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How does this relate to the Microsoft Android tax, that MS is extracting from the hardware makers. Seeing as Microsoft holds patents in relation to Android? ref

Well...no, that's completely backwards. Apple's profits are larger than the entire Android ecosystem combined.

Have a look at R&D expenditures by semiconductor manufacturers. Think about what you were looking for the last time you purchased a processor, or considered the processor as part of your decision to purchase a device. Are you going to buy the open source processor where they just figured out a legal way to copy what Intel did three years ago? Or, are you going to buy the processor the does the most work fastest for the least money?

Figure out some way to fund the billions in development costs, legal/IP issues and marshal the necessary talent then maybe... Of course, there is no reason to believe the result would be any better: RISC-V memory model has severe problems due to underspecified memory ordering that were revealed by formal testing and are still being resolved. Perhaps this is an example of an open process working well, but just throwing out RISC-V doesn't guarantee a bug free design.

They tweak the ARM design.

If by tweak, they design their own cores rather use the stock ARM cores, yes.

Lots of companies tweak their own designs.

If by "lots" you mean 7 companies have licenses to design their own 64-bit ARM cores with 7 companies having rights to design 32-bit cores.

The Apple Ax CPUs are just ARM implementations, made because they can, not because another SoC wouldn't do.

They are NOT "just ARM implementations".

Apple is one of just a handful of ARM licensees on the planet that has an "Architecture"-class License. That means that they can (and do) actually "roll-their-own" ARM CPU cores. IOW, it is MUCH more than the typical "silicon compiler" cutpasta "Engineering" that most ARM Licensees can do.

And considering that their CPUs are regularly at the top of the food-chain, performance-wise, no, not just any ol' ARM SoC will do. Why else would someone like Apple expend the tens-of-millions of dollars to design and qualify a new SoC, rather than just reaching onto the shelf and purchasing an existing one?

The process advantage is substantial, it allows Intel to have significantly more transistors for the same power usage.

..except that process advantage not only ends this year, Intel is falling behind this year as TSMC opens ite doors to full production in its 10nm fab.

This doesnt mean AMD gets that fab time (contracts with GloFlo may prevent it), but AMD isnt really Intels competitor. Only in imaginary simpleton land is a cpu design company like AMD a competitor to a semiconductor manufacturer like Intel.

The competitors to Intel are TSMC, GloFlo, Samsung, and Toshiba/Sandisk, At this moment all of these have 14nm, 15nm, or 16nm fabs running, and dont believe the hype that these are not "true #nm" as Intel isnt doing "true 14nm" either. In fact, Intel was the company that invented lying about process node size and the term "Intel Nanometer" is now a thing in the industry (for reference, the "Intel nanometer" was 1.182 nanometres a few years back before their "14nm.")

All of these companies will have 10nm fabs up and running before Intel does. While it wont be publicly saying its lost the lead until it absolutely has to, its actions will continue to be consistent with a company that has lost the lead such as the recent massive layoffs and the numerous recent press releases about some bullshit "cloud strategy."

Use your eyes. Dont listen to what Intel is saying. Look at what Intel is doing. If you have any Intel stock, its time to sell it.

Intel are determined to sell 40 million of their tablet chips, but they certainly aren't going to make any profit, because of "contra revenue".
"Intel is charging customers about the same as Allwinner and Rockchip for tablet CPUs â" $5 a pop, reports Digitimes"
http://www.electronicsweekly.c...

No surprise that their mobile group lost nearly $1 billion last quarter.

$5 Billion Semiconductor Fab in India where, presumably low-wage robots(?) will use backward and primitive equipment (oh, no... wait... it'll be brand new high-quality equipment) to make chips... beacuase, you know, they may be preparing to lay-off thousands of people in New York state (the article, and others indicate hundreds, but also note they have assured New York they will keep about 3K jobs in the state, where they currently are reported to have about 7K) , but they just cannot POSSIBLY find enough skilled tech workers in the US and desperately need to have more H1B visas to help them push down wages.

If you are a geek/nerd/engineer (working for ANY firm, not just IBM... they affect the "standard" wages) you need to SERIOUSLY hassle your congress critters to squash H1Bs and outsourcing (which the giant firms are using to suppress ALL tech/engineering wages and benefits) and make them more worried about YOUR VOTES than about "Big Blue's" money. Your wages and benefits are aleady lower because they have been doing this, and each and every day you are working is a day you are not getting dollars you should have been and that you will never recover. You will have less stuff in your youth and a poorer retirement when you are old... and the guys on Wall St will be enjoying the yachts they "earned" by suppressing your pay.

Being able to respond to voice commands requires the CPU to always be parsing audio input.

Not if you have a dedicated ultra-low-power DSP on a chip which is pre-programmed to listen for specific trigger words.

What problem are they trying to solve?

• Getting directions while driving.
• Getting unit conversions while cooking and hands are covered in crap.
• Getting weather forecast while dressing for work.
• Finding your phone in the house by yelling for it.

Intel *is* a foundry. They make chips for third parties. They have a whole "Intel Custom Foundry" division dedicated to this. They make chips for Cisco, Netronome, Altera, etc. Some of those chips even have ARM processors.

Intel is inching into the foundry business.
They are *not* making chips for Altera. They have a deal with Altera to make chips at 14nm but Intel doesn't even have a production 14nm process yet. The Cisco deal was only signed in January. No word on when they expect to ship. Their shipping customers (Achronix, Tabula, Netronome) are all startups with limited volumes. Apple needs huge volume. I don't think Intel is ready for that yet.

I love reading articles from back in December that call out Intel's bs. http://www.electronicsweekly.com/mannerisms/markets/intel-has-no-process-advantage-2012-10/

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/engineering-design-problems/rohs/ The replacement of leaded solder with tin-silver solder was bad for the environment (while the leaded solder was "toxic", the process to remove tin and silver - the replacements - is far more toxic, so the pollution was diverted from western controlled landfills of the future to coral mining islands of the present). But if it turns out to cause planes to drop from the sky (see concerns over "tin whiskers"), it will prove worse. I don't know that the Boeing problem is related to the ROHS circuit, but (per the link above) defense aeronautics engineers refused to comply with it based on concerns cited.

You should probably do a bit more fact-checking before saying stuff like that..

There's nothing below that invalidate what I've said, on the contrary. So let's go for some fact checking...

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Embedded-Linux-powers-first-handheld-software-radio/

An old prototype from 2003 handling low bands. Nothing commercial seem to have followed.
Yes, for low frequency systems you could do direct sampling. With a big badass A/D converter you just sample a huge band, filter out in software (DSP) the channel of interest and decode it also in software. The problem with this approach is that it's not necessarily the most efficient (many DVB-T systems still use a RF) although this may change, and doesn't address the part I mentioned about filtering.

Because in real life, you can have adjacent systems transmitting at high power while you receive a low power. This is called the near/far effect. For example, a close GSM phone transmitting at 900 MHz while you try to receive a far base station in a close band. You will have a HUGE power difference. There are only two ways to deal with this:

1. 1) Use a RF filter to extract all power but the channel of interest. Then you're not blinded by adjacent interferers anymore and can use a reasonable A/D with a lower dynamic;
2. 2) Have a very high dynamic on the A/D converter. The problem there is that there's a trade-off between speed (and how much band you can handle) and dynamic. There's no magic converter that can offer both at reasonable price and power consumption for mobile devices, if at all.

That's why we're still living with RF front-ends which are band specific, and SDR is in most cases restricted to the baseband processing.

That won't prevent people from dreaming of a universal wireless device anyway, because it's a very sexy idea. It's been a very sexy idea for more than 20 years actually. It's made significant progress. But plenty ignored the fine details to their detriment. My point here by the way is not to ridicule the idea or kill the dream. Just to instill some doze of hard nosed practical sense.
For a truly universal practical radio modem, we would need programmable filters and wide-band or programmable power amplifiers, with acceptable cost / size / power consumption. I'm sorry to say I don't know of anything practical there, not even on the radar. But with LTE huge amount of bands (40+, and increasing) there would definitely be a use for that. So we'll see, the big carrot may lead to a breakthrough one day?

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/17/12/2007/42781/intel-targets-wimax-with-software-radio-device.htm

Well, in this very article it says:

The test chip [...] links to three RF chips for the different networks.

So it doesn't even have a wide band RF, which is something available nowadays (the article dates back from 2007, which can explains this). So expect different network specific RF FEs too. It's really exactly as I described: SDR here purely refers to the digital processing part.

There are already chips that do direct-if conversion for DVB-T.. It's not a generic chip they use but a specialized that will have a high-speed ADC and then have hardware that do the 'tuning' to the wanted frequency...

For VHF TV this could be doable indeed. It's low enough for a high-speed ADC, and you can have a front-end protecting the TV band too. And the power consumption may not be a problem in many use-cases (even mobile possibly: when the screen is on, a bit more power on the modem may not be so significant). Still, this is not applicable to many domains

You should probably do a bit more fact-checking before saying stuff like that..

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Embedded-Linux-powers-first-handheld-software-radio/
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/17/12/2007/42781/intel-targets-wimax-with-software-radio-device.htm

There are already chips that do direct-if conversion for DVB-T.. It's not a generic chip they use but a specialized that will have a high-speed ADC and then have hardware that do the 'tuning' to the wanted frequency...

So... There is stuff already doing this on a large scale...

If you want something that works with any type of protocol then you need some type of generic CPU that can be loaded with software that can be reprogrammed, and this is probable something that don't exist outside some specific circles, but it do exist and is available commercially. This stuff is usually done on FPGA's to reduce the powerusage and get good performance....

First read this

Electronics Weekly reports on the Raspberry Pi CE testing process

You know you can, its not difficult, you're supposed to be technically proficient.

Now, given this information, any of you care to retract your cretinous speculations? Hmmmmmm????

Constant monitoring could be the next big thing in medicine.

We currently diagnose based on discrete measurements compared with cutoffs - "averages" and numbers which are rounded to easily-remembered values. For example, Type-II diabetes is indicated when glucose is over 200mg/dl 2 hours after an oral glucose test. ...that seems like an awfully contrived number, simply because it's so easy to remember.

Instead of single point cutoff measurements, maybe we could get better diagnoses if we could see the change in values over time. Perhaps a more accurate diagnosis of diabetes would come from characterizing the slope of several months worth of glucose measurements.

With the rise of cheap microprocessors, I think there's a lot of opportunity for medical monitoring. Something like a wristwatch which records 10 types of measurements every hour. Of course I don't know how this could be done - perhaps spectroscopic measurements of reflected light through the skin, or terahertz wave reflections.

I've often wondered if it's possible to make a USB peripheral that records to a TI Chronos wristwatch for later display.

I bet there's lots of interesting features there just waiting to be discovered.

"Yes Samsung sold more phones, but nowhere near as many smartphones."

No, check again, they outsold Apple in terms of smartphones. Apologies though, it was for the whole year, not the quarter:

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/30/01/2012/52838/samsung-out-sells-apple-in-smartphones-in-2011.htm

Angry Birds works on every equivalently priced Android handset too, and many lesser priced handsets to boot. All in, there are far more Android handsets on which Angry birds will run than iPhones.

Regardless, your focus on iOS makes one thing clear, you're a fanboy whose only interest is protecting your pet platform through some irrational feeling to protect a company whom you really owe nothing to, so I'll step out of this discussion now as it's pointless discussing something with someone who only hears what they wish to. My point was merely that Android is another platform you can choose to support to increase company profits, if you do so you have to understand it like you understand any other platform, if you do it wrong you'll fail like the developer in TFA. I'm not really interested in Android vs. iOS discussions per-se, merely that to grow a mobile business you simply cannot ignore Android, but similarly you must be sensible about how you support it. This guy wasn't, he suffered for it, but it's ultimately his loss, and his problem. You'll face the exact same problems with the PC for a desktop app because it's more awkward than supporting MacOS X, but we all know that's not really smart if you want to grow your business.

It doesn't take an hour to assemble one, and even in the UK assemblers of these kinds of parts don't make $15 an hour.

PCB assembler, £7-7.15/hour, i.e. about $11/hour. (Minimum wage in the UK is £6.08/hour). Add in some overheads (cost of factory buildings and equipment, etc)...

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2008/08/12/44304/arm-outlines-power-benefit-of-multicore-processors.htm

ARM recently released a 2GHz dual-core A9 hard-core for TSMC's process (40nm). I forget the power consumption, but it was quite low compared to Atom.

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2009/09/16/46955/arm-produces-hard-cortex-a9-for-high-performance.htm

ah... http://www.arm.com/news/25922.html

"The Cortex-A9 power-optimized hard macro implementation delivers its peak performance of 4000 DMIPS while consuming less than 250mW per CPU when selected from typical silicon."

The advantage structural engineers have over software engineers is that the variables in their simulation are much more bounded. Nobody blames the structural engineer if they fail to anticipate a 2000 mile an hour wind or time suddenly stopping and then jumping forward (possibly for only one part of the structure). The latter LITERALLY happens to software sometimes! That's why getting threaded apps right can be hard.

Of course, structural engineering isn't the most fair comparison to software in general. Nobody dies when a word processor segfaults and so management and customers simply aren't willing to spend as much on design to make sure it doesn't happen.

Small consumer gadget design would be more fair, and that field is packed full of WTF moments (see Made by Monkeys).

Oh, yes, I remember Micron. Back when memory was $40/megabyte, Micron would sell a PC pre-configured with enough memory to stun an elephant. Well, they weren't making so much money on the PC itself ...

A quick dip of the fish net, brings up the following:

http://law.taragana.net/archive/micron-faces-two-class-action-lawsuits/

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2006/02/28/37828/more-dram-price-fixing-charges-for-micron.htm

According to the complaint, Micron shares traded at inflated prices allowing the company to issue more than $632m worth of debt during 2003, sell more than $480m worth of warrants and complete numerous stock-for-stock acquisitions using inflated shares as acquisition currency.

Insiders also sold approximately $4.5m worth of their own personally held Micron stock at inflated prices during the class period, the complaint continued.

http://www.crn.com/it-channel/187202238

Turns out that extended plateau in the downward-trending DRAM price curve benefited from some white-collar terraforming.

Reminds me of the cleanest, best managed pig operation I ever saw. That working oil well on the back forty might have had something to do with it. I don't envy anyone aiming to make a respectable living in a commodity market.

This may be true for sending entire frames to threads, but in mpeg4, frames are broken up into chunks. Motion vectors are created that allow these chunks to move about the image from frame to frame. Other filters are used to remove blockiness, compress the image, do motion detection and macroblock detection, and do various other tasks. MPEG4, especially H.264, can be easily multi-threaded: http://ietisy.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/E88-D/7/1623 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004SPIE.5308..384L http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2007/05/02/41296/aspex-targets-parallel-processor-at-blu-ray-dvd.htm When doing a two-pass encode, this is even easier because the keyframes are discovered on the first (faster) pass, so (if encoding already couldn't be threaded) it could by taking advantage of the known keyframe markers in at least the second pass. But, that's not necessary. I use handbrake to create H.264 videos under Linux all the time on my dual core machine, and both processors stay between 80%-90% utilization from start to finish regardless of the number of passes.

Note: I posted this earlier as a reply, but no one seems to have noticed it. Hence this repost. I'm a long-time-reader-very-rare-poster, so sorry if this is not the right way to go about it.

Although the study quoted by the OP got a lot of media attention because of MIT involvement, what is more interesting is this actual product that has been released last month: "One AAA battery! The boss must be kidding..."

This company (Silicon Labs) has managed to put a DC-DC converter in a microcontroller and have managed to do this on an actual product that you can buy now (not just a research project!). They claim to be able to run for years (even >15 years) on typical low-power applications such as data loggers that wake up for a short while take a measurement and go to sleep. This is also the first microchip that can run on one battery... if you think that adding an external DC-DC converter would do the same trick, you have to remember that the external DC-DC converter needs to be ON even during sleep mode so the micro can wake up again, which burns quite a bit of power. They claim to have eliminated this by putting the DC-DC converter on chip.

More articles on this micro: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206801775 http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2008/02/26/43201/silicon-labs-microcontroller-features-integrated-dc-dc-for-portable-uses.htm

Although the study quoted by the OP got a lot of media attention because of MIT involvement, what is more interesting is this actual product that has been released last month: "One AAA battery! The boss must be kidding..."

This company (Silicon Labs) has managed to put a DC-DC converter in a microcontroller and have managed to do this on an actual product that you can buy now (not just a research project!). They claim to be able to run for years (even >15 years) on typical low-power applications such as data loggers that wake up for a short while take a measurement and go to sleep. This is also the first microchip that can run on one battery... if you think that adding an external DC-DC converter would do the same trick, you have to remember that the external DC-DC converter needs to be ON even during sleep mode so the micro can wake up again, which burns quite a bit of power. More articles on this product:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206801775 http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2008/02/26/43201/silicon-labs-microcontroller-features-integrated-dc-dc-for-portable-uses.htm

But Don Sadoway, a professor of Materials Chemistry at MIT who is an expert in advanced battery technologies, worries about off-shoring of a chemistry he asserts "needs to be treated with respect."

"I have 100% confidence in the Japanese battery manufacturers," he says. "And my guess is that they never had the problems theyre seeing now when the same batteries were manufactured from start to finish in Japan."

He notes that one of the challenges with Li-ion batteries in particular is that it is very difficult to verify that the manufacturing and assembly is being performed according to specifications. Thats because once its assembled into a battery pack, the device cannot be inspected from the outside nor can it be easily tested.

Sadoway points to the separator material between the electrodes as an example. Acting like a kind of fuse, it is designed to soften and collapse at a specific temperature, causing the battery to essentially go into an open circuit condition and die.

In fact, he wonders why that didnt happen in the case of the Dell laptop that burst into flames last year.

"You could think you are specifying a porous polypropylene material for the separator, but once the thing is packaged up you would have no way of knowing what you actually got. Even under the best of circumstances, you can get screwed by your own job shop. What if the workers took a short cut and substituted the original material with cardboard?"

A "plays-all" drive wasn't announced today. What was announced was a single chip that does video decoding, DRM, various video outputs, etc. [1] It's a piece of the pie, but not the whole thing. It's suggested that creating a single drive that reads both with be more difficult that building the decoding chip. [2]

Intel has only recently seen it's stock price improve off of 3-year lows. Of course, AMD is also down quite a bit. 1 year graphs:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=INTC&t=1y
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AMD&t=1y

This is indeed one of those cases where the entire chip industry is slowing. Not just CPUs, but RAM, the standard digital and analog 'building-block' parts used in all sorts of electronics, etc. In part, this is just a sign of the times--the global economy is slowing.

I'll call the current Intel/AMD price war a win for the consumer, as well. At least as long as it doesn't get serious enough to cripple AMD, which would damage competion between the two in the long run. Which I just don't think is in the cards. AMD recently inked a deal to build a new fab in New York, after all, at a cost of 3.2 billion dollars, and they say they're going to fund it out of operating cash flows.

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2006/06/ 27/39076/AMDtosetup32nmNewYorkfab.htm

It's supposed to be a 32nm fab, which is pretty interesting. Also, it's probably going to give them more capacity than they seem to need, based on current projects. Maybe they're planning some big wins, either with new CPUs, or lots more Dell, (or HP, or ?) business down the road?

I have my private speculations...

All it takes to start this revolution is open source software, based on an open standard, to provide encrypted data transmission and routing, a new way of assigning hosts independently of central nameservers and static routing tables plus an interface to the Internet (call it Internet Classic). All components already exist. Important is that this software would have to come with all new Linux distributions by default and only require a simple Yes or No from the user to enable package routing plus a simple option to make a computer a new host, if requested by the owner of the computer. Add an extra installation kit for all Windows PC's and you have the revolution rolling. Industry planners, brace yourself!

WiMAX set for meteoric growth, says analyst

http://www.theinquirer.net/ (online computer journal)
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/ (online electronics journal)
Just to name two of many journals with lots of external citations. Journals like PCWorld with their low standard are rather the exception than the norm.

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/ (UK) reported about this disk half a year ago! http://www.electronicsweekly.com/articles/article. asp?liArticleID=38427

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/ (UK) reported about this disk half a year ago! http://www.electronicsweekly.com/articles/article. asp?liArticleID=38427

Can't believe no one appears to have bought this up, there is a new generation of Li batteries, the LiS battery, coming out.

The LiS chemistry offers up to 3x the energy density of the current LiPoly and an extremely favorable charge rate.

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Article19790.htm contains some basic information, google for some more.

That is true now, but Apple tried to charge royalties and stymied the adoption of Firewire. See this article, amoung many others. Confusion in naming has its genesis in this totally stupid attempted royality grab.

http://compoundsemiconductor.net/articles/news/8/1 1/26/1

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/articles/article. asp?liArticleID=38164&liArticleTypeID=1&liCategory ID=4&liChannelID=109&liFlavourID=1&sSearch=&nPage= 1

Wow. Thanks for your international interest JBN.

It would be very helpful if you could send emails or faxes to MEPs. Your non-EU citizenship can be used as a positive, i.e.:
"As an American, I see first hand how software patents hurt innovation and competition in a software industry. Start ups find it hard to enter the market when they can be threatened with costly patent lawsuits and investors are nervous about giving funding to a company when they know that a deeper bank account will likely draw the attention of Intellectual Propertly law firms"

There is a listing of all EU MEPs at:
http://wwwdb.europarl.eu.int/ep5/owa/p_meps2.repar tition?ipid=0&ilg=EN&iorig=home&imsg=

Good arguments for talking to non-techs can be found at:
(RMS and Nick Hill, longish)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4683640,00. html
(and a short one from me:)
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/issue/inview.asp? vpath=/articles/2003/05/28/view02.htm

If you only speak english, stick with the UK and Ireland. Many EU citizens are already talking with their MEPs, your emails or faxes would be a great reinforcement.

Ciaran O'Riordan