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Here's a study by Sharp. It's a PDF. http://www.eetasia.com/STATIC/...

Samsung in fact does make solar panels:

http://www.samsung.com/us/busi...

Now, not back in 2008 "Samsung Electronics are among the largest patent holders in solar photovoltaic panels, although they have no products in the field today. By contrast, many of the world's biggest producers of solar panels hold relatively few patents on the technology."

So who's the company hoarding patents again? 'Samsung "the IP gorilla in this relatively new field."'

The lithium ion 18650 cylindrical cell production has been dropping as laptop demand has dropped and as laptops are moving to lithium polymer flat pack batteries.

Panasonic/Sanyo has had to close factories. Originally, Panasonic's plants that were acquired from Sanyo were supposed to be able to produce 300 million cells in their Suminoe plant in Osaka, Japan in just stage 1.

http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800603184_765245_NT_5f784554.HTM

That plant alone, running at full stage 1 capacity could produce enough batteries for 40,000 85kWh Model S's. The demand from Tesla is strong enough that they are expanding production again:

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-08-21/news/41433228_1_lithium-ion-batteries-production-line#

However, it really isn't the Model S or Model X that will have the issue, or even the initial production of whatever Gen 3 car that is coming. The big issue is making enough batteries for millions of EVs, and that will take some planning for the necessary expansion.

What I really want, is something like http://www.eetasia.com/articleLogin.do?artId=8800626684&fromWhere=/ART_8800626684_1034362_NP_93053a1f.HTM&catId=1034362&newsType=NP&pageNo=null&encode=93053a1f

There are a number of efforts to boot up, and be on a working desktop in very few seconds. In fact, I plan on building my next desktop on a mainboard supported by Coreboot - http://www.coreboot.org/OpenBIOS With a custom BIOS, an SSD, and all the optimizations I can find for boot time in Linux, I should get 3 or 4 second boot times.

Instant on. I mean, even televisions are "instant on" these days. There aren't any tubes to warm up, or anything like that.

There are many reasons why this is happening:

1. ACTA agreement and license fees are up for renewal.
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx
All OEM product makers and content encoders are now waiting on the 2010 agreement from the mpegla licensing aggregation company . It will be stiff fees apparently, although not confirmed yet. What is even stranger is that we are now in 2010, and they have still not released the new licensing terms. Very weird; What are they waiting on i wonder ? Maybe ACTA resolution ?
Most China OEMS don't pay the fees, and hence why ACTA is being "negotiated" so secretly also.
http://www.eetasia.com/login.do?fromWhere=/ART_8800463180_499501_NT_5bb04467.HTM
So this is a "double whammy" waiting to explode.

2. There are many other codecs around to choose from and why not test the water for others.
There is much discussion in this area. But its a chicken and Egg game.
You can make a fantastic codec, but you gotta have GPU support, otherwise its pointless.
See below for how this can happen in the Long Tail version.

3. Google knows that its Chrome OS is reaching a tipping point where they need to decide how they will handle video - they need to resolve this and get their ducks in a row.
They can do flash on ARM CPU now, but i am sure they wish they did not have to.
And they also know that with JavaScript and HTML% coming through like a train, Flash days are definitely numbered. See Sproutcore JavaScript framework for example of one of the many "flash replacements".
And they have OpenGL covered with O3D and WebGl also moving forward very fast now with working implementations and even content conversion thinks to the Collada Open 3d format specification not fully entrenched.

they can do NACL (NativeClient), and have already implemented a NACL c language h264 decoder. This was one of the first libraries they did !!
Native Client FAQ: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/wiki/FAQ
H264 Implementation: http://geekglue.blogspot.com/2008/12/google-native-client.html

So the cards on the table are all congealing based on the above factors, and its a good time for Google to see where the cards fall for them and their various business models.
So, why not ask the users too.

I think it will come down to the h264 licensing terms to be released, and the ability for GPU's and embedded GPUs to handle video decoding.

15 seconds and Google. You might want to try it some time.

http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800424319_499495_NT_3378d9fd.HTM

Pare away the heat sink and all that junk, add super small RAM and flash storage and ... hand held computers (like the article notes from Toshiba). Microsoft better not be resting on its laurels and should either be beefing up Windows Mobile or porting Windows 7 to ARM ... or they're going to miss out big time again.

People keep saying this sort of thing, but I really don't see it being viable. A Snapdragon is probably going to end up being at best the same speed as an Atom for native code. Windows 7 is probably quite portable and from the tests I've done on the Beta on Atoms might run quite okish on an 1Ghz Snapdragon if it were ported. Even there we're talking about a 1Ghz in order core with a memory controller designed for cellphone SDRAM. High performance desktop memory is really different to the stuff used in cellphones - the buses are narrower and slower. Here's are the details for an Atom

http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLB73

Note the bus speed, 533Mhz and the cache size, 512KB. By desktop standards the Atom is slow. Most Arm systems run memory much slower than this and have less cache. Look at the Snapdragon based Toshiba L01

http://pdadb.net/index.php?m=specs&id=1855&view=1&c=toshiba_l01

It uses "mobile DDR SDRAM". I don't know the clock speed, but look at this

http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800457078_499486_NP_197bb814.HTM
Hynix claims 'fastest' 512Mbit mobile DDR SDRAM with a 185Mhz clock speed.

See the thing is that the sort of memory you get in a cellphone is a lot slower than the stuff you get in a desktop because the power budget is so much less. If you want to run desktop applications or emulate an x86 that will really bite you.

Once you get past the OS it gets worse. Office is probably less portable than Windows and Office 200x runs terribly on an Atom and would be worse on Snapdragon given the lower performance memory. Most Windows applications will not be ported and will run even worse in emulation - a Snapdragon emulating x86 will be unusably slow.

Of course maybe ARM will do a Jazelle style extension where common x86 instructions are turned into ARM ones via an extra pipeline stage. I think that would mean a Snapdragon chip would run x86 code say 90% as fast as an Atom at the same clockspeed. Still a 1Ghz Atom is not a quick chip.

Yes, that is a possibility too. This diagram seems to imply that both CPUs are on one die in the DS, too.

They're different chips for sure, though, with the DS being labelled "CPU NTR B" and the DSi one "CPU TWL".

http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800441505_480300_e692d19d200611_no.HTM/

If China made a move towards Taiwan, they could easily throw the entire semiconductor industry into an uproar. That would have global implications, at least in the short term. This could make China very important to the US and the rest of the modern world. And that would suit the Chinese ego just fine.

Remember what happened to memory chip prices 8 - 10 years ago when Taiwan had that earth quake?

Fair enough, but in terms of dollars of revenue per wafer, though, the relative cost of a given defect is generally smaller on a 45nm wafer than a 65nm wafer if the 45nm design is roughly 1/2 the size of the 65nm design. You've taken out a smaller percentage of the devices on the wafer. Note that I say "relative cost." 45nm wafers are still more expensive than 65nm wafers. :-)

Also, with a RAM-heavy design, you can build significant redundancy into your RAM arrays and perform RAM repair (remap columns or rows) to buy back some yield. Thus, you have yet another bulwark against these defects. As asliarun pointed out, Intel favors RAM heavy designs. This could be part of the reason.

It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out. Right now Intel probably does have to eat a bit more cost on the 45nm process as it matures. The raw cost per wafer is probably higher, and the yields not as good, just as a function of immature process. But, that's a relatively fixed expense that will be amortized over the 100s of millions of x86s they'll pump out, so the actual cost per device over the lifetime of that design will be minimal. They've got the volume to support it. Developing a process isn't cheap though. Even my employer, TI, is going to outside foundries for its high speed 45nm logic process.

Sorry, e has been taken for years now, but it isn't exactly a programming language its a Hardware Verification Language. http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800419943_480400_daed8 03e200606_no.HTM

Mechanical Engineering Power did a study that came up with much the same results as the white paper already linked -- see here. (gas engine for comparison -- about half the well-to-wheel efficiency.)

In general, your back-of-the-envelope numbers are mostly wrong. Generating plants often exceed 50% efficiency), transmission loss is about 7%, switching chargers lose in the range of 5-20%, and overall drivetrain loss is around 55% for an electric motor, for a total of about 22% (as above).

That huge drivetrain loss is known as the "tank-to-wheel" efficiency, and it's what really kills the gas car -- those have about 14% efficiency for that process, giving them 11-12% overall efficiency (also known as "well-to-wheel" efficiency). So in general a gas-powered car takes about twice the energy to run that an all-electric car does, with hybrids somewhere in the middle. Google "well-to-wheel" and you'll find a great deal more on this.

Manufacturing costs play some role in overall energy requirements, but it's pretty minor. A typical car in the US fleet will see about 160,000 miles; at 22mph (average), that's about $22,000 of gas (at $3/gallon), which totally dwarfs the energy costs involved in constructing the car in the first place. Careful about total-lifespan costs, though -- there was a deeply bogus study that came out a few months ago that used nonsensical assumptions (e.g., "cars last for 100,000 miles, trucks for 250,000" even though the figure as measured for the US fleet is 150,000 vs. 170,000), so there's some false claims floating about.

Oh, man, I think I had better buy some silicon dioxide futures then. Or, I suppose, we could always just go to a desert & pick up some sand...

Kidding aside, manufacturing cost curves for solid state follow the First Corrolary to Moore's Law--that the price per transistor halves every 18 months (Moore's Law states that the # of transisters doubles every 18 months, but the corrolary also proves true). According to this article, the period for photovoltaic cells is about 4-6 years. Hard disk drives seem to be following a period of 2-5 years, with a greater deal of variance than with solid state. It is inevitable that solid state will be cheaper than hard disk drives at some point.

The same holds true for LCD panel monitors. Some day, wall-sized LCD panel monitors will be only slightly more expensive than wallpaper, and we'll be living in a Total Recall world.

Back about 15 years ago, I calculated the crossover point for solid state vs. hard disks as occuring in 2008. I don't think I'll be too far off...maybe 2010?

It's Intel's CeleronM ULV chips (Dothan). AMD can't measure up on those in performance/Watt or overall power consumption.

And Intel has already been using strained silicon for some time. http://www.eetasia.com/ARTP_8800262619_499505,4995 13.HTM

Why do people assume Apple is after the P4 chips? Look at Dothan, look at Yonah. Those make a lot more sense in an iMac G5, laptop or Mac Mini than a P4 does.

I'll agree with several of the folks here - CRT's with even 85+Hz produce eyestrain for me when reading text, especially with window's stupid default of black text on white backgrounds. Change those to white or gray text on black backgrounds, and your eyestrain drops significantly. (To be honest, I use the same color scheme on my LCD, it works for me)

My empirical evidence is based on a time I used to work on a terminal for up to 20 hours a day. I quickly learned which ones caused headaches and which ones didn't. This was in the days of white text on black backgrounds (about 3-4 hours) green text on black backgrounds (about 5-6 hours) and amber text on black backgrounds (unlimited) vs a unix workstation (black text on white background (about 2-4 hours - better quality CRT). For more modern CRTs, I was forced to use a lesser quality monitor at work for a while, which could barely do 72Hz. I had headaches just from using it 8 hours a day, even with the "inverted" color schemes (web pages still were being displayed black on white, with web development being the job....)

For gaming, watching videos, or other dynamic displays, CRT's are almost always better. I think this is because with a moving picture, you will not notice the refresh because of all the "motion" you're seeing, and your eye focuses on that. It should be noted that in Europe, the fps are 25 instead of the 30 in the US, and the fps was noticeable enough that they created 100 Hz TVs [PDF] that buffers the pictures to effectively double the scan rate to 50 fps for a superior viewing experience. While DVDs are generally coded at 24 fps, most DVD players now days will do a 3:2 pulldown, creating an effective 30 fps.

So it really depends on what you're doing

Your claim of needed physical access is not true. I work in Siebel. Like most people there I use my i-card for access to locked doors. This card contains a magnetic strip just like a credit card. We have been provided with necklaces for holding our i-card so it is easy to swipe. The entire number encoded on the magnetic strip needed by the building is printed in clear text on the front of the card (I watched them type the number into the door security system). All one needs is a very high resolution picture of someone who is wearing their card front-away-from-body and you could make a copy of their card.

article

The state of the OLED industry, with some timelines.

How about having a computer for a secretary? DARPA is funding a "enduring personalized cognitive assistant." The system will be able to "reason, use represented knowledge, learn from experience, accumulate knowledge, explain itself, accept direction, be aware of its own behavior and capabilities as well as respond in a robust manner to surprises."

SOI is the wave of the future. In the next 4-5 years, IBM hopes to push processor speeds to 5GHz.