external USB hard drive January 3, 2007 XM to go beyond radio with weather, video MSI to showcase medical notebook Lexar upgrades Jumpdrives for Windows Vista Westinghouse to show Quad HDTV January 2, 2007 Patriot to demonstrate 1302 MHz memory modules Fujitsu to demo H.264 IC for HD recording Showtime to launch video download service for Windows Vista Autonet announces Internet access for cars Vutec to show off Tri-Plex screen

• TG Daily: Yesterday at the Microsoft conference, Bill Gates unveiled Live Anywhere, giving people the idea of multi-platform gaming - where some people on a network are playing a game on an Xbox 360, and others are playing the same game on a PC. I'm scratching my head and thinking, doesn't this give the PC player an unfair advantage? George Alfs, PR manager, Intel: Who said that's unfair? TG Daily: Well, unfair in my favor, which is not bad. DT: You get that from two dimensions. You get that from the rendering and the detail in the content, the depth of it and the physics, and you get it from [the fact that] these quad graphics systems demand more performance. These are not $299 systems. These are enthusiast systems. That's one thing that's different. Now, you're talking $599 plus an HDTV, you're getting into $1,000. But what we've seen anyway is, the PC has surpassed the PlayStation 2 in terms of its net polygons. Game consoles have taken a big move forward, and certainly on paper, they can generate a lot more polygons with that product than we can with a single graphics product. I think some of these quad-graphics systems can get there now. You take them and multiply them out by Moore's Law, and unless they do it in console about every two years, these PC systems will go past them...Once you get to that, you can ask yourself, "You know what, if the games are moving forward, if the quality...is getting more 3D-like, it's not getting that jittery stuff that gives people headaches, people who have a PC may have an advantage, because they get a lot more smooth experience and a faster response rate." You look at a first-person shooter game like Day of Defeat and you see the shadow of the guy coming around the corner, those types of realism effects, if you get a better-quality display and a better-quality engine, those things give you a bit of an advantage, because the other guy doesn't see that shadow as clearly on his background as people are coming around the corner. TG Daily: Consoles can get their performance because they can wring the best performance of the graphics, the sound, all the different components, and put them into a single box. Do you see Intel maybe one day coming out with their own console? You guys already do integrated graphics. You already have network stuff. I don't see where it would be that big of a jump to maybe do your own console. DT: No, we haven't made any plans to make a console. Over half of [the job of maintaining a game console] is ecosystem - engagements, licensing, how you can get people to put the appliance in...almost a negative margin. And then to sell titles. In terms of silicon technology, for us, we see it. But to be able to do that other half, that's a big deal. That's something that takes a lot more consideration. We're very happy with the PC model. I think a lot of people try to say PC gaming is dead, which is totally wrong. PC gaming continues to evolve...The openness of the PC allows a base of innovation from the Internet side and the software side, that just won't stop. TG Daily: Not in the last two decades have game programmers really had to seriously consider the nuts and bolts of the microprocessor. There haven't been assembly programmers for games for years. The development engines allow developers to use high-level languages and graphical environments. So game developers don't really have a one-on-one meeting with the processor at any point in time. And Intel's message today seems to be, dual-core plus hyperthreading. If I'm a game developer, what are four cores going to get me? DT: We did demonstrate a quad-core architecture in a server environment, which is extremely valuable for servers, because they can do online transaction processing, which is very parallel, a lot of queries. We've been working with [over 20 partnered] gaming companies to do general threading. Dual-core is, basically, an evolution of hyperthreading in the client space. Quad-core is, how many more parallel workloads can you do? Turns out that media, for sure, is an extremely parallel workload. You could take the screen and divide it into four. It's a very parallelizable workload. What we've been finding is that physics and AI also respond to multithreading. We certainly know that the graphics processors do a majority of the rasterization, the vertex and pixels, but even they use the processors a lot for setup, for [counting and preparing] the polygons...so there's still a graphics part of the processor. And that, as we know, is a very parallel workload, because of the nature of rasterization. We have run some stuff internally to see what some things might look like, like a Winmark 3D 2006 on a quad-core, and the scores go up significantly. So we know there's inherent value there. We're working with [partner game developers] on threading, so they know that they can scale with the number of threads that come into the system. Because once you've launched a process, as long as you can launch eight of them, they can take their time or, if they each have a core, they can all go through. TG Daily: Is there a value proposition for the casual gamer to go to multicore? DT: You know, that's funny, because the more resource-starved a person's PC is, the more you actually benefit from having the dual-core. A lot of people have things going on in the background of their PC. They'll have the game that they're playing in front of them, and then people have a little firewall, or virus protection software, or they'll have little accessories or popups going on in the background. You'll [often] see 50 processes running on a PC today. So what we're finding is, all those background tasks can really be bothersome to someone when they're trying to game, because it interrupts them. So they'll turn all that off. The busiest gamers will get everything out of the Start Menu, every single thing off of their control bar, so they don't get interrupted. Well, dual-core helps that a lot. It takes care of those processes in the background, relieves you, and balances out your system. We're seeing that in the gaming world, and in the corporate world too. People will turn off their virus protection software that I.T. has put on there, because it's so bothersome. Their media slows down, and imagine someone in your corporation turning off their virus protection software. Not a good deal. Intel's Jodi Geniesse explains her company's concept of handheld gaming to TG Daily's Humphrey Cheung. Jodi Geniesse: We went from Centrino [last] December, to January introducing our first dual-core. We had about a 70% performance increase there. Nine months later, we're talking about shipping on Merom. So from December to August, we're roughly doubling the performance...with a 28% reduction in power. That's an awesome engineering feat. Gaming performance today, versus last year, isn't comparable. TG Daily: It seems to me, with the evolution of the mobile platform in gaming...in a sense, you're creating a virtual console for yourself. JG: Yeah. We're starting to see more segmentation in the [mobile] market, moving towards more gaming-specific laptops. These days, Dell and Toshiba, these are the big guys introducing segment-specific gaming laptops. I think the trend - and you see larger OEMs starting to do the same - is towards a mobile gaming form factor. TG Daily: What aspect of multicores will benefit gaming in the future? I hear a lot about speech recognition...How will multicore help with that? DT: There's a general category of workloads that we've been watching for quite a while...voice recognition being part of it, visual recognition being part of it. Data mining on the desktop: I actually run a lot of searches on my own desktop for stuff that I know I have. Recognition, identifying things, converting things to different languages, data mining - being able to search through all your photos and find pictures of your kid, or a wedding. We see that happening with virtual workloads, the most popular case being ray tracing, which is the future generation of how people will be doing these games. Today, it's rasterization; but if you look at Hollywood, a lot of the new movies are being made using ray tracing, which is a very different algorithm for rendering the content. That's how they get so much realism into their [films]. That's a very [parallel] workload. For a CPU guy like me, my benefit is that I can jump very quickly. My graphics controller is great at taking a block of data, and doing XORs, comparisons like mad, and them moving that data and drawing it out. So recognition, mining, and synthesis - those workloads are the key to how multicore will evolve. It's financial, it's professional, and it's consumer. It's all three of those. You said something about the way gaming is developed today. There's actually a gaming engine - the id engine, Half-Life, Valve - and it's really those folks that we need to work most closely with, and we do, to be able to get their engines to respond to multicore, dual-core. That's a big chunk of our research also, to work with those leaders in that technology, and figure out where they want to go, and make our technology intercept it. Join our discussion on E3 2006 There's more: Read all E3 2006 stories on TG Daily

• One of my favorites in the unusual PC category is one of the first microprocessor based computers, Processor Technology's SOL-20 with an Intel 8080 CPU. I built one of them from a kit and learned some carpentry and wood finishing skills staining and polishing the micro's walnut wooden sides. World's First Multi-User/Multi-Tasking Micro I have fond memories of the AlphaMicro AM100 computer. It was built in 1977 by an Irvine, California based company, predictably named "AlphaMicro". The computer used a WD16 16-bit CPU built by none other than Western Digital. The WD16 was a re-microcoded version of DEC's LSI-11 CPU. The AlphaMicro was the first multi-user/multi-tasking microcomputer ever. Users accessed the computer on serially attached terminals. The operating system was called "AMOS". It bore an uncanny resemblance to the UNIX-like operating system running on Digital Equipment Corp's PDP-11 minis. Rumor has it that the guys at AlphaMicro backed up a truck with their computer on it to the back door of a company that owned a PDP-11, connected the two computers and simply transferred the DEC OS to the AM100. If this is true, I believe the statute of limitations has run out on that caper and there's no chance for HP, which bought Compaq which bought DEC, to sue AlphaMicro, which is still in business. Photo of the interior of an AlphaMicro AM100 based computer. From front to back, the CPU takes up the first two ribbon-cable linked boards, then come three 64K memory boards, next a CDC Hawk disk controller followed by other boards including a floppy card, two 6-channel serial cards with speeds up to 19200 baud and a wire wrap board to support a Western Digital hard disk drive. Photo copyright Michael Friese. I ran a research shop back in those days and we convinced the stogy old US government to give us the money to buy enough AlphaMicro motherboards and CPU, memory, serial terminal, floppy and hard disk I/O boards to build two multi-user computers. The motherboards were outfitted with AlphaMicro's modified S-100 bus connectors. These were the first multi-user, multi-tasking micros ever funded by the Feds. We ran standard office apps and statistical analyses on the computers. We used a standard DEC PDP-11 word processor. I wrote the statistical analyses routines in FORTRAN, which I learned after tussling with Bill Gates and Paul Allen's MS Basic on the Sol-20. Based on an independent audit, over the five year life of the research program and factoring in the cost of the AlphaMicros and their support and maintenance, we saved the US government around $10,000 annually in purchased computing services costs. They were astounded. Frankly, though we promised significant savings as part of our request to make the purchases, so were we. Conclusions What can I say? Send your stories to me by next Tuesday (February 20th) before midnight Eastern Standard Time and stop by on the 23rd to read the follow-up story. Join our discussion on this topic