They don't offer any x86 CPUs that match up the power/performance profile that the XO currently has with the AMD embedded device they've chosen for it. While it's sub-optimal for a "modern" user of PC's it's not at all suboptimal for what they're gunning for (it's actually a decent performer.)- the closest thing would be VIA's Eden stuff as it's in the same bang for buck space.
AMD's got concerns, but they're not out of the picture by a long shot. If VIA joined in, they might have some concern (As VIA has some higher performing parts, compared to the AMD parts used...) but since they're not...
IF Microsoft can winnow out their crap, they might have a place. As it stands, unless they can come to the table with something that works out for the OLPC project in the same way as the current Red Hat derived OS offers, I'd be telling them to go pound sand if I were Mr. Negroponte.
Because Bill's used to getting his way and not getting his way here scares the bejesus out of him and the rest of the executive management over there in Redmond...
That's a way out. The problem is, most of these documents are NOT worded such that you can do that without a VP level or above management person signing off on the document. While it counts if their rep lets you get away with it, it's still not binding and in most cases, the HR people won't let you sign it in that form.
The document, technically, is to be signed as is or not at all.
So, either you need to come up with an amended version that they will sign properly or an actioned amendment agreement that alters the rules accordingly actioned BEFORE you action the other for it to count.
If you don't you can expect the employer dragging you into court trying to run a suit forcing you to assign at your cost up the flagpole and seeing if a Judge will salute it if they smell a goldmine and it's not officially theirs. It's happened before in the past (and in the DFW metropolitan area, where I live) that someone's been stuck with a Court Order, commanding the person to assign the thing at your cost. This was in spite of the fact that technically it wasn't theirs to begin with- but the reasoning the Court used (and was upheld) was that you signed it, you agreed to it, so you have to honor it.
Do not sign things you do not agree with, regardless of what the "unenforcibility" thereof is on the agreement or contract. You might be shocked to find what actually IS enforceable.
You'll note I DID NOT SAY that the IC was invented by the space program. The minaturization needed by the space program, including the Apollo program, is what I was referring to. It was a need to get it small enough to do the task. And that ISN'T an urban legend.
Besides, how would someone that didn't have the space race in their heritage (My father was one of the engineers that designed the ground support hydraulic systems, my grandfather was one of the production engineers for the Apollo project- we happen to have two of the rare Apollo 8 medallions that were minted from metal that went around the moon in our possession as a result...) even know that one?
The reality is, the computers of the day were nothing compared to what was developed for the lunar mission (I know, I've got all kinds of stuff in my Dad's and Grandad's shop notes...) Just because the IC was developed, doesn't make for computer tech, doesn't make for a lot of things.
Quit going around a presuming someone is perpetuating an urban myth. I wasn't. I made the statement based off of actual facts I have in evidence- and it wasn't even the damn urban myth that you quoted.
And I'm in the process of trying to negotiate that BS line away in an employment agreement I got presented.
There is no way I will sign an agreement of that nature without serious modifications. I've walked away from contract gigs in recent times where the client's HR outsource insisted that I couldn't start work without signing the document and that there would be no modifications to the document (Effectively dismissing me before I even started- the hiring manager went into a panic and went charging around to get permission to get me to submit an amendment to the agreement that protected their interests, but by that point in time, I'd already got another comparable contract and was off the hook from the other. Don't play games with me. You wouldn't tolerate this stuff out of me, I won't tolerate it out of you as an employer.
In the end, it's standard boilerplate and it's from businesses or their lawyers thinking they're "clever" and trying to avoid losing anything that might be theirs. The problem is, for me, it IS indentured servitude- and they're in no way even remotely paying me enough to lay claim to everything I might come up with, nor could they. The HR people all invariably say "that's not what we're intending"- BULLSHIT. If you intended otherwise, you would have put it in the agreement- what is on the paper is what you intended. If it's not, you need to fire your damn Counsel and find one that will do what you actually intend.
I can think of plenty of things that are more motivating and visionary to spend taxpayer money on. Things like AIDS research and cancer research, just to name two off the top of my head.
Considering that the very computer you're using is an END RESULT of the last "space race" that went to the moon, and that the research tech that makes the research you're talking about "being more important" possible came from that same space race...
In the end, most people (yourself included, unfortunately...) just don't have a damn clue how they got where they are today. They think that this or that is more important or that "we've not figured out how to fix the problems at home".
They don't get that without some of this other stuff going on, we wouldn't even TRY at these things that enable the other thing because everyone's so blindered on the other "problem". AIDS. Cancer research. There's BILLIONS going on right now on that. Honest. As much or more than what they spend on space exploration in toto. Why? Because there's MONEY to be made on it directly. And, yet, we still don't have a fix for either of those. Or for Diabetes, which kills more people than either of the other maladies. But, you don't see me screeching for them to put all their efforts into fixing THAT illness, even though I have it. Worse, it's something that could be prevented very, very easily by taking a substance out of the food chain of first world countries that makes the illness more likely to happen. But you don't see the industries taking high fructose corn syrup out of the foods they make.
I believe that the people lacking vision are those that want to spend billions of dollars rocketing a team of 8 people to a giant red rock in the sky when we haven't figured out how to fix problems at home first.
Considering that the tech spurred by the attempt at going to the moon enabled the rest of what we're able to do today and what we're using to try to find the answers to the problems at home, I would think that you'd not mind them spending a pittance on a lark that would very likely come up with new answers to problems that would enable the solutions to the other problems you're bitching about. But then, like most people, you didn't get that it's all interrelated and you can't just strip one out for the other.
A good painter understand colors, a great painter understands where the colors come from. a Master painter know the breed and care of the animal they get their brushes from.
That's a GOOD analogy there. In fact, I would venture the observation that it applies for any skill or trade in question. And I'd be striving to make better "painters" in any course that involves the use of computers. Far, far too often the coursework in high schools and colleges leans toward just "prepping for the workplace" and making cogs out of people instead of teaching them the ability to think- which is really what education was intended to be, not training, which is what they end up doing all too often...)
How about not using it at all? XP only "works" after a fashion.
It's less secure (Vista is too, but we won't go into that...). It's more resource intensive. It takes resources away from my system to enforce the media company's "rights"- of which, I largely don't use their crap any more. I have to buy all sorts of things to make it more robust, secure, etc.- things that shouldn't need to be there or should have came with the OS in the first place.
With Linux, I don't have those issues- and it's not because it's "The Underdog" OS.
...the revenues from the downloads are killing them, it is that the quality of the bulk of their offerings is so poor that now that people get to pick and choose what they're getting, they aren't clearing the money when they were ripping us off by the CD and fobbing crap off onto us to fill the CD's.
Get better content and you'll make the same money.
If this is the best that the Dems can do, then it just proves my point that they're little better than flip sides of the same coin. But then, we all knew this, now didn't we?
Heh... There IS a reason that they bought ATI. It's the very thing you're telling me here.
To be honest, the bang for buck comparison between the top-end is something I didn't compare. There's slots in the price points where it makes slightly more sense to buy Intel, there's quite a few slots where you're better served with an Athlon64 class CPU. I picked a slot where it made sense for a Core Duo for my last purchase- in 4-6 months, the next major upgrade will be for a quad-core rig lashup. I'll probably do the price comparisons then and probably arrive at an Athlon/Opteron solution.:-)
Heh... They can't really measure productivity worth spit anyhow.
It's not like you're making widgets where you've got a physical manifestation of what work you've done. Physically being there doesn't measure productivity. It never really did that.
Think in terms of stream compute clusters. Four-way GPU setups make complete sense in this space and while the gamer crowd is a big spur for new tech, the high-performance cluster computing space is shaping up to be an easier target and just as much a spur for that same class of tech. Having said this, the fact that they're not upping the cache (which is where that discrepancy in performance in the benchmarks is REALLY coming from...) to match Intel's lead in this space (With an insane 8Mb of L2 on the top-end, it becomes a little tough to keep up...).
...it may be that hostilities are about to increase. They've been at showing a bit of their capabilities, physical and electronic warfare-wise for about the last 2-3 years now.
I work for nvidia. My employment contract said: a) Any inventions I invent on my own time with my own equipment are mine. b) Any inventions I invent on their time and/or with their equipment are theirs. c) I can leave nvidia whenever I want (duh) and go work for whomever I want, on whatever project I want.
All they ask is that if I'm thinking about leaving, I let them know so they can see if they can make the reason I want to leave go away.
You can have my job when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Which is why the jobs there seem to be hotly sought after and they've been gaining people to attrition from one of your competitors... >:-)
I just wish I had something like that right now. I'm facing yet another one of these stupid "We own everything you come up with" assignment clauses in an employment agreement.
The answer they're going to get is "I can't sign that as I've got ongoing covenants that preclude my assignment of that IP in that space to you... Let me get with my attorney and come up with an alternative." Which I've already told 'em. So far, while it never hurts to ask someone, the batting average on this stuff (For me, at least) has been dismal. I've always been nice about it, never surly- but they almost always have been that way. Something about them thinking they're entitled to it or somesuch like it.
The reality is many of these contracts are unreasonable and would be seen as such by a judge, so it's easier to sign and worry about the consequences later.
One would seem to think that this is the case. The problem is, once you get into a courtroom, all bets are largely off. All I need do is point to one gent's story about him doing that sort of thing to show the dangers of that thinking.
You sign it, you agreed to it. Whether or not you could legally agree to it or not is irrelevant.
All you do is make an uphill battle for yourself if you sign it because you have to go through the motions of invalidating the thing you agreed to.
Fair warning, it's not always that simple. I've been dismissed 12 months into a job because I wouldn't sign (That wasn't the stated reason- I was "laid off"; which in reality was they let me go, they "let go" someone in the California offices and "hired" a contractor for the position that was strangely the same person they "let go".)- be prepared to get told "NO" on this. My situation will probably be resulting in a lawsuit as it's pretty much illegal for them to pull this stunt in the first place- you can't pull the "you have to sign" thing after you've let me work for you any length of time (magic deal there...).
As it stands, there's far, far too many "clever" corporate counsels, too many businesses that think they own you and they're entitled to shake a stick at. Thankfully, there's more than enough places that aren't idiotic about this that it's only moderately problematic.
Yes. In fact, it's illegal for a US based business to be DOING this sort of thing. If there's enough evidence, Microsoft is very much guilty of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Right now for the populace: Yes. Because they're ignorant of the danger.
For those of us that took in their MBA without critically evaluating the consequences of some business decisions: Yes. They ONLY see the almighty dollar and don't for one moment think of the Law of Unintended Consequences, of which we're seeing a fairly high-profile example thereof.
Me? OH, HELL, NO. I'm NOT at all "ok" with it and if the funding comes in, you can bet your bottom dollar that I will NOT be off-shoring a single thing from the company that we're trying to start up. Not only can I NOT do this, I won't even if I could.
In the case of the discrete cards (PCI-E, AGP...) they have a pool of memory that's accessible via the bus and that's directly accessible by the GPU's own memory bus (That memory size when you see 128, 256, 512Mb, etc.)- which is faster than just about anything out there and has no contention spots for the GPU to have to wait any longer than the access latency to the memory from the second access port. The peak speed of the GPUs when compared to an IGP solution comes from the contention-less, very, very fast access to the card's memory pool so that you don't stall the graphics pipeline. A stall of a microsecond can cost you FPS (Duh...) and larger stalls can drag framerates to the slide show domain- it's part of why the older ATI fglrx drivers were roughly 50% slower under Linux when compared to Windows. They had a stall in there somewhere that was introduced by their way of getting their then Windows-ish codebase to work under Linux.
Now, having said this, Hypertransport's suspiciously close to the same performance level of most of the local GPU buses and you only need to deal with bus contention issues for the only real performance snag. IGPs start making sense at that point for many applications because the memory's now close to the same speed as the add-in card's memory with similar latencies. The only real slowdown would be that you don't have dual pathways now.
In the case of Intel, it's the memory bandwidth coupled with a distinct lack of Vertex Shader support.
In the case of AMD, it's the memory bandwidth coupled with a dramatically reduced/nonexistent support for Vertex Shaders.
In the case of NVidia, it's the memory bandwidth.
In the case with many IGPs, the combination of having to share RAM with the machine on it's own bus, along with no Transform, Clipping, and Lighting hardware acceleration (Little to no Vertex Shader hardware...) means for a very slow GPU overall. Now, having said this, the Hypertransport 3.0 interface may help on the bus speed, and if you're looking at the Unified Shader requirements for DX10, you might find that this may be a little better performer. It's not going to be like a PCI-E add-in card, but it may be serviceable for light to medium duty 3D stuff by itself because of those two things.
Skinnable it probably will be. As for syncing with Exchange...there's vendors that do this for Symbian, Palm, and WindowsCE clients of all kinds; why would this be any different. You don't sync with Exchange, you sync with Outlook which actually has a fairly well defined API for doing this sort of thing if you're willing to roll the sync conduits for your device.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't offer any x86 CPUs that match up the power/performance profile that the XO currently
has with the AMD embedded device they've chosen for it. While it's sub-optimal for a "modern"
user of PC's it's not at all suboptimal for what they're gunning for (it's actually a decent
performer.)- the closest thing would be VIA's Eden stuff as it's in the same bang for buck
space.
AMD's got concerns, but they're not out of the picture by a long shot. If VIA joined in, they
might have some concern (As VIA has some higher performing parts, compared to the AMD parts used...)
but since they're not...
IF Microsoft can winnow out their crap, they might have a place. As it stands, unless they can
come to the table with something that works out for the OLPC project in the same way as the current
Red Hat derived OS offers, I'd be telling them to go pound sand if I were Mr. Negroponte.
Because Bill's used to getting his way and not getting his way here scares the bejesus out of him and the rest of the executive management over there in Redmond...
But not Office XP... That's...hard...
You're talking about their less bloated oldware that they don't even support anymore as being able to do this.
That's a way out. The problem is, most of these documents are NOT worded such that you can
do that without a VP level or above management person signing off on the document. While
it counts if their rep lets you get away with it, it's still not binding and in most cases,
the HR people won't let you sign it in that form.
The document, technically, is to be signed as is or not at all.
So, either you need to come up with an amended version that they will sign properly or
an actioned amendment agreement that alters the rules accordingly actioned BEFORE you
action the other for it to count.
If you don't you can expect the employer dragging you into court trying to run a suit
forcing you to assign at your cost up the flagpole and seeing if a Judge will salute it
if they smell a goldmine and it's not officially theirs. It's happened before in the
past (and in the DFW metropolitan area, where I live) that someone's been stuck with a
Court Order, commanding the person to assign the thing at your cost. This was in spite
of the fact that technically it wasn't theirs to begin with- but the reasoning the Court
used (and was upheld) was that you signed it, you agreed to it, so you have to honor it.
Do not sign things you do not agree with, regardless of what the "unenforcibility" thereof
is on the agreement or contract. You might be shocked to find what actually IS enforceable.
I don't think I want my brain damaged by the exposure, thank you very much... >:-)
You'll note I DID NOT SAY that the IC was invented by the space program. The minaturization
needed by the space program, including the Apollo program, is what I was referring to. It
was a need to get it small enough to do the task. And that ISN'T an urban legend.
Besides, how would someone that didn't have the space race in their heritage (My father was
one of the engineers that designed the ground support hydraulic systems, my grandfather was
one of the production engineers for the Apollo project- we happen to have two of the rare
Apollo 8 medallions that were minted from metal that went around the moon in our possession
as a result...) even know that one?
The reality is, the computers of the day were nothing compared to what was developed for the
lunar mission (I know, I've got all kinds of stuff in my Dad's and Grandad's shop notes...)
Just because the IC was developed, doesn't make for computer tech, doesn't make for a lot
of things.
Quit going around a presuming someone is perpetuating an urban myth. I wasn't. I made the
statement based off of actual facts I have in evidence- and it wasn't even the damn urban
myth that you quoted.
And I'm in the process of trying to negotiate that BS line away in an employment
agreement I got presented.
There is no way I will sign an agreement of that nature without serious modifications.
I've walked away from contract gigs in recent times where the client's HR outsource
insisted that I couldn't start work without signing the document and that there would
be no modifications to the document (Effectively dismissing me before I even started-
the hiring manager went into a panic and went charging around to get permission to
get me to submit an amendment to the agreement that protected their interests, but
by that point in time, I'd already got another comparable contract and was off the
hook from the other. Don't play games with me. You wouldn't tolerate this stuff
out of me, I won't tolerate it out of you as an employer.
In the end, it's standard boilerplate and it's from businesses or their lawyers
thinking they're "clever" and trying to avoid losing anything that might be theirs.
The problem is, for me, it IS indentured servitude- and they're in no way even remotely
paying me enough to lay claim to everything I might come up with, nor could they.
The HR people all invariably say "that's not what we're intending"- BULLSHIT. If you
intended otherwise, you would have put it in the agreement- what is on the paper is
what you intended. If it's not, you need to fire your damn Counsel and find one that
will do what you actually intend.
Considering that the very computer you're using is an END RESULT of the last "space race" that went to the moon, and that the research tech that makes the research you're talking about "being more important" possible came from that same space race...
In the end, most people (yourself included, unfortunately...) just don't have a damn clue how they got where they are today. They think that this or that is more important or that "we've not figured out how to fix the problems at home".
They don't get that without some of this other stuff going on, we wouldn't even TRY at these things that enable the other thing because everyone's so blindered on the other "problem". AIDS. Cancer research. There's BILLIONS going on right now on that. Honest. As much or more than what they spend on space exploration in toto. Why? Because there's MONEY to be made on it directly. And, yet, we still don't have a fix for either of those. Or for Diabetes, which kills more people than either of the other maladies. But, you don't see me screeching for them to put all their efforts into fixing THAT illness, even though I have it. Worse, it's something that could be prevented very, very easily by taking a substance out of the food chain of first world countries that makes the illness more likely to happen. But you don't see the industries taking high fructose corn syrup out of the foods they make.
Considering that the tech spurred by the attempt at going to the moon enabled the rest of what we're able to do today and what we're using to try to find the answers to the problems at home, I would think that you'd not mind them spending a pittance on a lark that would very likely come up with new answers to problems that would enable the solutions to the other problems you're bitching about. But then, like most people, you didn't get that it's all interrelated and you can't just strip one out for the other.
That's a GOOD analogy there. In fact, I would venture the observation that it applies
for any skill or trade in question. And I'd be striving to make better "painters" in
any course that involves the use of computers. Far, far too often the coursework in
high schools and colleges leans toward just "prepping for the workplace" and making
cogs out of people instead of teaching them the ability to think- which is really what
education was intended to be, not training, which is what they end up doing all too
often...)
How about not using it at all? XP only "works" after a fashion.
It's less secure (Vista is too, but we won't go into that...).
It's more resource intensive.
It takes resources away from my system to enforce the media company's "rights"- of which, I largely don't use their crap any more.
I have to buy all sorts of things to make it more robust, secure, etc.- things that shouldn't need to be there or should have came with the OS in the first place.
With Linux, I don't have those issues- and it's not because it's "The Underdog" OS.
...the revenues from the downloads are killing them, it is that the quality of the bulk of their offerings is so poor that now that people get to pick and choose what they're getting, they aren't clearing the money when they were ripping us off by the CD and fobbing crap off onto us to fill the CD's.
Get better content and you'll make the same money.
Then explain the DMCA...
If this is the best that the Dems can do, then it just proves my point that they're little better than flip sides of the same coin. But then, we all knew this, now didn't we?
Heh... There IS a reason that they bought ATI. It's the very thing you're telling me here.
:-)
To be honest, the bang for buck comparison between the top-end is something I didn't compare. There's slots
in the price points where it makes slightly more sense to buy Intel, there's quite a few slots where you're better served with an Athlon64 class CPU. I picked a slot where it made sense for a Core Duo for my last purchase- in 4-6 months, the next major upgrade will be for a quad-core rig lashup. I'll probably do the price comparisons then and probably arrive at an Athlon/Opteron solution.
Heh... They can't really measure productivity worth spit anyhow.
It's not like you're making widgets where you've got a physical manifestation of what work you've done.
Physically being there doesn't measure productivity. It never really did that.
Think in terms of stream compute clusters. Four-way GPU setups make complete sense in this space and while
the gamer crowd is a big spur for new tech, the high-performance cluster computing space is shaping up to
be an easier target and just as much a spur for that same class of tech. Having said this, the fact that
they're not upping the cache (which is where that discrepancy in performance in the benchmarks is REALLY
coming from...) to match Intel's lead in this space (With an insane 8Mb of L2 on the top-end, it becomes
a little tough to keep up...).
...it may be that hostilities are about to increase. They've been at showing a bit of their capabilities, physical and electronic warfare-wise for about the last 2-3 years now.
Which is why the jobs there seem to be hotly sought after and they've been gaining people to attrition from one of your competitors... >:-)
I just wish I had something like that right now. I'm facing yet another one of these stupid
"We own everything you come up with" assignment clauses in an employment agreement.
The answer they're going to get is "I can't sign that as I've got ongoing covenants that preclude my
assignment of that IP in that space to you... Let me get with my attorney and come up with an
alternative." Which I've already told 'em. So far, while it never hurts to ask someone, the batting
average on this stuff (For me, at least) has been dismal. I've always been nice about it, never surly-
but they almost always have been that way. Something about them thinking they're entitled to it or
somesuch like it.
One would seem to think that this is the case. The problem is, once you get into a courtroom, all bets are
largely off. All I need do is point to one gent's story about him doing that sort of thing to show the dangers of that thinking.
You sign it, you agreed to it. Whether or not you could legally agree to it or not is irrelevant.
All you do is make an uphill battle for yourself if you sign it because you have to go through
the motions of invalidating the thing you agreed to.
Fair warning, it's not always that simple. I've been dismissed 12 months into a job because I wouldn't sign (That wasn't the stated reason- I was "laid off"; which in reality was they let me go, they "let go" someone in the California offices and "hired" a contractor for the position that was strangely the same person they "let go".)- be prepared to get told "NO" on this. My situation will probably be resulting in a lawsuit as it's pretty much illegal for them to pull this stunt in the first place- you can't pull the "you have to sign" thing after you've let me work for you any length of time (magic deal there...).
As it stands, there's far, far too many "clever" corporate counsels, too many businesses that think they own you and they're entitled to shake a stick at. Thankfully, there's more than enough places that aren't idiotic about this that it's only moderately problematic.
Yes. In fact, it's illegal for a US based business to be DOING this sort of thing. If there's enough evidence, Microsoft is very much guilty of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
The reason is that they are gambling on NOT getting caught doing this crap.
More often than not, they don't get caught.
Right now for the populace: Yes. Because they're ignorant of the danger.
For those of us that took in their MBA without critically evaluating the consequences of some
business decisions: Yes. They ONLY see the almighty dollar and don't for one moment think of
the Law of Unintended Consequences, of which we're seeing a fairly high-profile example thereof.
Me? OH, HELL, NO. I'm NOT at all "ok" with it and if the funding comes in, you can bet your bottom
dollar that I will NOT be off-shoring a single thing from the company that we're trying to start
up. Not only can I NOT do this, I won't even if I could.
You're not really that ignorant... :-)
In the case of the discrete cards (PCI-E, AGP...) they have a pool of memory that's accessible via the bus and that's directly accessible by the GPU's own memory bus (That memory size when you see 128, 256, 512Mb, etc.)- which is faster than just about anything out there and has no contention spots for the GPU to have to wait any longer than the access latency to the memory from the second access port. The peak speed of the GPUs when compared to an IGP solution comes from the contention-less, very, very fast access to the card's memory pool so that you don't stall the graphics pipeline. A stall of a microsecond can cost you FPS (Duh...) and larger stalls can drag framerates to the slide show domain- it's part of why the older ATI fglrx drivers were roughly 50% slower under Linux when compared to Windows. They had a stall in there somewhere that was introduced by their way of getting their then Windows-ish codebase to work under Linux.
Now, having said this, Hypertransport's suspiciously close to the same performance level of most of the local GPU buses and you only need to deal with bus contention issues for the only real performance snag. IGPs start making sense at that point for many applications because the memory's now close to the same speed as the add-in card's memory with similar latencies. The only real slowdown would be that you don't have dual pathways now.
What makes an IGP slower is a couple of things.
In the case of Intel, it's the memory bandwidth coupled with a distinct lack of Vertex Shader support.
In the case of AMD, it's the memory bandwidth coupled with a dramatically reduced/nonexistent support for Vertex Shaders.
In the case of NVidia, it's the memory bandwidth.
In the case with many IGPs, the combination of having to share RAM with the machine on it's own bus, along with no Transform, Clipping, and Lighting hardware acceleration (Little to no Vertex Shader hardware...) means for a very slow GPU overall. Now, having said this, the Hypertransport 3.0 interface may help on the bus speed, and if you're looking at the Unified Shader requirements for DX10, you might find that this may be a little better performer. It's not going to be like a PCI-E add-in card, but it may be serviceable for light to medium duty 3D stuff by itself because of those two things.
Skinnable it probably will be. As for syncing with Exchange...there's vendors that do this for Symbian, Palm, and WindowsCE clients of all kinds; why would this be any different. You don't sync with Exchange, you sync with Outlook which actually has a fairly well defined API for doing this sort of thing if you're willing to roll the sync conduits for your device.