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One we can get this done in tight bundles. It could be a replacement for hard drives. Theoretically we could criss-cross a present day platter with a R/W array. And don't forget quantumn dots in the future

> [Interactive TV] just is never going to happen.

Maybe iTV is never going to happen in the States, but just as with cellphones, DAB and many technologies that gain momentum through standards and cross-border co-operation , the US is being left behind, as Interactive TV is thriving in Europe, especially in the UK, and I'm amazed that many tech-savvy Americans don't seem to realise this

~45-50% of UK households *with a TV* have digital TV, and of them 65 percent of have access to ITV

In simple numbers ,that's about 8 million households have Interactive TV in the UK. As a comparison, there are about 10 million Uk households with access to the Net.

There are about 6.25 million households with digital satelite alone. All of them have access to very, very advanced interactive services. There are about 2 million households with digital cable, using Liberate middleware

The new Free to air DTT boxes are selling like hot cakes, and there are many Interactive services available through the BBC and others

Here's a wide range of iTV screenshots

In europe as a whole 'interactive TV was estimated to be available in 31 million European households at the end of 2002, creating a potential audience of 72 million viewers'

> what about the price & availability of [CDMA] handsets as compared to GSM, GPRS and UMTS ones?

Negligible difference, for the same reason that a P-III that cost $$$ when newly-introduced is throwaway-priced today: handsets are only as costly as the demand. In fact, a W-CDMA (UMTS) handset that also supports vanilla GSM would be costlier, because effectively you have to put two phones into one. CDMA handsets remain compatible with older CDMA networks, including CDMA95.

> And what about Qualcom royalties, do they exist also in GSM 3G?

This was probably the single biggest grouse about CDMA - Qualcomm's money gouging. El Reg, never one of Qualcomm's biggest fans, reports though that for CDMA2000 they have reasonable royalties - 5-6% of equipment cost.

Incidentally, Qualcomm also markets W-CDMA which is used in GSM based 3G networks/UMTS, because it owns the patents. So I guess it wins either way! :-|

The manufacturers web site.

An article in the Electronic Engineering Times.

There is a large barrier to entry for designing huge processors, but I think processor startups will always exist. With resources a small fraction of the big guys, they can't design and manage a device this complex. Instead of designing a 25 million transistor beast, people are designing much smaller processors, making sure that each can network well, and then populating chips with multiple copies of these processors.

Startup Pact (with a staff of only 30!) has designed a 30 million transistor chip by iterating a 200k transistor processor 128 times, yielding a theoretical maximum 12.8 billion MACs/sec @ 100 MHz. Of course, that's the theoretical max... it will take the correct problem and/or some good programming to get anywhere near that maximum.

Lexra has put 16 MIPS32 processors on a single die. Again, with only 30 employees.

How do they justify the extra $117? Shipping fees?

It shouldn't be due to shipping fees - Flextronics is manufacturing the European XBoxes in Sárvár, Hungary. Not a country known for it's high cost of labor.

-Russ

Now that you mention AMD. It has been roumoured last week all over the net that intel has a backup plan, an P4 with 64bit extenstions

os.opinion article
news.com

by the way, the amd hammer is expected to 105 mmm^2 on 130 nanometer (.13).

the current amd MP (palomino) has a die size of 129mm on .18.

the original P4 has a die size of 217mm and is now at 150 mm^2.(with a bigger cache)

Note that the original article does mention the 424 size is on .18 and the next generation is on .13. note that this can make a differce of a factor 2 (13^2/18^2= 0.52)

well yes HP PA-RISC is nice but really its catch up

MIPS 1GHz Dual core on same die for a while

and that its 64bit

check
http://www.electronicstimes.com/story/OEG20010612S 0002
or
http://www.pmc-sierra.com/products/details/rm9000x 2/index.asp

oh yeah did I mention that PA-RISC is a MIPS decendant
but shhh they made so many changes they fscked the pipeline(they might have got it working again but I dont know any more)

may the SPECINT and SPECFP fight it out

regards

john jones

p.s. I wonder what the HP layout guys think of Intel chips (-;