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• Contrary to what their name may imply, let's right away cut through the marketing smoke screen, which AMD couldn't resist to pull once more; no, the Radeon HD 3000 does not introduce a new architecture at all, neither is it an important evolution compared to the Radeon HD 2900. Those cards' name should have started with Radeon HD 2xxx and nothing else (as did the Radeon 1900 in its time, and even they were a bigger evolution), and it's disappointing to see to what extent the company has a tendency to rely on this kind of method every time it's in a difficult position, just as it did in other areas at the time of the Radeon HD 2900 presentation. Moving on. The RV670 As with the GeForce 8800 GT, the Radeon HD 3800 was only made possible thanks to the improvement in process. And at this game, AMD still has the lead since it goes down from 80 nm to 55 nm, whereas NVIDIA wasn't able to go beyond 65 nm. It must be said that the Canadians' job was, it seems, not as difficult at least from a numerical point of view, with 666 million transistors for this new chip versus, if you remember, 754 million on the G92 of the 8800 GT. Thus, contrary to NVIDIA, the number of transistors is decreasing compared to the previous chip, as the R600 totaled 700 million transistors. A GPU that doesn't evolve much Yet, the number of computational units remains unchanged (when it was slightly decreasing with NVIDIA) with 320 stream processors. There are still only 16 texturing units (what a shame not to take the opportunity to correct this limitation!) and 16 ROP. The only enhancements: An optimization of the memory controller, in charge of making a better usage of the bandwidth, the manufacturer goes so far as to claim similar performance to a Radeon HD 2900 at identical frequencies, despite a memory interface limited to 256 bits (the ring bus displaying 512 bits or 2 x 256 bits to be precise). PCI Express 2.0 support is also making its debut, but it should only show a slight gain with cards limited by the quantity of memory (HyperMemory cards or the HD 3850 256 MB), and in high resolution, except, of course, in GPGPU applications. Also on stage, the UVD, yet absent from the HD 2900 XT if you recall, but the GeForce 8800 GT gaining back PureVideo 2, the Canadian didn't have a choice and it's all for the best. The support of DirectX 10.1 is also to be considered, even if the Radeon HD 2000 were already quite close to it. PowerPlay Is No Longer Reserved To Notebooks Here's a good concept! We had regretted that technologies significantly decreasing power consumption in certain situations were only reserved to components meant for laptops, whether it is for CPUs, GPUs, chipsets and others. AMD steps up by enabling the activation of the PowerPlay of the Radeon Mobility on the HD 3800. Practically, the mode corresponding to the "maximum battery" setting should make its appearance. This simply reduces GPU and memory frequencies to intermediate values between those in idle and peak. Yet such a mode remains questionable on a Desktop. Another problem, the actual drivers don't enable any page dedicated to PowerPlay management and our tests under 2D and light 3D didn't reveal any automatic intermediate mode. Thus, here's again another failed promise by AMD...

• One of the very prominent examples of basic MSR research comes from its assistant director, Luca Cardelli. Dr. Cardelli sees the globe as a single computing environment, within which there are billions of mobile elements which play distinct roles. In the same way John Stewart Bell divided the physical universe into contexts of existence, Cardelli sees mobile computers as components with their own local contexts, but connected on another level with a larger universe of computation. To that end, he creates a concept called ambient calculus, within which mobile components tear off little sections of the universe all to themselves, which he calls mobile administrative domains. Any globally connected computing environment, Cardelli argues - if that's indeed what the Internet is evolving into - should take ambience into account, all those parameters and circumstances and conditions which can be presumed as global, before breaking down the computing world into domains. What has been compelling about Cardelli's research is that his domains are not analogous to our concept of classes in object-oriented computing. Just as in Bell's universe, physical principles are dependent upon the place or context in which they reside, Cardelli's objects are all given local identity through their domains. But objects in his universe don't inherit by design; when an object or a concept transcends domains, there are entrance and exit principles that must come into play, taking account of what changes. When we asked developers outside of the Research division a few years back, to evaluate whether Cardelli's research has any bearing on their work, the response we got was that Cardelli assumes that Microsoft Corp. was ready to upend everything it had accomplished thus far with the Component Object Model. Luca's a nice fellow, we were told, but COM is here to stay. Since that time, the beginning of the upheaval of COM has already begun, with the move toward an XML-based platform where software components use SOAP to communicate with one another, and share XML-encoded data. On the surface, it would appear Microsoft may have missed an opportunity to make good use of the technology concepts it already invested in. But as Kevin Schofield told us, Dr. Cardelli's team at MSR Cambridge did make use of the technology transfer program, just in ways that might not be very perceptible. For instance, Schofield said, the Cardelli concept of ambients was the inspiration for a project to add generics to C# and other Microsoft .NET languages. In developers' vernacular, generics are classes of objects whose parameters may differ at run time, though which can apply behaviors that apply generally to any and all types of parameters they may encounter. This way, you can type an object whose behavior may apply to a string of characters or a cluster of data from a database; rather than having one explicit behavior for the string and another for the cluster, a generic class can typify behavior that the runtime interpreter can extend to either parameter as the program is being executed. Cardelli and his partners introduced this concept in 1985, six years before MSR was founded; and Sun Microsystems has been just as interested in applying his principles to the Java Runtime as Microsoft has to .NET's Common Language Runtime (CLR). "The CLR team at Visual Studio," said Schofield, "has been super-appreciative of all the work that Luca's team has been doing. Luca's team has also been helping them with security models around - not only the programming part of this, but also the network protocol part as well, as we define XML-based protocols for passing information back and forth, and make sure there aren't opportunities for security holes." Many of the projects devised by its most brilliant researchers and engineers since 1991 would require developers and engineers to make massive infrastructural and mindset shifts in order for them to be implemented. Indeed, a few of MSR's most sweeping propositions presume a very different world where certain evolutionary events - including some which Microsoft itself precipitated, such as the continuation of Secure Sockets Layer - never occurred. After all, some researchers may assume, if anyone can make the world change, it's Microsoft. The solution Schofield sees, and which he believes Live Labs can help bring about, involves building a kind of hybrid activity between basic research and engineering, which he calls applied research. Its basic tenet, he explained to us, is to be able to say, "You know what, you should take some risks, try some goofy things, but let's try it in the context of a particular product." One working example of this, Schofield offered, may have a familiar ring to it by now. "Two years ago, [MSN] decided they were going to make a fundamental strategy change, and invest very deeply in running and owning our own Internet-scale search engine. Twelve months later, after great partnership with Microsoft Research, where we helped design and architect a server farm and a crawling farm, indexing algorithms, distributed architecture for this thing, they had one up and running, because we were ready, and because we've been working for eleven, twelve years at that point on search and indexing technologies." So a prime example of how applied research could benefit Microsoft as a whole, now follows a familiar theme. "A great example I like to talk about it in the context of Live Labs is multimedia search," said Schofield, not unexpectedly. "We have lots of great technologies in Microsoft Research around speech recognition and vision technology." He explained an aspect of one project involving speech recognition in providing audio cues for a proposed multimedia search engine. The level of granularity required to implement speech recognition for that application, such as calling, "Start" and "Stop," he explained, might not necessarily need to go to the same lengths as for dictation in Microsoft Word or Excel. But just how exact should a search algorithm be? "If we were to launch an Internet-scale multimedia search engine," he asked hypothetically, "what's 'good enough?'" The scaling down of parameters and granularities to make projects fit the mold of server-based software, as opposed to client-based software, is one more reason MSR makes such a good fit with Live Labs, Schofield explained. "If you look across the sets of products that Microsoft builds, they're on different schedules," he told us. "If you look at something like MSN, where it's mostly server-based code, the simple logistics of releasing [revisions] every six months, or every three months, or opportunistically, is much easier than with a client-based product. So it's easier to grease the skids, and say, 'We can do applied research and be nimble and quick, and if we can come up with something cool, it can ship six months from now.' It's really harder to do that with Office." Office Live, which is partly server-based, may be easier to implement within Live Labs, Schofield added. But an applied research project with Office Live might not happen for another few years, and perhaps as long as four years. A lot depends, apparently, on how well Live Labs revolutionizes that other singular aspect of our work. Maybe Microsoft Research's initiatives aren't timed in concert with product developments, and perhaps never should be. But without some sense of synchronization - for instance, without Dr. Cardelli's window opening up before .NET's window closes - it could never happen anyway. Which is why Ray Ozzie's and Gary Flake's creation of Live Labs could be the greatest thing ever to happen to Microsoft Research. It could, at the very least, enable MSR never to have to find itself again in the position of defending its mission, its effectiveness, and its contribution to the affairs of humankind, by pointing to a great spelling checker or speech synthesizer. But before we get that far along, to the point where Live Labs encompasses all of Microsoft Research's vast domain, it must succeed at job one. "We hope [Live Labs] is something that will allow us to do more applied research, to be more nimble, more responsive," hoped MSR's Kevin Schofield, "and be able to take great cutting-edge technologies, and get them into our search products, and our other Live products, faster."

• Wolfgang Gruener What is it: 2007 Apple iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacPro, Mac mini; Dell Dimension C521, E521, Inspiron 1501, Latitude 131L, OptiPlex 740 Why we chose it: Let's start with Apple. There are friends who you never thought could be friends. If you are an Apple aficionado and have visited Steve Jobs keynotes in recent years, then you probably know all too well how those Power-whatever machines drove those mighty Xeon machines in the ditch and smoked one Photoshop benchmark record after another. There was lots of strange schadenfreude against Intel and unshakable enthusiasm for Apple, which you just knew would last for an eternity. But here is 2006 and Steve Jobs and Paul Otellini are best friends. How did that happen? You could speculate that Apple really did not have a choice in times where the Power architecture was outmuscled not only in terms of performance but especially in power efficiency and Apple was in dire need of a different supplier. We are still a bit dazzled that Apple went with Intel and not AMD, as the green team, at least from our view, would have been a better fit for the mentality of the Apple camp. But then, Steve Jobs has the kind of sales talent every company would kill for. Jobs could tell us the snow is black and we'd all believe it: In that view, the Intel proposition was really child's play. Nevertheless, the bottom line is that Apple made one gutsy move that could have resulted in a riot in the Apple crowd. The numbers, however, prove that it was the right decision. The company sold 30% more Macs in the most recent quarter (1.61 million) than a year ago (1.24 million). Plus, the user benefit is obvious: Besides more performance, Mac users get closer to a wealth of x86 applications and Windows guys have a real chance of getting their hands on a cutting edge-style machine without having to move to an entirely new system. We patiently will wait for the final version of the Bootcamp software. Dell-AMD Finally! Jeez, Dell, what took you so long? It appears that everyone always knew it was a matter of time when Dell couldn't resist the pressure of consumers asking for AMD anymore. I remember asking a PR representative in 1999, if AMD wouldn't be a great move for Dell and I heard the same "we are always evaluating other technologies ..." phrase then as I did earlier this year - when an analyst floated the rumor that a Dell-AMD announcement was very likely for this year. I discussed this topic with many tech journalists, including Charlie Demerjian from the Inquirer and we were quite certain that Dell would not go with AMD this year. A major concern was AMD's potential production capacity, which was rumored to be running around 90%+ even without Dell being a customer. Charlie was confident enough to put a bet on it against VoodooPC president Rahul Sood. I chickened out and turned Rahul's offer to join Charlie in this bet down, luckily, I have to say. As we know today, the Dell-AMD announcement came and Charlie had to do his IDF coverage in a bunny suit. But, if you remember, even Intel appeared to have been caught on the wrong foot: In a rather memorable email to Intel employees, Intel CEO Paul Otellini expressed his disappointment over Dell's move. But in the end, Dell had little choice, but to offer AMD processors to its customers. Starting with 4P servers, it was obvious that demand for Opterons were skyrocketing and HP and Sun were grabbing market share from Dell, practically unchallenged. Moving down the ladder to the desktop and notebook came a bit late, but was a natural extension of this strategy. Rumor has it that Dell used its bold AMD announcement to negotiate new prices with Intel, but - true or not - there is little doubt that Dell has made the right decision for its customers and itself - we just wish the company would have made this move three years earlier. What it means to you: More choice for everyone, that's what this industry should always be about. Bridges were built this year, enabling new products strong enough to be considered part of the most significant hardware announcements in 2006. The AMD-Dell announcement (we should not forget that Lenovo also adopted AMD) is especially significant, as it will strengthen AMD: A stronger AMD will promote healthier competition, in which AMD will be able to not only tease Intel once in a while. The result should be more innovation in the microprocessor segment than we have seen before, especially with ATI now being part of AMD. Predictions for 2007: Keep an eye on AMD becoming much more visible in the Dell lineup. Today, Dell is selling AMD mainly in entry-level configurations. Don't be too surprised seeing AMD's new processors, Kuma and Agena/FX, in the company's XPS series of notebooks and desktop computers. Apple is a tough one. People went bankrupt over betting on Apple products for the new year, so I will be very careful here. But I will say this: Apple will build a breakthrough entertainment PC based on Intel processors, it will roll out quad-core enthusiast Macs with more graphics capability and it will offer an UMPC-like touchscreen mobile computer, based on Intel ULV processors in 2007. Article Coverage: Apple announces Intel-Macs Dell's AMD computers now available Paul Otellini "incredibly" disappointed by Dell decision