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Microsoft Making Internet Appliance Chips
M$ Mole writes: "According to CNN, Microsoft is now developing their own chips for WebTV and other new internet appliances. The article is lacking in terms of technical details of the chips, but does bring up a good question of: What does this do to the Wintel relationship?" The idea of Microsoft making chips will raise a lot of eyebrows ceiling high, but it sounds like a fairly modest endeavor thus far, not MS jumping into the ring with AMD, Motorola, Intel, or even with the smaller X86 makers. As M$ Mole and the article say, it's about chips for appliances -- for now.
You stick in the toast. You hit the lever down. After about 30 seconds, the "crash" sound from your toaster's selected theme sounds off indication that "I do not to alarm you or give you unpleasant feelings but something 'bad' just happened. 'C'lose or 'D'etails'?" Curious, you hit 'D' to see why the Microsoft Toaster had problems. It starts to dump an uninteligable gooy mess not unlike strawberry jam. Meanwhile, the bread is burning away stuck in its current state. You hit 'C' before something is really damaged or catches on fire which causes a cascade of 'Close or Details?' dialogs to pop up before finally getting to the point where it can turn itself off. So you have a charred piece of former bread stuck in your Microsoft Toaster with smoke pouring out of it and still there is nothing to eat.
Oh wait...you said "internet appliance"!
Now M$ can't blame broken hardware for the bluescreens. :>
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Industry observers had this to say: "Once they get this thing rolling, everything will go downhill rapidly." Expected to be another proprietary product of the software giant, it's an unusual venture into the field of hardware. "This will demonstrate our engineering prowess," said another club-toting anonymous source, clad in a bearskin.
Others claim this has already been done long ago and that there are already existing ways to produce this same item, many of which are free. Company President and CEO, Steve Ballmer had this to say, "Ugh, wheel good! Ugh, innovation!"
On slashdot.org an extremely embarassing corporate profile was linked, detailing how Microsoft was again late to the table with dirty hands. When questioned on this, Ballmer replied, "Oot!"
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The O/S requires the chip, the chip requires the O/S. Seems like one way to try to block Linux out of their markets.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
this has got to be about the worst idea ever. At least right now I'm pretty sure microsoft won't be able to cause damage outside my computer because they didn't make it the electronic controls
An appliance from microsoft would be one of the most frightening things I can think of. Right out of some b-movie horror. Maybe it will secretly print ads folded into paper airplanes and shoot them across the house. Or maybe oscillating voltage drains to destroy non-MS-complaint appliances on the same circuit. I can just imagine a microwave with ad banners, that only works if you took the fridge from an MS refrigerator of the same generation.
Okay, I know they really mean web appliances, not household appliances (YET!) but that's scary too. The only reason to use such a thing (unless it's really cheap) is for the increased reliability and decreased maintenance of a wellbuilt firmware solution - and if there is anything MS can't do well it's firmware.
The really, really evil thing about MS is that everyone in the world now expects computers to not just be usually somewhat confusing, but also to be unpredictable irrational and unstable. Having to reboot all the time makes people hate computers, and is constantly increasing the ranks of the technophobes, when computers have been swift enough for quite a while now that they shouldn't have this kind of problem!
*sigh*
*sigh*
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
...not to invest in software companies. Why? Two words: Free Software.
Free Software is great for hardware companies. It sucks for most software companies. RedHat will never pull in the dough like MS did.
Now, MS is one of the few software companies with the $$$ and wherewithall to transform intself into a hardware company via initiatives such as this, the X-box, and their various PDA efforts.
A lot of other software companies are just going to go *poof*.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So M$ is building a custom chip to keep the hardware costs down on their low-cost internet appliance. There is a slightly better version of the story on the Mercury News.
:-)
Lots of companies do this when the cost of assembling a bunch of separate components gets to be too expensive. If you know you have a large market, it is cheaper in the long run to invest in designing a custom chip to perform a single function. It eliminates all the overhead cruft of general purpose computers like the intel architecture. In simple economics terms, this is the easy answer.
For those with a suspicious bent towards anything M$ does, it could be a slap at intel or a first step towards creating a computing platform where competitors can't run. They could be trying to make a system with integrated audio/video streams which will only play a proprietary format which M$ controls, and since the codec is in hardware, no competitor could weasel its way onto the box and steal some content marketshare. Your call.
It'll be interesting if these new boxes turn out like closed architectures, like gaming consoles. Why does that sound like a challenge to figure a way to install Linux?
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
A:Nope. Tried that.
Q:Can we out market Palm?
A:Nope. Tried that.
Q:Can we lock in users on the apps level?
A:Nope. Tried that.
Q:Can we lock in users on the OS level?
A:Nope Tried that.
Q:Can we lock in users on the hardware level?
A:I guess so. We have nothing to loose.
Q:How about giving the customer a better product?
A:Blank stare . . . [laughter]
I suppose that would lead to the nickname of "Chewy chips", which would then invariably lead to loading dock workers shouting, "Chewy Chips Ahoy!" when there was a shipment coming in.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Great, now Mircosoft will make hardware will all of the quality, reliability, and openness that we have come to expect from them. Er... :-/
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Here is the complete article at San Jose Mercury's site.
That would be... potato chips.
As we all know when one builds these types of chips you have to choose your OS very carefully.
Depending on the exact nature of the chip many companies choose PalmOS ( a good, small, low-power OS), a few companies choose WinCE (or whatever that waste of bytes is called now), many (or at least some) companies choose to create a Linux-derivative, and many create a new OS (which usually fails).
To me this symbolizes the place where a court-ordered break-up would actually help Microsoft. If the chip making part of the company was not tied to the OS making part they would be free to choose any of the above solutions. But as it currently is they could only choose one (and it is not a good one).
I've always felt that Microsoft made very good hardware. Whenever I rant about their faults it is only in relation to the software, if it were to become possible to seperate the company into 3 (MicrOS, Microsoft, and Microhard, Look I even gave them names all of the hard work is done) then we could get some good products and a seperate crappy OS.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
Particularly, a couple of quotes from Intel about this:
- Ron Smith, a senior VP at Intel's wireless division in Santa Clara
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"I have no problem competing with Microsoft."
This may also answer Hemos' question, about why is Intel demoing Linux failover.- Mark Christiansen, Intel's senior VP in charge of its IXA project
You sell chips: we push other operating systems.
How do you Service Pack a chip? ;>
About four years ago the Soft tried to make a revolutionary graphics leap forward with the Talisman chip. It was actually a pretty cool design. And like this new chip, Talisman could "take it to the next level", something MS felt it needed to do to make Windows a competitive game platform. It failed for a number of reasons. One of them was the complexity level was higher than any of their fab partners were used to dealing with. Another was that other graphics chip manufacturers became scared to talk to them -- they didn't really want to support Talisman, but felt they needed to get Direct3D support for their chips, and Direct3D and Talisman capabilities were getting intertwined inside MS. The result was a giant mess, and it was finally dropped. My point is that MS doesn't have a very good track record with this sort of thing. Not predicting doom, but I see some similarities between the two.
I am Jack's writable stack pointer.
I know it sounds petty, but are they trying to force out Transmeta, seeing as how Crusoe is supposed to be focusing on low-power applications like laptops and internet appliances?
bun-fhuinneog agam!
They're using Toshiba for the actual silicon, although Tos may be going to some fab house. One way or another, Microsoft isn't buying a fab house.
No, you don't need your current appliances networked, but you will want your new appliances to be networked.
I have ReplayTV. I want it networked so that I can log into it from work and see what's recording, delete stuff I don't want, record shows that I forgot to ask it to record, and such. When I watch TV, I want to be able to call up the IMDB page for the movie I just watched.
I want to have my MP3 player networked.
I want my alarm clock/radio to also play MP3s, so I want it networked.
I would like a lot of my house controls (lights, heat, AC, and such) computerized and networked. So I went on vacation and forgot to turn off the AC? I can log in and stop wasting electricity, and program it to be cool again just before I get home.
I would love to have my car networked. It could search for low gas prices on my intended route when the tank gets low. It could report its location if it gets stolen. Obviously, it could download MP3s for the stereo.
I would like to have my doorbell networked. I have a friend that has a doorbell with an intercom, along with a web cam all computerized. Someone can ring the doorbell when he is at work. He can answer on the intercom and look at the person at the door, making them think he's home but can't come to the door.
Ten years ago most people didn't think they needed their computers networked. All it takes is a little imagination. Sure, the value-add may not be that huge at first, but others will imagine a little more, and soon we'll wonder how we ever got by without having everything online.
There is no way M$ could produce the silicon in-house; this will be farmed out to an ASIC producer or something.
They could wire a 1Mhz square wave into the HALT line to make it run just like Windows. Heck, just tie it low...
There's nothing illegal about having a monopoly, but it's illegal to try to leverage a monopoly in one field to attempt to gain a monopoly in another.
Since there has already been a court decision that they have a monopoly, they had better be very careful about this sort of thing.
If they have any slight special preferential treatment between their software and hardware, it will almost certainly have disastrous consequences.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Whats the possability that gates has taken a liking to the borg/gates img used here on slashdot and is attempting to make chips for implants?
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
Also I don't really like the sound of the OS maker manufacturing the processors too: how long will it be until the processors themselves come with a small bit of the windoze/dos code on them in ROM.
"The system has not detected a FAT32 partition on the disk controller. Nice try, sucker. Press any key to retry..."
And we all know how bad M$ is at releasing ANY code to the community. At least with Intel, we get chip specifications for development. I can't see microsoft having those specs in a nice handy .pdf document on their website, do you?
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Motorola came out with the MPC821 a few years ago, with LCD driver build in, then the MPC823 with LCD/VGA support on the chip. Plus 10Base and USB ports, a couple of simple serial and I2C And SPI for controlling any peripherals you needed to. Oh, and it could talk to a framer to get T1/E1/ADSL. Not the fastest, at 40-80 MIPS, but maybe enough for settops, toasters, and microwave ovens.
It certainly seems as if this is a attempt to handle both the DoJ and inroads for compeating operating systems. The MS marketing machine certainly will make this impressive to some consumers.
Too bad open source RTOSes such as RTEMS haven't gotten much attention. They beat WinCE hands down, be it memory footprint, performance, or ease of use. And they are true hard real time OSes, not the MS "well, just use a faster processor and maybe it'll be quick enough" sort-of-real-time-OS.
Since then, they've done many revs. Sure Microsoft bought them several years ago, but designing new chips is not new.
named after Solo, WebTV founder Steve Perlman's dog
I think not! I bet instead it was Lucas calling up Gates and saying "Hans off!"
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Infuriate left and right
Sun has been designing their own chips since the Sun 3. They have designed a neat new processor (ps. anyone else - it really is neat, check out that link). The MAJC processor is in no way tied to running Java code. It is just a neat way at getting hardware to support multi-threading better.
But let's judge Sun on their history. Look at Sun's history with chip production. Look at the bios they use: OpenFirmware. Look how they have spun control of the sparc architecture off into Sparc International, to make it a truely open platform.
Then look at MicroSoft's track record. Do you doubt that M$ will be trying to gain monopoly control over WebTV devices, in the same way they have captured the desktop market?
I really don't see any point in your comparison.
cheers,
G
I'm sick and tired of seeing AlphaLinux running only on Alpha chips, why can't those crazy busters get a clue and start porting their code to other chipsets? Theres lots of us out here that are dying to see AlphaLinux released for the x86 and PPC.
I hope people stop developing the Netwinder so no one has to worry about set-top user friendly computers anymore. The last thing we need isa departure from hastily built caseless POS Linux boxes. I don't know what i would do without my space heater often confused for a file server. While we're at killing off simplicty, why the fuck are you still using X, you don't need a GUI you pussy. Web-TV is stupid because it has a Microsoft logo, I hate it with a passion. It really gets your point across when you scold a computer neophyte because they like the Windows Start button and cute sounds when they click things. Kick a puppy while you're at it.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
How am I gonna crash my Windows box if I can't get it to boot up in the first place?
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Seems as if it may be their attempted answer to Crusoe??? MSFT likes to match every product that ever comes out to the market with something of their own. Some become reality many evaporate.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
...they're jumping in just in time to get beat up by the open source processor groundswell.
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Maybe this will make it easier for MS to put government backdoors in their products. Backdoors in hardware are much easier to conceal and harder to circumvent. Clipper Chip anyone?
It's really not a big deal to make your own chip. When I was doing grad school part time several years ago, I made this little chip, together with a small group of other students. The whole thing only took a couple months to design. I learned a lot and since then I've had a much better perspective about how ICs are designed, which has been helpful designing at the board level.
The CNN article is remarkable vauge about what Microsoft's chip actually does.... it may be a CPU, or maybe just "glue logic". Whatever it is, it's common to design ASICs for high volume products. Unfortunately, it also common to make a big deal out of nothing.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Microsoft pretty much NEVER does it right the first time out. Rev#1 is a joke, Rev#2 is a pig, but workable, Rev#3 is the one that dominates the marketplace.
Unfortunately, they've followed that pattern so often that everyone begins to quake when MS releases Rev#1, often as not folding then and there. Also unfortunately, devoid of competition, MS doesn't feel as intense a need to get the product up to the Rev#3 stage.
Imagine Microsoft's version of...
- The Pentium FP bug
- The 286 comatose phase-of-the-moon jump bug
- The 286, period
- The 6502 catch-fire-and-burn instruction
The mind boggles.
Is it harder to push buggy hardware into the marketplace than it is buggy software?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
This is about MS moving out of the computer and into your TV. Not the good ole rabbit-ears TV, not even your cable-hooked-plus-VCR TV but tomorrows TV.
Think Smart-Cable-box + WebTV + Tivo + Digital Download of Media (music, movies, special events) + Games + Network Sharing + Remote Applications + Home Automation + Telephony.
One box that plugs in, from one vendor, with massive name recognition and tons of back-end architecture already in place. All of your couch-potato needs from one source.
So why a custom chip? Control. Now MS can put all of the anti-piracy / media-control / encryption right into the hardware. Optimize the CPU to run MS architecture material. Heck, with WinHEC they've been setting the specs for years now, it's a small jump to just doing it directly.
Microsoft doesn't want to be your OS vendor, or your applications vendor, not even your ISP or cable-company or channel - it wants to be all of them.
Yesterday the MS WebTV, today the MS Phone, tomorrow the MS Information/Entertainment/Shopping system.
Convergence.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Microsoft doesn't understand where their power comes from--and that works in our favor.
Why is MS popular? "Compatibility". And when MS creates new technologies, what's the best word to describe the usual result? "Incompatible". So please, MS, dump a lot of money into creating a new chip and software to run on it--it only hastens your demise.
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Now, let me see...would chip manufacture fall under operating systems, or software applications? Hrm...
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"The Constitution...is not a suicide pact."
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I'd look at this as a means for Microsoft to bypass the hardware market all together. If they can manufacture and market a WebTV box that uses the .NET infrastructure and the C# language as a development environment, they can bypass Intel, Dell, etc. altogether. And, keep those profit margins up.
You may be able to file this in the "set-top box" file, and safely forget it. This is either a really brilliant move, or a feint to keep the wolves at bay.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Made from 99.9% recycled Intel
Well, maybe not, but in accordence with standard embrace, extend, extinguish philosiphy, I would have to say yes.
But my question is (aside from perhaps the stereo and tv) why does anything in my house besides my computer need to be networked? I don't need web access on my toaster, blender, microwave, refridgerator, washer, or dryer. If you can wire up my sink to automatically rinse the dishes and put them in the dishwasher for me, while having my Mindstorm's clear off the table I just ate from, then *maybe* and only maybe, will I feel that its necessary to have my appliances networked.
soon i'll be surfing the web from my toilet paper spindle
Only a monopoly can get away with this. They have many conflicts of interest, but people keep using them.
Think about the sonystation vs. the MS Xbox. Sony is still paying microsoft for windows while competeing with them in the console space.
Office software suites are another example of this problem. And we all know how well lotus and Borland did vs MS.
Why would you want to write any software knowing that if microsoft decides to release something similar they're going to leverage the OS to run you out of business?
Because about 80-90% of computers still run windows.
If there was a more viable alternative (large market share) I'm sure many companies would write software for them.
Maybe linux someday?
MS in the past have created competition to ward off anti-trust is this a way of say "hey we are competitors with Intel AMD IBM are several other companies as well"
so basically they are no longer an monopoly because they entered another market
i know that its all seperated but a judge might be more *understanding* if they are in a market where they dont have an monopoly
or are they asking for more trouble because they are (will) be optimizing their OS to their chip?
-rev
Which means that everyone these days can make chips on a shoestring. Well, not an Open Source shoestring, but in the scale of corporate financing it's about as expensive to make a chip today as it is to buy a fleet of 10 cars, development costs notwithstanding.
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It's a
-- Danny Vermin
I can see this and their Linux ports as endeavors to ensure the respective Baby Bill's survive the inevitable split; MS management knows now that they won't be able to play later, so they're expanding the masrkets of both the future MS/APPS and MS/OS.
Or, looking at it in an evil way; They can't get away with OS/Applications market collusion, so they're expanding into markets the DOJ hasn't prosecuted them for..
.sig: Now legally binding!
From reading the article, It's not like Microsoft itself is creating the chips, one of their companies is, webTV. This really isn't that big of a leap for a company to make.
This, of course dosn't mean that M$ isn't the evil empire...
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He who laughs last... Thinks slowest
OK, if Microsoft wants to make chips, fine, just make sure they don't end up in my car. I'm shuddering just thinking of the consequences of that move.
M.G.
Excessive forking causes un-wanted children.
I think that should be nominated for stupidest name yet. It would have been alright if they had called it the Han Solo2 or something. Jeez, even chewbacca is a better chip name then that.
Viva Anales!
I bet they will delay as much as possible on giving out any specs, so that everybody will use WinCE (talk about an aptly named product =:-) instead of running QNX, Linux, or whatever else people like to put on little embedded systems.
I wonder what makes MS think they can pull off a switch like this and make it worth it... I'll be curiously watching to see what sort of evil plan they have, because they must have some sort of plan to embark on such a odd project...
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