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Apple never intended for them to be used as audio recorders, and they have no control over the quality of third party dongles.

Your analogy is flawed or, rather, you are too passive. These are not "third party dongles", these are licensed and manufactured in partnership with Apple (that provides the firmware support and allows access to the iPod's innards). You don't get Apple's blessing, you don't get very far. Look at the incredibly slow progress the iPod Linux has made relative to, say, RockBox. This is because Apple actively works to lock out unauthorised development.

The iPod's hardware seems well capable of supporting high-fidelity recording, both analog and digital. The PortalPlayer PP5002B chipset (and derivatives on current models) used in all the big iPods since the early days is capable, according to PortalPlayer itself, of encoding MP3, WAV, AIFF, WMA, and ATRAC3 at up to 320Kbit/s.

A little over a year ago iPods switched to the Wolfson WM8731L ADC/DAC ($5 each in small lots!), which can sample at 44.1kHz, 48kHz or 96kHz. I haven't kept up with current iPod offerings because they are of little interest to me but I would assume Apple has not regressed on the ADC capabilities. It's hard these days to spend more than $3 on a signal chip and *not* get high-quality ADC. I note that most of the other players based on a similar PortalPlayer/Wolfson platform (eg Samsung, Philips, iRiver) offer high-fidelity recording.

So you see you are wrong. The iPod's lack of high-fidelity sound recording is not the fault of "third party dongles", it is not a limitation of iPod hardware, it is simply that Apple has chosen to intentionally limit the available quality of the recording function. As to why Apple would choose to cripple the iPod this way, many people probably have different opinions on that. personally, I feel that it's Apple's way of making nice with the RIAA.

The Xeon parts to come are SIP, but it looks like the EE is a single die. Though, with no on-chip interconnect, it seems a distinction without a difference. EETimes.com - Potholes seen in latest Intel road map

Free login required. Messy to reach the article if not already logged in. The login dumps you at the the main page, not the page you wanted. Click on the link again after logging in.

Some of us do read books, and have been around long enough to have a good understanding of the history of computing. For a summary of IBM's work in storage technology, see here.

Actually, not too far off the bat... :)

Nanoimprint lithography has been demonstrated to reliably produce replicas in curable polymers on the order of around 10 nanometers.

Basically, you start with a "hard" patterned surface (e.g. SiO2, quartz) press it into a polymer (e.g. PDMS-polydimethyl silizane), heat it up to the glass transition temperature of the polymer (so that it flows and conforms around the master) and then proceed to cool and/or cure the polymer. You're left with a rubbery mold that can be subsequently used to "cast" replicas of the original.

From reading about this earlier, it is a very exciting technology for embedded systems. It does seem a bit expensive though:

Hindsight will go into beta sites in May, with production slated for July. Incremental cost over Simics is around $5,000 per seat, but Hindsight won't target single seats. A typical engagement, including Simics, Hindsight and some initial model development, is estimated at $200,000 to $300,000 for a software development group with 10 to 20 seats.

Actually, from what I understand, opening up its design is what has caused this problem in the first case. M$ decided that it wanted to get into the media streaming business in a big way. They want everyone to use WMV. So they go after customers. Many of the customers wanted it to be at least an industry standard before they go for it. So MS tries to standardize it. They enter standardization forums and bully their way through the forums trying to force everyone to accept WMV as a standard. The current players in the standards field have been playing since the days of MPEG-1 (Sony, Thomson, Philips etc..), so they are really pissed off by Microsofts bullish attitude. Microsoft finally submits its WMV/VC-1 designs for preusal. Since all MS stuff was a proprietary closed standard before, nobody knew what was in it. Now that it has been opened up, all the major companies are saying "Wait-a-minute. Isnt that the motion-estimation algorithm? Looks like you owe us a lot of money Mister." And so what started out to be a simple issue of opening up WMV for standardisation ends up being a pain for Microsoft. Of course this is probably a gross simplification of the issue, but thats what it roughly looks like.

Heres a link to a very informative article on the whole issue. M'soft coup starts media codec fight

Don't get me wrong, this is great and all, (see a better article at EETimes) but to implement microprocessor-complexity devices with single nanometer technology, we need single nanometer scale wires and the technology with which to 'draw' them onto silicon.
We already have enough trouble at 90nm with wiring, and it's only getting worse at 65nm.

This looks like a great leap in device technology, but we need similar advances in lithography to really use it.

According to this article we could possibly generate all the electricity we need, at least during the day time, in 10 years with Stirling engine's that generate electricity from solar power. That coupled with fuel cells should be able to dramatically reduce our dependence on oil, and as a result reduce green house gas emissions.

Now, the one problem with this scenario is the U.S. and its current leadership, which is deeply invested with in the oil market, and makes HUGE profits when the price of a barrel of oil goes up and up and up. I hope that with in 10 years the rest of the world will gain a back bone and stand up to the U.S. instead of be bullied around. It won't be too hard to do, seeing that the U.S. economy is already in the shitter now, and Asia and the EU are projected to make huge economic gains in the near future.

Here is hoping that U.S. power is diminished in the next ~10 years, so we can avert this catastrophe.

UNC's Zimmons has his doubts. "I believe that while theoretically having a large number of transistors enables teraflops-class performance, the PS3 [Playstation 3] will not be able to deliver this kind of power to the consumer," he wrote in response to an e-mail query from EE Times. "The PS3 memory is rumored to be able to transfer around 100 Gbytes/second, which would mean it could process new data at roughly 25 Gflops (at 32 bits) -- far from the 1-Tflops number."

[BB84]C.H. Bennett and G. Brassard "Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution and Coin Tossing", Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computers Systems and Signal Processing, Bangalore India, December 1984, pp 175-179.

I've been thinking of turning the PS2 into a workstation.

It's a playstation, not a workstation. Did the plans in this 1999 story ever pan out?

Found it, the cell is 0.143um2 and made in 32nm node. So your 0.157um2 was very close!!!

LONDON -- Engineers from Advanced Micro Devices Inc., IBM Corp., Sony Corp. and Tohiba Corp. have developed a strained-silicon transistor technology called "Dual Stress Liner," which can improve the performance at a given power consumption, AMD said Monday (Dec. 13).

The team is due to present a paper on the topic at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco this week, and AMD said the company and IBM are both expected to deploy the technology at the 90-nm manufacturing node in the first half of 2005.

AMD did not say if or when Sony or Toshiba would make use of the technology. The process development allows transistor "speed" to improve by up to 24 percent at the same power levels compared to similar transistors produced without the technology, AMD said. This process makes AMD and IBM the first companies to introduce strained silicon that works with silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology.

AMD said it intends to integrate the DSL strained silicon technology into all of its 90-nanometer manufacturing process technologies, including those used for future multi-core AMD64 processors. The first 90-nm AMD64 processors using the technology are expected to ship in the first half of 2005.

Similarly IBM plans to introduce the technology on multiple 90-nm processor platforms, including its Power Architecture-based chips, with the first products slated to begin shipping in the first half of 2005.

"This achievement with AMD demonstrates that companies willing to share their expertise and skills can find new ways to overcome roadblocks and help lead the industry to the next generation of technology advancements," said Lisa Su, vice president of technology development and alliances at IBM Systems & Technology Group.

No unfortunately - most of it came from talking to people in the know and reading between the lines of the legal struggles between nvidia and microsoft. There's no document signed by Microsoft saying how they planned to shaft nvidia.

The dispute over price was won by nvidia, presumably because it was very clear in the contract what the formula was for the profit per chip.

I thought that he was trying too strongly to make the case that those that want to use Linux for real-time applications will not buy tools and those that want better performance for hard-real-time will not choose Linux.

It is also obvious that a general-purpose operating system is not going to work as well in a real-time environment as one specially designed for that purpose. It's the reason why, for example, if you are an organization that wants a system to break encryption keys fast, you build a special-purpose machine that includes hardware designed to do quick computations of prime numbers, not commodity hardware with lots of extra features you don't need and won't use, that slow down the primary purpose of breaking codes.

He seemed to be arguing the point far too strongly, as if he had a hidden agenda. Okay, presuming his argument is valid, so what if Linux as a general-purpose O/S is not as good at handling hard-real-time as a specially designed one? He could have argued that in about 1/5th of the space his article uses. What is also interesting is, despite all his talk about how bad Linux is, he seemed to ignore examples where Linux is considered good enough for real-time use in many cases, and was unable to mention any alternative which might be better, such as some open-source alternatives that have been mentioned here on Slashdot.

I had a suspicion but I wasn't sure. And now it's clear: his company sells real-time operating systems in competition with Linux. So he claims Linux is not good enough. Where have we heard this before? :)

The cell chips are interesting, but from the description they seem to be more of a variant of the current multi-core chips that Intel, Sun, HP, IBM, et. al, are doing. It sounds like they have the capability of putting more than one type of CPU on the same silicon, which is different, but it is still a variant of existing designs. It doesn't sound like they will be putting more than a hand full of cores on their chips. Sun is already talking about 8 cores on their new Throughput Computing chip line now, and more in the future. Sun claims that their Throughput computing chips will ultimately be 30x more powerful than what is out there today.

If you want to look at something really different, check out the Mathstar FPOA chips. Right now they can put up to 400 1Ghz processors / devices in different mixes on a single programmable chip. There will probably be a lot of applications that this will be a better match for than a multi-core IBM Power based chip, although in fairness they are probably targeted at different applications. On the other hand, maybe the FPOA will be the "IBM PC" of the multicore chip world. When the IBM PC first came out it was laughed at by the IT shops as being so small and limited, that it wasn't a "real computer". But the people who had PCs didn't have to wait weeks for the IT Department to rewrite their program, run their report, or crunch numbers for them on the mainframe. The PC changed the world. I wonder what the FPOA will do?

You might want to rethink calling Itanium a complete failure that no one wants.

As per our converstion:

U.S. 'negation' policy in space raises concerns abroad
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030522S0050

First off power consumption for a processor = .5*C*V^2*F where c is capacitance, V is voltage, and F is frequency. So if you can find capacitance you can get a pretty good estimate of the processor's power needs.
From Intel's datasheets: P4 90 nm (prescott) 520-550 models 84 W of design power (what Intel recommends the heatsink be able to pull).
550-560 models 115 W of design power.

From AMD's datasheets: design power (measured with max amplitude and nominal voltage) is 89 watts for all power ratings 3000+ to 3700+.

I couldn't find a PPC 970 data sheet at IBM but ee times claims it pulls 97 watts, but speed was not specified. That seems consistent with the water cooling on the G5, my air cooled P4 is plenty loud.

Then let me break it down for you, since this is apparently so difficult.

The processors that Apple dubbed the "G4" are various iterations of the Motorola 74xx core. Targetted at the embedded and low-power draw computing markets, originally, the highly efficient design was very competitive with anything else in the same price bracket for a while.

When Motorla spun off their semiconductor division, it took the name Freescale and began to ally itself with other technology firms. Right now, Freescale, Phillips, and STMicroelectronics are sharing fabrication space in a facility they built in France. This site, known as Crolles2, is intended to be a next-generation workhorse and research lab, where they can apply the lessons learned from the failing and lagging Motorola line. They'd had successfuly 90nm test runs as early as 2003, with engineering samples being produces in 2004, and a plan to start the sampling process for 65nm in 2005.

The product line for Freescale is one of legacy - older Motorla cores like the 74xx series, the 603e, and others - and some new designs. Among the new designs are the e300 and e500 embedded systems chips (shipping now), and the e600 and e700 designs. The first appearance of the once-e600 will be the MPC9461D, which is a dual-core enhanced 74xx chip that will have two 128-bit AltiVec SIMD units, 1 MB of L2 cache per processor, on-die memory control and access to DDR2 (up to 667mhz), four on-die MACs for networking, encryption protocol support on the chip, and the ability to scale past 1.5ghz (the current high-end for 74xx cores).

As a stepping stone between the present and the future, Freescale is revising the existing MPC7447A processor. Breaking from the traditional upper limit of 167mhz on the MPX system bus, they're offering it at 200mhz on the bus, with a jump in core frequency to 1.8ghz. This compares to the previous high-end chips, the MPC7447A and older 7445/7455, with higher clocks and system access ability but lower power draw.

There... Just as geeky, but now more informative.

the article's basically a typical CEO interview. A lot of "I'm the pioneer; I'm God" type of arrogance that you often see in any typical EE Times interviews. Basically he's just using "outsourcing", which sounds negative, into "[is just our way of expansion because we're starting to have higher demand of our products overseas, and we need our man power there to do production and support]". It's just another way of him to say that his company's products are doing well and because [they're "customer oriented"] (damn I hate these stupid business-type buzzwords) they need to have the man-power there to provide the support of their (uhh.. again) "solutions".

Well I see he's a pretty good speaker... in turning something negative and make it seem positive, but in the end it's the company that benifits, not us, the north-american engineers.

For the record, I'm working my ass off in my Masters EE program (takes longer to finish in Canadian schools than US,) and I really hope I'll be able to find some decent employment when I finish within this academic year... Unless I can find full-time employment in my field, I wouldn't want to do a PhD. fulltime.

I encountered this jaw-dropper from the interview:

"How much does the United States invest annually in basic R&D in physical sciences? About $5 billion."

Huh? Anyone know any different? Or is this A-1 confirmable fact? I call shenanigans, so I will go look...

google found me this reference back to 2002, where the figure is stated to be 100 billion.

Is this dude talking out his nether regions, using his "exalted" CEO royal intellectual poohbah position going up against a lowly journalist, just to buffalo him? Or d'ya think he believes his 5 billion figure?

Maybe it's a good idea he's being forced to retire..... Or maybe something terrible happened between 2002 and now, just don't know, but 5 billion just seemed incredibly low ball. I mean, that seems the buidget for maybe just one firm, like IBM perhaps. Or is this apples/oranges? What is considered "hard" science research?

And his views on outsourcing and what it means job wise for US middle class folks... popuh leeze, here's a guy talking about his multiple homes, his 12,000 acre + sized "ranch", his private corporate airline, etc, and he's qualified to *relate* to joe worker, even if joe worker is an engineer?

Sounds like these millionaire politicians who "feel your pain" when they are talking it up at some diner for the TV cameras. Just "regular guys", aw shucks and stuff...

Joe sixpack white collar with a calculator and a PC loses his job to some guy who has to come up with 35$ (whatever, low ball for example) a month rent. Uh huh, he's supposed to "compete" wage wise with that inside the US. uh huh. Yep, that's gonna be just *spiffy* for the economy.

We got rid of buggywhip jobs when most folks switched from carriages and horses. What we are getting rid of now are *not* buggywhip jobs. That's the big difference between what happened with the industrial revolution and this scam they push called "globalization". I certainly didn't see Mr. Barret outsourcing HIS job for 1/2 price or less so his corporation could save money and make profits for the investors. And funny, I don't see any news reports of any other CEOs doing that either. Why is that? Oh ya, THEY like THEIR jobs, don't they?

Big famous rich dudes talking up globalization is an example of "do as we say, not as we do".

Hypocrites

http://www.eetimes.com/semi/news/showArticle.jhtml ;?articleId=47208507

"In July, Infineon indicated it would set aside $250 million to settle potential legal liabilities from the investigation."

They still have $90M in change left over from what they thought they might have to pay... it sounds like its possible they may be ahead even after the fine...

".....the owner/operators uuof foreign imagery services will profit enormously as US customers procure data from an open, unfettered market abroad".

But look what some in your government have planned for the rest of the world (including your allies (while you still have some, that is)): 'Negation'.

If you've got the carbon, why bother with the silicon? Actually, I wonder what they use to "dope" diamond semiconductors?

http://www.eetimes.com/at/hpm/news/OEG20030822S000 5

Optware is using a polymer developed by Aprilis.
You can find more technical details here: Technical Publications
The founder of Optware used to work at Sony, and other technical guys working for them were involved with Blu-Ray. I guess they got tired of working by the hour. Heh. Finally, here's an EETime Article that goes into more detail about the Optware product.
Personally, I just want to know when I can buy a burner.

"Microsoft will be part of the game with a vested interest in Apple's success," said Jobs.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/97/966news/macweb.html
read and weep.

As EE Times Reports:
Prescott is also Intel's first processor to support a security technology code-named Le Grande. While Intel has not yet detailed the technology, it is believed to provide a protected space in main memory for a secure execution mode required as part of Palladium, a new PC security scheme being developed by Microsoft Corp.

Le Grande is Intel's codename for Trusted Computing. HP's codename is ProtectTools, Cisco's codename appears to be either NetworkAdmissionControl or SelfDefendingNetwork, Phoenix BIOS code name is CoreManagedEnvironment, and of course we all know Microsoft's codename was Palladium and now is NaGSCaB and is slated to appear in Longhorn.

If you scroll down near the bottom of this page you can catch a look at a micrograph of the Prescott from about a year ago. Note that the Trusted Computing core is it's own an entire CPU and memory and support structures, and eats up about 20% of the chip. In other words Trusted Computing core ties up around 25 million transistors of real-estate, or about half of a Pentium 4.

It will support encrypted code (to secure it against you, the owner), it will encrypt RAM access (again, secure against you) and take over a portion of your cache. It will carry a unique key to identify you and your machine, but far more powerful than the old CPU serial numbers. It will forbid you to know your own encryption keys and prohibit you from decrypting your own data. I know it's designed to work with a "secure clock" (wouldn't want you the owner to be able to "tamper" with the time, now would they?), but I'm not sure if the secure clock is inside the CPU or planned to be external.

AMD has their own Trusted Computing project, but I have been having trouble digging out any hard info. It *may* be incorporated into the Opteron processor.

Transmeta has a trusted Computing project too, the TSX system - Transmeta Security eXtensions. I beleive initially appearing in the Caruso5800.

Welcome to tomorrow. Resistance is futile, all your base already belong to us, Slavery is Freedom, and always remember The Computer Is Your Friend.

-

OLEDs are getting pretty big right now though I admit they are only prototypes - http://www.eetimes.com/sys/news/showArticle.jhtml? articleID=20600073

The durability will be overcome, I remember when labs were first playing around with the idea of OLEDs and they only had green colours and lasted for only 100hrs. Now the red and green last well into 20000 hrs it is just the blue that is failing to get up to spec. Last I heard they were just about to achieve 10000 on the blue - almost getting up to a useful standard.

Currently the fullcolour screens are a lot thicker and power hungry than they will be eventually since atm three layers for each colour are used with a mask - even so these screens are a -lot- thinner than comparable LCD panels. Hit google image search for "OLED screens" and such (i'm in work atm and they filter google image search) you will find a lot of prototype screens in profile *awes at the thickness (should I say thinness)*

They will be the screen technology of the future. No doubt about it - especially when a flexible polymer can be used as the substrate (currently glass) and we can all have relatively cheap, huge and flexible screens. They are so efficient and bright they are being considered as a new lighting system for airport runways - embedded OLEDs would mark the be the current 'white lines'.

They will phase out LCDs starting with phones, I am sure it is in nokia's roadmap to start replacing LCD with OLED by 2005/2006 (cant find the source again though)

Anyway OLEDs are great!

*ramble ramble*

These dudes are using AI to capture a hockey game and record the highlights. The game can then be made into icons and replayed on your mobile phone. The print artcile was better because they showed some screenshots.

http://www.eetimes.com/issue/tech/showArticle.jhtm l?articleId=21401293&kc=6265

--
3 more Gmail invitations availiable

Maybe it is cause ARM does not really shove itself down people's throats. Their business practices help set them apart.

No they don't, they throw their weight around just like any other monopolist. See this project.

And see it die at the hands of ARM's lawyers.

ARM is no saint. Their strong arm tactics just haven't been noticed yet.

Maybe their lack of problems comes from the fact that they don't employ sumbarine patents, price fixing, coercion or collusion to keep their position in the market.

Ah, but ARM DOES use coercion to maintain their market. As noted in this article about OpenCores:

Frankly I don't know how they get away with this. Its like Intel telling AMD not to build anything that is x86 compatible. I for one would like to see someone build a free ARM core and knock ARM Ltd off their pedestal. They have been milking the industry forever now...

A better link here:

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20011102S0121.

I call bullshit

Duly noted and thoroughly refuted. See here.

Welcome to my list of those who call bullshit and are subsequently 0wned. It's a long list, so fret not young skeptic.

Here you go. http://www.eetimes.com/article/printableArticle.jh tml?articleID=12803964&url_prefix=story&sub_taxono myID=2251

You can no more "disclaim" your right to own property than you can "disclaim" your right to be alive
There is precidence to signing away your rights to intellectual property that you create.
When you work for a company in an engineering/scientist capacity, you typically sign paperwork stating that all inventions, ideas, derived from your work is the property of the company. Also, work for hire situations typically have you sign away rights to the property before you have created it.

I agree that having filtering software on the spacecraft rather than on the ground does not change anything for this particular project, but there are some situations where having such software would be very beneficial.

If your spacecraft has a limited bandwidth where you are forced to throw some data away, you will want some onboard processing to determine what's "interesting" or not so that you will have a better probability of getting better science data on the ground. Such software is also vital for spacecraft which have capabilities similiar to Deep Space 1's autonav system. Imagine the possibilities of a spacecraft that can fly itself with very little ground interaction and able to automatically determine which instruments to use and when. Currently, deep space missions get planned out years and years in advance in order for the spacecraft to be completely utilized all the time. It would be nice to at least have an "autopilot" feature for not only attitude control but also automatically find opportunties when the instruments could be best utilized.

If you have a typical earth orbiting satellite with a high transfer rate, just return all of the data and do the processing on the ground. We have a number of large databases of satellite data just so we can do our own filtering and analysis on the data years and years after the fact. Some of our processing requires days or weeks to execute and sometimes we still don't know if the data is "interesting" or not. If we let the spacecraft determine everything, there will be things we miss. I'd prefer to use the flight software to only gather data and package it up rather than try to make fancy decisions for us. Of course, all of this also depends on the role of your data. Certain datasets will benefit from such advances. My data won't -- we need as much of it as we can get. But if we didn't have a large data rate, the best possible solution would then be to put some processing on the spacecraft to increase our odds on getting good data.

What does all this mean? It means that you need to do what's appropriate for your data and as always, your mileage may vary.

Here's the clickable version of the above article

More info from . If that link doesn't work (it has a session ID I couldn't remove), try looking at the EE Times front page

One third of the volume of the device is fuel; if you doubled the volume, you'd get 4x the life.
----
TOKYO -- Toshiba Corp. has developed a matchbox-sized direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) with no moving parts.

The prototype measures 22 x 56 mm with a thickness of 4.5 mm and includes a 2-cc capacity fuel tank. The fuel cell weighs 8.5 grams, and has an output power of 100 mW. Using a 99.5-percent concentration of methanol, the fuel cell can power low-power consumption devices such as MP3 audio players for about 20 hours, Toshiba said. Toshiba divides its DMFC development into two types, "active" and "passive." The new passive fuel cell aims for higher power -- more than 10 W at 10-20V generated by active systems, which use a pump and fan to feed methanol and oxygen into a cell stack where oxygen reacts with the methanol to produce electricity.

Toshiba unveiled an active prototype to power notePCs last spring, and plans to introduce a product later this year.

The passive model features a simpler structure, making use of the concentration gradient to feed methanol and oxygen to the cell stack. "We eliminated mechanical components such as a fan and fuel pump used in active-type DMFCs. Instead, we devised a way to supply fuel and air uniformly," said Fumio Ueno, a technology executive at Toshiba Display Device & Components Control Center.

Toshiba engineers reduced catalyst particles nanometer size. The electrodes measure 2 x 3 cm, but deliver the same output power as Toshiba's conventional DMFC using electrodes five times larger.

Toshiba plans to introduce the small DMFC with an output power of about 100 mW sometime next year.

Toshiba engineers said the fuel cell can power some portable devices such audio players. "We'll work on improving the output, then the fuel cell can power cellular phones," said Kazunori Fukuma, managing director of Toshiba Display Devices & Components Control Center.

For cellphone applications, Toshiba is targeting an output level of 2W at 4V. "More functions are implemented in a cellular phone, such as TV reception. This will increase the need for fuel cells," Fukuma said.

Initially, it will be difficult to replace current lithium ion batteries with DMFCs, and a hybrid configuration may make the most sense. The fuel cell could charge the lithium ion battery when the phone is idle.

More info from . If that link doesn't work (it has a session ID I couldn't remove), try looking at the EE Times front page

One third of the volume of the device is fuel; if you doubled the volume, you'd get 4x the life.
----
TOKYO -- Toshiba Corp. has developed a matchbox-sized direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) with no moving parts.

The prototype measures 22 x 56 mm with a thickness of 4.5 mm and includes a 2-cc capacity fuel tank. The fuel cell weighs 8.5 grams, and has an output power of 100 mW. Using a 99.5-percent concentration of methanol, the fuel cell can power low-power consumption devices such as MP3 audio players for about 20 hours, Toshiba said. Toshiba divides its DMFC development into two types, "active" and "passive." The new passive fuel cell aims for higher power -- more than 10 W at 10-20V generated by active systems, which use a pump and fan to feed methanol and oxygen into a cell stack where oxygen reacts with the methanol to produce electricity.

Toshiba unveiled an active prototype to power notePCs last spring, and plans to introduce a product later this year.

The passive model features a simpler structure, making use of the concentration gradient to feed methanol and oxygen to the cell stack. "We eliminated mechanical components such as a fan and fuel pump used in active-type DMFCs. Instead, we devised a way to supply fuel and air uniformly," said Fumio Ueno, a technology executive at Toshiba Display Device & Components Control Center.

Toshiba engineers reduced catalyst particles nanometer size. The electrodes measure 2 x 3 cm, but deliver the same output power as Toshiba's conventional DMFC using electrodes five times larger.

Toshiba plans to introduce the small DMFC with an output power of about 100 mW sometime next year.

Toshiba engineers said the fuel cell can power some portable devices such audio players. "We'll work on improving the output, then the fuel cell can power cellular phones," said Kazunori Fukuma, managing director of Toshiba Display Devices & Components Control Center.

For cellphone applications, Toshiba is targeting an output level of 2W at 4V. "More functions are implemented in a cellular phone, such as TV reception. This will increase the need for fuel cells," Fukuma said.

Initially, it will be difficult to replace current lithium ion batteries with DMFCs, and a hybrid configuration may make the most sense. The fuel cell could charge the lithium ion battery when the phone is idle.

Actually, the big jump in heat for the Prescott cores is from Intel use of only starined silicon in manufacturing. By creating a strained lattice for the silicon, you increase the likelyhood of current leakage (hence more heat). This is why AMD and IBM went with silicon on insulator and added strained silicon later (the SOI process helps to mitigate the leakage in strained silicon).

Here's a simple primer

EE Times

eWeek

Slashdot

It looks like the electronics industry will give it a shot and start a lobby. After some further reading it looks like they are not going all out against the flag though. Sad...

I think you hit the nail on the head.

Dell's real observation is that computers (at least PCs) aren't a high-tech industry anymore.

Howerver, surely Dell's "The days of engineering-led technology companies are coming to an end" guideline is not at all the case for companies that are still in a high tech sector. One of the carbon-nanotube companies may very well replace Intel in post-silicon computing. One of the robotics companies may replace much of the military. Surely these are "engineering led".

But in their market, I must agree with Dell that I don't see a "engineering-lead" Wintel-box company in the near future.

I think they do, but I couldn't find anything with Google. I do know from this however that the PowerPC controls the walking mechanism in Honda's Asmino, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was in their cars as well. I remember some silly rumor a few years ago that OS X was going to power the current Accords. I think it stemmed from that.

According to Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, Intel is supposed to officially announce today that they're not going to bother with the Tejas generation of PIVs/Xeons.

This ought not come as too much of a surprise to those of you who read this last March, and we openly wondered whether Tejas was going to see the light of day a little while back .

Yes, this a major announcement that will effectively knock Intel out of the box in the cutting-edge overclocking world for at least something close to eighteen months. This essentially leaves us with whatever AMD chooses to offer.

Nonetheless, the biggest aspect to this story is not the "what," but the "why."

A few days ago, the chief technology officer at IBM, Bernie Meyerson, told an industry forum that the traditional and expected increase in speed just from shrinking the manufacturing process is dead .

To quote:

"Somewhere between 130-nm and 90-nm the whole system fell apart. Things stopped working and nobody seemed to notice. . . . Scaling is already dead but nobody noticed it had stopped breathing and its lips had turned blue."

(This comes from the company that AMD paid $46 million dollars to help build 90nm chips, BTW. It also comes from the company that was supposed to have 3GHz 90nm PowerPC chips ready for Apple in a couple months, but is now talking about eventually getting to 2.5GHz.)

Meyerson said the biggest reason for the problem is power leakage, the same as what Intel has been saying. He also pointed out that the problem with power leakage is "nonlinear."

That's a fancy term for saying "it doesn't get slowly worse; you get past a certain point, and everything suddenly falls apart on you."

It's Not Quite Over

Mr. Meyerson is not saying "it's all over." What he is saying is that the era of easy, big gains from each new generation of processors is over. As he put it, "60 to 70 percent of the benefit of each new generation of manufacturing would have to come from innovation."

By that he means technologies like SOI and strained silicon, though he implied that these were not long-term fixes to the problem.

What is clear is that future technological advances are going to be a lot harder to do, cost a good deal more, and being a lot harder to work with than has been the case in the past. The old way of doing things is broken, and there's no mature alternative around at the moment.

Perhaps one will eventually show up, but the magic bag is empty at the moment, and it will probably take years to come up with some major new tricks.

In the meantime, progress will slow down.

Playing Noah's Ark

In all likelihood, Intel's short-term answer to this problem is to stop revving and start adding. Processors, that is. The son of Pentium-M which will become Intel's next generation will almost certainly be a two-headed beast. In short, a 6GHz processor won't be a 6GHz processor; it will be two 3s.

AMD plans to do exactly the same (which ought to tell you that SOI, good as it is, is no long-term fix to this problem).

This is hardly something either party would willingly want to do rather than increase speed, simply because the vast majority of current programming does not (or even cannot) work better with two-headed action.

It's certainly not something Microsoft want to deal with on the OS side, and probably is a big reason why Longhorn keeps getting pushed back, much less the armies of non-MS programmers out there.

It's going to happen because the hardware people don't have a choice in the matter.

This sounds like a great improvement to 802.11x technology...now let's open-source it so we can all benefit!

This is actually much bigger than you think. . . in fact it's much
bigger than Sony or portables

This Sony Connect actually fits into a larger distro called AnyMusic available in Japan that was
created by a cooperation of Japanese consumer electronic firms including Sony. AnyMusic

Sony, Kenwood, Pioneer, Sharp, Onkyo, Marantz, Denon, JVC, and Yamaha
plan on creating consumer electronic devices beyond portables that will
be comptable with the online distro (using Atrac3 and OpenMG X/Label
Gate); also likely the Sony PSP/PS3 will also be compatible as well as
other non-sony devices.

Here are some devices that support the format:

Pioneer
X-AM1

Kenwood

Sony
NetJuke (40GB HDD)

Demos:

Corporate

CE
screenshot

I had assumed that Microsoft was vying for this, too; but then I read this:

Compression schemes take screen test for digital cinema.

"As many as eight compression schemes will face screen tests in April as they vie for inclusion in the final U.S. specification for digital cinema...DCI won't reveal any of the compression contenders to be tested...one not on the list is Windows Media Video that Microsoft Corp. has elected not to submit for consideration in the standard."

Um, what the hell? Is this standard not as important as the article makes it sound? Does Microsoft feel like they can tie up the market even without being part of the standard? I surely thought this was one of their goals, and was surprised to learn that they no longer had an interest in contending.

Can anyone shed any more light?