Category: Components

Components provided to OEMs

Centrino Chips Get Updated by Intel

Today Intel release information about their new Centrino range of chips, aimed at notebook computers.

The release of the code-named “Sonoma” chip has been delayed for several months as Intel ironed out some problems they had been having with the chips. Intel hopes it will further bolster their current 85% dominance of notebook chips.

Such is the keenness of the laptop manufacturers to bring the machines to market that Sony have already released their FS range and Toshiba the less than catch-ly named Dynabook VX 470LS notebook. It is understood that 80 laptops with the new chippery will be available from today, with that number growing to 150 by the end of the year.

Intel have been very crafty with the Centrino range, which includes microprocessor; wireless; and supporting chips providing sound and graphics, as the Centrino brand cannot be used unless the entire bundle of chips is bought from Intel.

As is always the case with the introduction with a new range of chips, the new models will come in at about the same price of the previous high end chips and the current offering will slide down in price. Expect some bargains.

Intel

East Fork: Media Chipset for Home PC’s from Intel

A chip set focused on providing home users with the ability to capture, manipulate and distribute digital audio and video content around a home network wirelessly is running through the rumour mill. It has been long anticipated.

Intel recently dropped the launch of the 4GHz version of their P4 processor. Many commentators had been wondering what people were going to use all of that processing power for after chip speeds have spiralled upwards in the last few years. In discussion that we’ve had with senior Intel people, it has been clear that they don’t really know what to do with all of that power.

Their new approach is to develop ranges of “platforms” – Centrino, the chipset designed for laptops being a good example. It has low-power use and WiFi built in.

Reuters are reporting on project name “East Fork” will focus the power of the chips on providing and distributing and manipulating Audio and Video (AV) content around peoples home. Playing back AV content doesn’t take a huge amount of processing power, but capturing video and real-time encoding it, to distributed around the household does. The problem Intel faces with that is the media companies don’t want their content digitised, but they are addressing this with content protecting schemes.

The Korean DigiTimes has information that the complete setup will be called “DH EF PCs”. Not too catchy, and we assume an internal name only, that stands for Digital Home East Fork PC.

Intel Move in to STB Chips

Intel is preparing a family of consumer electronics processors based on the company’s IA-32 architecture, the design underlying the vast majority of Intel’s desktop, laptop and server processors. The new chips are designed for running digital video and audio content while providing a robust, fast and transparent method for transmitting and receiving digital content between a variety of products including PCs, high-definition televisions, set-top boxes, digital VCRs and DVD players.

The benefit of faster processors that consume less power is that they offer new ways to view high-quality digital pictures and sound. Streaming content from mobile devices is also a major component in the digital transmission proposals that the entertainment industry is reviewing, regarding delivery of video and audio content.

It’s almost certain that the Intel chips will run at slower clock speeds compared to their desktop counterparts, as the processing power of consumer boxes is not as critical as desktop computers, laptops and servers – frankly for the replay of video, photo and audio, you don’t need that much power. The chips will also likely have a slower bus and smaller cache, as this is an easy way to reduce power consumption and costs. Slower processors leads to less power consumption, less heat generated, therefore less need for noisy cooling fans. Silent or near silent machines are vital in the lounge setting.

Set Top Boxes (STB’s) have until now been built to a low price, so they have been pitifully under-powered. This has lead directly to the interactive TV (iTV) applications that they can run frankly not looking that much better than an Atari 2600. New mass-produced powerful chips  are the first step towards changing this.

Intel already produces processors designed for low-power consumption and high performance processing for a wide range of wireless and networking applications and rich services. Based on a new core devised by England-based ARM, the XScale chips are currently used in both smartphones and PDAs, but it’s looking to offer faster processing power with the new IA-32-based parts.

It’s quite clear that Intel is a chip company focused solidly on its core business, regardless of where it takes it. The company is building up support for its new chips among consumer electronics manufacturers by developing reference designs, or blueprints, for various products. The next step will be establish well-known, robust public and symmetric key cryptographic technique that will provide manufacturers with a simple and inexpensive implementation, while allowing protect digital content in transit quickly and easily – something that Hollywood is very keen on, to say the least.

Intel

TI to put DVB-H in Single Chip

Texas Instruments have just announced they will be building a single chip that will that will allow cell phones to receive digital television broadcasts over a wireless network.

Currently if a mobile phone manufacturer wanted to do this they would have to include three separate chips – a TV tuner, a signal demodulator and a channel decoder, but the TI chip, codenamed “Hollywood”, includes all this functionality already.  “Hollywood” will support two emerging digital and open TV standards for the wireless industry – the European, DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting – Handheld); and the Japanese Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting – Terrestrial (ISDB-T).

Texas Instruments say that the chip will be able to receive a live TV broadcast at up to 30 frames per second, twice the rate that some of today’s top notch phones display video clips.

While the chip is already being trialled, manufacturers probably won’t receive samples until 2006, pushing commercial deployment to 2007.

It’s unclear if users will watch TV on a tiny mobile screen.  Furthermore, it is not yet known which mobile phone manufacturers will provide the phones, although Nokia, who announced last year that they are going to put television tuners into all their cellphones, (having already done so with the 7700) could be a contender.

A time might come when we forget what the mobile phone is really for.  We’ll be so busy playing music and video games, taking photographs, or watching TV that receiving a call will become an irritating nuisance.

Texas Instruments

Microsoft and Cisco Announce Security Partnership

Microsoft and Cisco will announce a partnership today to make the security features of their respective range of products compatible. By tying up security at both the server operating system and hardware layer, the two companies hope that they will beat hackers and virus writers, whilst at the same time regaining the faith of corporate customers.

Microsoft and Cisco products hold a particular fascination for hackers, who enjoy exploiting various vulnerabilities in their platforms. Some corporate customers have switched to Linux and Unix as server operating systems on the grounds of security, as there are simply less viruses and malware on those systems.

By ensuring interoperability, customers should have an easier time deploying security policies and integrating products from both companies on their networks.

The next big step for the MS/Cisco partnership will be the release of Longhorn Server in 2007, when Microsoft’s own Network Access Protection scheme will be compatible with Cisco’s own Network Access Control features.

Microsoft will announce the news here later on Monday

3G Phones in Japan Get Even More Interesting

Twenty four hours is a long time in the Japanese mobile phone market, vividly demonstrated by the three interesting developments I’m going to outline below.

Firstly, KDDI, the second largest mobile operator in Japan will be distributing the new Casio W21CA handset with Opera as its default web browser – this makes Opera the first full web browser to be deployed on the 3G CDMA network in Japan.

Toshio Maki, the vice president and general manager of KDDI’s Service and Product Planning Divisionsaid in a statement:”With a market eager to experience evolved mobile communications, a crucial part of that experience will be how impressively users can browse the Internet and how rich Web content will be. Opera is the ideal mobile Web application to browse the full Web because of its speed, usability, and unique SSR [Small-Screen Rendering] technology, Opera is the best browser to utilize the high-speed access capabilities of the 3G CDMA network.”

Secondly, KDDI are about to launch a new music distribution service whilst introducing new phones that have enough memory to make them genuinely useful as music players. The new music store will launch with about 10,000 tracks, though we’ve not been able to confirm how much a download will cost.

The service will launch at the end of November, and will coincide with new phones from Toshiba, Sanyo and Hitachi. With 40mb of memory, the new Sanyo W22SA will be able to store about 100 minutes of J-Pop with around nine hours of playback.

Lastly, if you’re worried about your phone’s battery life now that it’s your video camera, music player, games console, TV and, errr, phone – then KDDI is hoping to introduce fuel-cell based batteries in the near future, with a prototype expected this year. Conventional batteries are just not up to the sort of energy drain required for all the new 3G services that network providers and phone manufacturers are hoping to seel to customers. The fuel cells are methanol-based and are charged by attaching methanol cartridges. Expect a sudden increase in tramps asking for 10p to make a phone call.

Opera

KDDI

Another Year, Another AIBO

Sony have announced another upgrade to their AIBO entertainment robot series, with the focus shifting away from cute tricks to becoming useful part of a household entertainment system.

The new ERS-7M2/W (white) and ERS-7M2/B (black) have the same style of casing as the previous top of the range AIBOs, but with a new finish and upgraded software and hardware under the hood, as it were.

AIBOs nose camera can now shoot video, which Sony says makes it an effective house-sitter. Given that AIBO will probably be the first thing in the back of the van if the owner gets burgled, I’m not sure if the robot’s ability to email a video clip of the view under a robber’s armpit will be especially useful. Regular emails of sound- or motion-activated photographs from home whilst you’re on holiday might bring peace of mind to some though.

AIBO can also play music from his speakers whilst dancing too – and can creak along to WAV, WMA and even MP3. Little pirate. AIBO’s Scheduler is compatible with Microsoft Outlook, so now he can remind you of any important appointments you might have via its text-to-speech interface. “Get head seen to”, for example.

The robot’s software has been optimised for much faster reaction times to spoken commands, along with better face tracking and obstacle avoidance routines – making it appear more lifelike and responsive.

All this canine robot fun will cost you US$1900 (€1545), and existing AIBO users can upgrade to AIBO Mind 2 software for $99 (€80).

Check out new AIBO

Intel Drops WiFi from Grantsdale

Intel have dropped their proposal to include integrated WiFi in its Grantsdale chipsets. Intel Wireless Connect was intended as a cheap and easy way to make WiFi networking ubiquitous – and help Intel promote and distribute their own wireless technologies.

PC manufacturers are not so sure, however, citing concerns that the functionality would add US$50 to US$75 (€40 to €68) to the price of a new desktop computer – this does not compare favourably to an add-in card which typically sells for US$50 (€40).

Whilst integrating WiFi into a chipset has advantages such as power consumption and compatibility, stand-alone wireless networking components have better signal reception and are easier to replace should they fail.

The timing is evidently wrong for Intel, but they have stated that they intend to reintroduce Wireless Connect when the price falls – or if a big enough PC manufacturer requests it.

Intel

Pentium Reaches 6GHz

It’s not stable by any means, but a group of Finnish overclockers have got a 3.6Ghz Pentium 4 up to 6009.73Ghz. The chip needs liquid nitrogen to keep it running, so don’t try this at home – it’s not available as a home system, and doesn’t even fit in a case. Though non-toxic and non-flammable, liquid nitrogen does present a frost-burn and asphyxiation hazard to geeks who have to calculate PI just that bit faster.

For safety, he overclocked system has low memory and a cheap graphics card, so has a couple of key performance bottlenecks (after all, you wouldn’t want to risk destroying a nice new Radeon X800 if you fried your system board), but is an interesting proof of concept. In this instance, only program that run entirely on the processor and do not make memory, disk and graphics calls with show the most benefits from this level of overclocking.

Overclocking to 6GHz and showing off

CLIE PEG-VZ90 marks Sony’s start of Mass Production of Full Colour Organic LED’s

Sony has announced that they will start the mass production of full-colour Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) displays. They see the OLED displays as a possible replacement for LCD screens, but with the added advantages of not needing a back-light, giving quicker screen response times and providing wider viewing angles. Response times will drop from 16mil sec on current Sony LED’s to a stunning 0.01mil sec and viewing angles will improve from around 130 degrees on LCD to 180 degrees in both horizontal and vertical planes.

By adding their own magic ingredient to OLED’s, called Super Top Emission technology, Sony claims they will get significant improved brightness (1000:1 vs 100:1 LCD) and a great range of colours (gamut) (~100% vs ~40% LCD). They claim it will rival the performance of Cathode Ray Tubes (CRT).

Since their introduction, one of the big problems for LCD-equipped portable media players has been the impossibility of seeing their displays outdoors when the sun is strong. It sounds like Sony’s approach could not only save the batteries of portable devices, but also fix the sunlight problem.

The CLIE ‘PEG-VZ90’ will be the first Sony device to benefit from the production run.

Sony