TechSpace

Please visit the Debasis and Associates blog.

2011-01-18T14:50:00.000+05:30

As announced already, we combined various blogs into the company blog at Debasis & Associates. Please continue to visit us, we shall strive to keep current with the technical spaces we observe on a regular basis.

CES 2011: Lenovo Announces IdeaCentre All-in-Ones

2011-01-14T20:05:00.000+05:30

The fact that Lenovo introduced these new set of all-in-one desktops for this year at the CES is not the news. I would think , the news is, the kind of features are being added even to the workhorse desktops. OK, you had some home theater PCs in the past and all that. But just look at the features these machines sport!

The models introduced were IdeaCenter B500, A320 and the B320. Some of these notable features are 23 inch display, Core- i7 processor, support for Nvidia's 3D Vision, for 3D gaming, or watching movies on the Blu-Ray drive on the B500 for example. This one is 3D ready too, one f the few in the market now.

The 21.5-inch A320 comes with second generation Core-i5 Sandy Bridge processor. HDMI, 802.11n Wifi, and an integrated TV tuner, pair of USB 3.0 ports would likely make it a nice entertainment machine. Lower down the ladder, the B320 comes with second-generation Intel Core-i5 processor and up to 8GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage. Its 1080p display has multi-touch support. Touch screens are moving into these products too then!

As we get these more capable processors, you are going to see devices gearing up for the full HD, MPEG4 (H.264) video/movie and the convenience features like the touch screen.
CES 2011: Lenovo Announces IdeaCentre All-in-Ones

New Android Tablets May Require Dual-Core Processors

2011-01-14T19:57:00.000+05:30

By the very architecture of Android, it will operate better for real time functions if a RTOS is running on a dedicated second processor. The reason being Android services may carry a little baggage as they operate through Linux processes. That would put a limit to what a single processor can accomplish by itself. For either reason then a second processor would be helpful. Looks like the next version of Android, the version 3.0 and otherwise known as the Honeycomb is going to impose a minimum hardware requirement of a 2 core processor.

It is also being discussed around that the new OS will possibly impose a minimum display resolution of 1280x 720 pixels. Motorola's Xoom tablet, that uses the Honeycomb is, based on reports, a pretty powerful machine!
New Android tablets may require dual-core processors and high-res screens

Combining Blogs Tech Space, Open Space, CAD Space into the Debasis & Associates Blog

2011-01-13T20:44:00.000+05:30

I am going to combine the Tech Space, Cad Space and Open Space into the "collective musing" blog after the currently pending posts in these three blogs. It becomes easier to manage. I'll eventually remove these blogs that are getting combined.The topics covered in these blogs will be covered in the umbrella blog now.

Half-terabyte Laptop SSDs are Here!

2011-01-13T08:35:00.001+05:30

SSDs are doing a fast catch up! The capacity was one disadvantage it suffered from. Looks like the gap is being closed very fast. Micron announced this 500 GB device in the laptop hard drive format recently. They have announced the C400 family that does 415 MB/sec throughput. As soon as prices become comparable, there is no other barrier for SSDs to take over the mass storage market! today that metric for SSDs stand at $1.20 per GB.
Micron releases half-terabyte laptop SSDs - Computerworld

Intel’s Second-Gen Core CPUs, The Sandy Bridge

2011-01-12T14:20:00.001+05:30

A set of processors have come out of the Intel stable recently. These are being hailed as the second generation multi core processors and are based on the Sandy bridge micro architecture. Tom's hardware reviews the offerings in the following article in detail. These are the Core i7-2600K, Core i5-2500K, Core i5-2400, And Core i3-2100 processors. 4 core versions are being offered first, the 2 core versions would be coming out a little later. detailed performance is discussed in the article. Quite a few manufacturers have already announced desktop and laptop products in the last week's CES exhibition.

Intel’s Second-Gen Core CPUs: The Sandy Bridge Review : Core i7-2600K, Core i5-2500K, Core i5-2400, And Core i3-2100 Reviewed

iPhone 5 and iPad 2are Coming

2011-01-11T21:58:00.003+05:30

Rumors are very strong in the blogosphere that the iPad next version will have a 2 core processor. Projections are that this will be soon too. Similar rumors are in the air about the next iPhone version, the iPhone 5. It is not difficult to grasp. Both these devices will be called for to carry heavier workloads and any extra smartness in a processor is going to be useful in both the cases.

iPhone 5 and iPad 2: Specs Update – Dual-Core Processor?

Smartphone Hardware Trends

2011-01-10T14:44:00.000+05:30

According to several studies, mobile phone growth will be actually pushed by growth of smartphones, rather than the plain vanilla ones. That apps is a big deal on the software side is already amply evident. But, what's likely to happen on the hardware front! One of trends is already evident. Android version 3.0 (Honeycomb) is going to need at least a dual core processor. With the increasing processing being demanded of these devices, particularly for video processing, dual core/multi core trends is certainly the most visible of the trends.

We talked of video above already. Add to that the demands of HD and then factor in the demand for 3D movies then a 3D display requirement is another likely trend. Once again looking at the push from software NFC or near field communication, or radio communication in a range of few inches seems to be a likely one. Android 2.3, Gingerbread includes this technology already. Upgrade to Full HD or 1080p resolution support will become a necessity. As of last year there has already been a move to 720p.

Dual SIm cards are already popular in the cheaper phones. Smartphones are likely to use them more. It offers customers flexibility. This could then act as inducement for people to move up to the smartphones.
Five smartphone hardware trends in 2011

The Android Platform and Mobile Applications

2011-01-07T20:14:00.001+05:30

Android is big! It has already overtaken other platforms in mobile smartphones.There are all kinds of mobile devices out in the market! Android based tablets are slated to overtake iPad and all the other platforms in use today! So it is good to get feel of what is it like! The following article from Mentor(1) has a good look at the platforms. The article at 2 is a year old look at the same OS when it has just started getting popular.

Android is a free source but with a license that does not make it necessary for the application code developed on the platform to be open source. That removes one of the reservation of developers working with open source platforms. I suspect, it definitely has contributed to the popularity.

Android is built over Linux kernel. The sequence of layers are somewhat as follows.

1. Hardware + board support package + Linux kernel provides memory and process management, , security, networking and an array of relevant device drivers.

2. layer 1+ Libraries: libc+ Google's version of libc, called bionic+media and graphics libraries+lightweight database SQLite.

The layer 2 also includes the Android runtime that includes the Dalvik VM. Specific to Android and is register based to conserve memory and maximize performance this executes Java code. A separate instance of the Dalvik VM is used to execute an Android application. The underlying OS does memory management and multi-threading.

3. Layer 2+ Application framework. The framework includes services providing views, content providers and resource, notification and activity managers. These are Java classes. Applications can "publish" capabilities for use by other applications.

4. Layer 3+ Some applications are distributed with Android, typically email, SMS, calendar, contacts, and Web browser. This is where applications occur. Applications are generally written in Java, processed with standard Java tools and converted to the Dalvik VM bytecodes.

5. This is the development layer: Typically an Eclipse-based development environment (from Google). This can used with the Android emulator or a real device (connected via USB).

Android application has resources bundled into an archive, an Android package.Programs are generally written in Java and run on Dalvik VM. This uses non-standard, memory-efficient bytecodes. These programs then use an independent Linux processes. That takes care of the protection between each other.

These details are from the second article mainly. Details of porting Android and the use of multiple core, some running true RTOS are discussed in the first article. No wonder there is a strong rumor that the version 3.0 of Android (Honeycomb) requires at least 2 cores to run!

1. Porting the Android Platform Beyond Mobile Phone Applications - Mentor Graphics
2. http://www.eetimes.com/design/embedded/4008876/Android-Linux--Real-time-Development-for-Embedded-Systems

An Introduction to USB and Its Future

2010-12-30T08:54:00.000+05:30

USB has been such a universal and available everywhere kind of connection available with computer systems, laptop or desktop. The article from Mentor Graphics provides a nice overview of the USB and its evolution.USB brought about a simple way of connecting peripherals and for the computers to recognize the devices and get an appropriate driver installed. The user need not be burdened with all that hassle. Thus USB 2.0became very popular and are present everywhere. next came the OTG or the "on the go" connection mode that allowed a peripheral to talk to another.

The most recent evolution is the USB 3.0 that can provide data transfer speeds of up to just about 5 Gbps. Read article to get a more complete view.

USB Explained: An Introduction to USB and Its Future - Mentor Graphics

First Intel next-gen laptops will be quad core

2010-12-20T21:51:00.001+05:30

The consumer electronics show is coming up, come Jan. Intel is ready to announce second generation core processors. The architecture has been known as Sandy Bridge. The upcoming device is going to be a 4 core one and couple of manufacturers like the Lenovo and Acer are going to be ready with laptops machines that use these chips. A dual core version is going to come out by Feb though. Nvidia's graphic chips are going to be used in these designs.

First Intel next-gen laptops will be quad core | Business Tech - CNET News

The ARM Cortex A15 MPCore processor

2010-12-05T19:02:00.000+05:30

The ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore processor is the highest-performance licensable processor the company released to the market recently. It is high performance, low power and is addressed to the smartphones, tablets, mobile computing, high-end digital home, servers and wireless infrastructure products segments. The unique combination of performance, functionality, and power-efficiency provided by the Cortex-A15. The following picture shows the resources available on-chip.

The Cortex-A15 MPCore processor has an out-of-order superscalar pipeline and a low-latency level-2 cache of up to 4MB. Floating point processing and the proprietary NEON media processing have been beefed up and it should deliver up to five times the performance of current smart phones.

New 1TB PCIe SSD boasts triple the performance of SATA - Computerworld

2010-11-04T09:03:00.000+05:30

I have been covering the rise of the SSD for a while now. While the rotating medium technology has reached the terabyte mark for a while now, the SSD are accelerating. TB mark is crossed now and at an impressive data transfer and I/O rates. With the PCI-e makes them really mainstream too!

New 1TB PCIe SSD boasts triple the performance of SATA - Computerworld

Apple's new 11.6-in. MacBook Air: Don't call it a netbook - Computerworld

2010-11-02T18:28:00.000+05:30

This one is somewhere between a netbook and a full fledged notebook. The small screen size of 11.6 inch screen and probably the lightest Macbook Air will feel like it is a netbook. However as this reviewer finds, performance wise this is more like a notebook. Besides, it comes with a SSD drive of up to 256 GB capacity. has the future arrived already!

Apple's new 11.6-in. MacBook Air: Don't call it a netbook - Computerworld

eReaders are Already Evolving

2010-11-01T15:09:00.000+05:30

eReaders which started by giving readers an exact equivalent of the printed page experience was able to gather a set of followers. However, that did not last very long and Apple's iPad upset the applecart. It became immensely popular and now there's a raging debate on whether the eReaders will survive or the iPads will become the dominant reading devices.

Color available in tablets like the iPad is a distinct advantage. So is the capability to show animations, video and playing the audio. While playing the audio needs a small enhancement, adding color to its ePaper displays depended entirely on when that particular technology will catch up. This seems to be happening now. There are quite a few devices which has come out with color displays.That would give these devices the equivalent capacity of being ability to read newspaper in color.

However, they have still a long way to go to compete in technological book /text book category as they need the multi media capability of the tablets. If, somehow, the readers catch up, they'll become more like the tablets as video processing will call for heavy processing artilary. Once you have a heavy processor on-board, it'll be a shame not to let the device do more and become a tablet!

ARM is so Successful!

2010-10-18T21:37:00.000+05:30

I often wonder why! This is one company that has no fab, has concentrated on just designing the processor and letting partners use the core in their component design or on system design where the partners extended the functionality with other components and creating newer chips.

If Intel and AMD and several others go through the complete chain, here is a company that is an exception. They went about the whole thing differently and now even the full cycle companies like MIPS Technologies has gone fabless.

The ARM success in mobile design wins is so strong that several companies including Intel is aiming for the mobile market! Will they succeed ? That is a interesting question that will get answered over time. Meanwhile we keep watching!

Cs 704 D Aos Distr File System

2010-09-27T22:23:00.001+05:30

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Cs 704 D Aos Distr File System

View more presentations from Debasis Das.

AMD's Bulldozer

2010-09-20T09:58:00.001+05:30

AMD has introduced the Bulldozer architecture recently.Intel keeps announcing newer architectures frequently. Yet, these are all the X86 instruction set compatible. What does that mean then! Apparently this looks like a contradiction. If the instruction set remains the same, how can the hardware supporting that change!

You can of course change improved hardware to do the same functions, of course. Other thing is that supporting hardware such the cache organization, turbo boosting ( overclocking as it is known generally) etc are introduced. Other thing that happens is that you introduce a superset of the x86 ISA(instruction set architecture). But then, over time these instruction sets can become diverse enough to lose the benefits of the standardization or the common OS etc. do not take advantage of the instruction set enhancements. Even the applications that make use of the special instructions will lose portability across platforms from Intel and AMD.

AMD introduces this new architecture after a long time. Last was done in 2003. read about the Bulldozer at the site Silicon Processors Fan Club.

Mere 27 Years and the Telephones have Changed Entirely!

2010-09-07T22:48:00.001+05:30

There was a time, I have been at that time personally, when we had a very pessimistic view about whether we'll ever have access to telephones easily..Humongous funds were being predicted to be required to provide telephone services to our country men. With the planned, controlled economy that we had there were no hope of ever getting such large numbers soon enough! From the time I was a student to the time I went to private sector there was a difference something like 25 years! During my student days, a benchmark was the year 1965, when I tried to call home but could not after waiting all day! The Agartala airport being bombed in the 65 Indo-Pak war prompted me to try the trunk call (as it used to be known those days!). By 1987 when I went out of DRDO and joined the private sector, you could get a phone line if your company knew the right people and grease things along! That was an improvement alright.

Meanwhile something in 1983 that was set to change the way we'll communicate. Below is a photo of the first mobile phone device held by the father of the device. Martin Cooper of Motorola, at that time, helped the telephone to be completely unleashed. There was a small time window when the phone became car-borne. The phase was that of the car phone.

Unbelievable! That big a brick was the first of the cellular phones! Hardly mobile! While the device has shrunk in size, it has grown in what it can do! It has become completely untethered so we use these in unimaginable situations! Penetration of phones has gone through the roof! We call up a cycle rickshaw through the mobile phone without thinking! We have come a long way. Here are some comments, views expressed by Mr. Cooper last Jun, on the occasion of 27 years of the cell phone!

“For 100 years, people wanting to talk on the phone have been constrained by being tied to their desks or their homes with a wire, and now we're going to trap them in their cars? That's not good” was quoted as his motivation for developing the device.

He was very clear in his vision and I quote again, “We knew that someday everybody would have a [cell] phone, but it was hard to imagine that that would happen in my lifetime. And now we've got almost five billion phones in the world.”

As far as Android phones are concerned, he is very bullish on them; “I had an iPhone for a while, I gave that to my grandson. Kids are really caught up in that. But I think that the Android phones are catching up now, and the latest version of the Android phones are every bit as good, if not better, than the iPhone.” let's see how things go!

What.s Cloud Computing All About!

2010-09-02T22:03:00.001+05:30

You can clearly see a trend of running applications on the Internet servers. Users access them through their browsers. These applications thus does not need much resources locally except machines that can run the browser efficiently. That would be really very convenient for the user. Coupled with a pay per use kind of pricing this is a nice model for the user. Sometimes, it is also a free service supported by ads.

However, it demands a large pool of resources at the service provider end.The service provider needs to run several instances of the program (word processor, for example). A data center connected together and connected to the Internet can fit the need. But, as the demand grows the data center, which is a multiplicity of similar servers, needs to expand. While these servers can be clones of each other, the power consumption, the heat generated and the consequent rise in cooling needs and hence the cost need to be controlled. Thus one of the prime design goals of these servers needs to be the ability to do things at as low a power consumption as possible. Plus of course the cost of adding a box and corresponding cooling needs has to be as low as possible.Some studies indicate the direct and indirect costs related to electricity use is 40% of total cost of ownership.

AMD Opteron 4100 family aimed at Servers in the Cloud!

2010-08-31T22:01:00.000+05:30

AMD's new 4100 family processors have significantly low power consumption. At 32 w it is really quite low for severs. This is at 100% CPU utilization of all the four cores on the chip operating at 2.2 GHz. That is quite a performance package and it would cost you just $99. Thus the commodity servers with 1P, 2P designs or the servers that have 1 or 2 sockets for the CPU chips can be made available comparatively cheaper. For the higher end servers with 2P and 4P configurations, the AMD 6000 family should be the choice of designers. Comparative, lowest power consuming Xeons still consume more power and deliver more but at a higher price, of course!

Resources: See the following report for details and market analysis, it'll cost you $50 though. Members of Microprocessor Reports can read the report free, of course.
New AMD Server Processors Reduce Power in Data Centers
By Linley Gwennap and Tom R. Halfhill, Microprocessor Reports

Tablets are going to be Everywhere!

2010-08-24T16:18:00.000+05:30

If the success of iPad is anything to go by, and the fact that all major manufacturers are preparing to enter the niche, tablets are going to be everywhere. Besides other issues, will it become the preferred device for reading! Most analysts think so. It has some inherent advantages. While the eReaders are electronic equivalent of paper books and that too gray scale only, what the tablets can make the reading very value added.is the graphics. Graphics can be full color, photos used could full color which definitely is an improvement on dull gray diagrams. The illustrations in the books can take advantage of all the rich media content technology. For example nothing explains a concept better than an animation. It is a natural in the tablet medium. At least for technical books and text books nothing can compete with that.Some have said, you may lose sleep after having read on those light emitting displays. But then, students do not sleep anyway!

Will the eReaders fade away then! My reading is it'll probably continue for a fairly long time. At least until, the generation used to reading a printed book switches to this technology or are completely replaced by the tech savvy generation.

iPad (tablets), Touchscreen and Home control

2010-07-09T16:08:00.000+05:30

iPad and similar devices with touch screen that support a lot of apps are increasingly being used for home control applications. HiddenWires recently asked (through Yasmin Hashmi) some industrial leaders about the phenomenon. Here's the article in details. Most see this phenomenon developing well and getting integrated into our lifestyles. Not just iPads by mobile phone, Android tablets and a whole host of other devices are destined for this market. Home appliance manufacturers have joined the phenomenon by releasing apps for their devices. Apps themselves have become quite sleek with effective yet easy to use interfaces that use the touch screen.

Stregthens my feeling that all these interesting devices will evolve into one that is a all in one avatar of all these needs besides being the communicator that we all crave. Watch this space!

So What's FroYo !

2010-07-07T20:23:00.001+05:30

It's a brand of Frozen yoghart. But we aren't interested in that! The fact that it is the code name of Android 2.2 is of real interest. It is a OS for mobile phones, the smart phones and is the latest version of the Android. This was hyped to be significantly faster than the earlier version. Gizmodo found it to be 5x faster than the Eclair or the Android 2.1. Devices has started appearing with this faster OS already.

What else does the FroYo have! It has the fastest browser too. It runs Flash 10.1 that is optimized for mobile devices. Apps and music gets downloaded over the air and gets installed, no specific sync required. If you have hardware compass it could be read from the browser and maps oriented to take your current location into account. You are able to access the camera from the browser too.

Voice recognition for search and voice recognition for Google translate are available. If you connect the voice recognition for translate with TTS, you get a nice speech to speech translation conveniently! An apps manager lets you move an app to the SD card and run from there. backkground updates of the apps are possible too.

iPhone 4 is here!

2010-07-05T22:27:00.001+05:30

The latest iPhone has generated a huge buzz! Apparently the display is a great improvement. The operating system iOS4 has gone multi tasking. In general users are quite happy with just about everything about the device. The only problem reported so far is that the signal strength drops if you hold the device in certain ways. According to Apple's response to the problem, it is only a algorithm problem that shows dropping of bars in the signal strength series of bars. just a display issue, the signal strength does not actually drop!

According to Apple the features in iOS 4 are as follows..iOS 4 works with iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 3G. Not all the features will work with all iPhone models. Only iPhone 4 and the 3GS will have multi-tasking available to users.
The top of the chart feature, of course, is multi-tasking. You can be running third party apps and switch between then immediately without affecting the foreground application or any added strain on the battery. You'll be able to organize up to 2160 apps into folders; just drag & drop into the folders you want them to be organized into. An iBook application that is not only a reader but a book buying space too. better mail, better camera at 5MP. When taking the video, you can tap on screen the area you want to focus on.

Photos can be viewed by who is on them or the place they were shot at. Which clearly indicates face recognition and geocoding added to photo taking. Spell check, gift apps and a Blue tooth keyboard support are some of the other features.

Phone your Blog

2010-07-03T21:30:00.001+05:30

That is the same title used in the WordPress blog. What that means is, you can simply phone in your post and it'll be published, even RSS feed will be updated/ After you enable the voice blogging you'll get a special phone number to dial in for recording your message. Much like blogging by email, when you mail your post to a special address.

It is a free service and you could record a call up to 1 hour duration. Though the service is free now and will probably remain so, the length of the post may get cut down for free use. That certainly is a new direction and I am sure other blog platforms will offer the same facility too. What say Google for your Blogger platform!

Apple iPad sold 2 million units!!

2010-06-03T20:40:00.000+05:30

Apple iPad was launched on Apr 3 this year. it is just about 2 months and the unit seems to have sold 2 million units.They sold a million units in the first month, they seem to be maintaining the pace. According to the Engadget, the recent start of international sales would have helped. But that's not the trend I am looking at. There are reports that tablets are getting readied by several manufacturers for launching soon.

One nice trend is the use of touch screen becoming highly prevalent. On tablets they are the input device. A touch screen with gesture interactions seem to be becoming the favored input system. That is really nice. The keyboard based interaction has dominated the input to computers for far too long. Time for a change here.

Personal Computers- Netbook, Tablet or what!

2010-06-01T20:34:00.000+05:30

Personal computer space is going through a turmoil. It was exactly about 2 years back that netbooks came on the scene. see picture of one of the first such life form below. The announcement is from Engadget. these netbooks sold like crazy, but seems to be flattening off now.

Just 2 months back the iPad came on the scene and there are reports already that iPad has sold 2 million pieces already. Many companies are scrambling to come out with tablets. So is the personal computer going to morph into a tablet! Intel has announced a dual core Atom chip. That would push the power of the net books some more. may be push them closer to a laptop, with the capability to manage productivity applications a little more! Net books were meant for users to surf and do email and things like that.

eReader with Color Display

2010-05-17T22:14:00.000+05:30

There's a flood in the models of eReaders coming on to market. Most are based on eInk displays that have grey level displays. Here's one with a difference. It has a color display.

Not much is know about the device. It has a 7 inch color display. It has a multimedia player, a image viewer, a USB 2.0 connector. It does have an optional radio too. Could be an Android device according to the source where this was announced recently.

ARM reaches everywhere!

2010-05-12T11:03:00.000+05:30

ARM architecture has been around for a long time. Unlike most other processors, this is from a company which does not produce silicon. It simply licenses the core design to whoever wants to make a processor for their use. Thus there is a wide variety of silicon that is customized for various applications.In the process, it is almost everywhere in the mobile handsets. Most manufacturers use a chip that has at least one core of the ARM from various generations.

Having won the mobile space, looks like, it is time for making a solid debut in the Tablet segment.Tablets are a evolving form of the personal computing device and it has clearly broken away from Wintel. There are several processors getting integrated into various devices coming out on the market. The ARM seems to be solid contender in various forms. One recent example being the NVIDIA's Tegra processor has two ARM cores and several of the NVIDIA's graphics processors.The sensation of the space, the iPad also has a processor that includes ARM.

McAfee Anti-virus Screw up

2010-04-28T21:17:00.001+05:30

Just about a week back a update from McAfee update locked up a whole lot of Windows XP machines. Fact that the company has apologized and promised to make good losses is a nice gesture. But, the fact that this has happened, kind of shakes up the customer confidence. Software releases have this nagging doubt that there's a bug lurking somewhere is fact of life. But if it happens with something that is supposed to protect you, you are shaken up. It was so prevalent a problem with XP service pack3 that this particular configuration testing, obviously, was incomplete!

The whole brouhaha will eventually pass but what bothers me is how do you prevent such a thing from happening again. possible with even more vital software!

ST Micro comes out with a New Ultra low power Microcontroller family

2010-04-28T09:58:00.001+05:30

A recent announcement from ST Micro presents the new STM32L ultra low power family. this is a 32 bit architecture family based on the ARM Cortex-M3 core. As you may be aware the M series cores are the micro-controller cores in the new ARM Cortex family. The controllers are built on a very low leakage platform of ST micro and has several low power operation modes which can be utilized by application developers to create an optimum product.

Some of the other useful features of the family of devices include flexible Brown-Out Reset; on-board Flash with Error Correction Code (ECC) support; a Memory Protection Unit (MPU); and JTAG fuse. All applications needing safe product behavior and highly secure code and user-data management can use these features fruitfully.. The MCU devices have embedded LCD drivers for easier, cheaper and smaller application designs. The devices should cost between $1 to $3 at 10,000 quantity level. Following fig shows the current and future devices of the family.

These are ideal candidates for portable sophisticated instruments.
Resources
The announcement
STM32L family

16 Bit Microprocessors are better Options in 8 Bit applications!!!

2010-04-25T21:00:00.003+05:30

Why not! If I can get a ultra low power 16 bit micro for much less or comparable price to 8 bit one! MSP430 is my favorites anyway, I have written about them elsewhere before. These devices from TI are amazing and now are available at 25 cents at large volumes. So if you have an embedded system being produced at really large volumes why not use these recent architecture rather than the old 8 bit architectures.

The support from TI is complete. There are going to 100 devices with various combinations of flash memory, RAM and other peripherals. These devices draw less than a micro amp when idle, you can forget about battery worries in many applications! Devices operate up to 16 MHz clock speeds. The device road map is as below as indicated on the TI page.

Development support is large and the development systems are cheap. A quick view from the same page is as below.

So next embedded application, take a look at this 16 bit RISC first before you select another!

Atom Moves into Embedded Space

2010-04-18T22:11:00.001+05:30

The Atom family has been very successful in the netbook products. Now comes the announcement form Intel that they now have a new family, the Queensbay family aimed at the embedded designs. They showed off a dashboard entertainment/ information display system for cars using the chips from the family, manufactured by Delphi Automotive.

The processors are highly integrated. The first processor will be available commercially in 4 th quarter this year and is named Tunnel Creek. It will be available in 600MHz, 1.1 GHz and 1.3 GHz clock speeds. The chip integrates the north and south bridges chipsets of the PCI bus. beside the processor the chip will also contain memory controller for 667MHz and 800MHz DDR2 and a 3D graphics engine; HD video coder and decoder. A display controller with support for an additional display; a legacy peripheral controller; and a high-definition audio controller, all are included in this piece of silicon.That's a highly capable device that has the video capability built in as that's demanded in so many applications now.

Resources:
The announcement
The Intel Company

Tablets Everywhere!!

2010-04-18T15:02:00.000+05:30

If there is are a host of devices coming out in the EReader category, there seems to be an explosion of tablets!. If my Google alert on Tablet computers of today any indication there are several that are ready to get into market soon.

This one alert talks about besides the iPad, of Toshiba launching a device soon, Dell' Streak tablet, HP-Compaq 2710p tablet, Hanvon launching a tablet. Phew! Are tablets the next wave in personal computing! First came the PC, then the laptop, then the netbook. Well netbooks may not have been a real wave! The sales have flattened already, if reports are to be believed. Is the tablet the wave then!

I can see the attraction quite well. Touch screen, gesture interface, a truly large display can help me get rid of a lot of devices. i am waiting with bated breath to see if the book like e-ink readers win or the tablets becomes the reader of choice! It can easily replace my portable video player. It can give me downloadable videos as well as streaming videos from the net. because, possibly they have more powerful processors than a netbook, I'll be doing my productivity stuff too on these. That leaves my mobile communication needs. If it can also get rid of the smartphone or the Blackberry then I'll be perfectly happy to carry this one tablet. slate or whatever you may call it. Is that what's going to happen!

Hanvon WISEreader

2010-04-14T09:53:00.001+05:30

The number of products in the e-reader category seem to be exploding. There are so many devices now, whereas there were only a few a year back or so. There is already a spread in the products, right from premium to no-frills. This one is in the no-frills category. yet, it is such an attractive proposition to be able to carry a large number of books in a pocket sized device. The reader has a 5 inch screen and the usual e-ink display. That makes it fall in the category of book experience replacement product. Instead of a book you take this device and read your book, much like black words on a white background!

This is a very attractive use anyway. For students, it means carrying this one device rather than a bagful of books. There are some schools in US that are giving e-reader deices to the students. but then what if he has to take notes, write an essay assignment, term paper and so on! then he is going to need the laptop, at least a net book! That brings back the question whether it is more convenient to carry just one device that can do a lot of things. What if the reading experience is not the same as reading a paper based book. Student, of all the demographic categories are increasing getting used to reading text on computer screens. They would not be at all reluctant to read a book as well as do other things, including mobile calling on one device!

Does that mean the e-readers are meant for only those who are not computer savvy and want to read a book in more or less the same way (E-Ink is a emulation of that experience) they read a book today! The readers have exploded in the mean time. many predicted this year would be the year e-reader really happens. it'll be interesting to see if e-readers remains a distinct product category or loses to the combination devices. One such major threat is from iPad tablets and a whole host of similar devices.
Read about a complete review of the Hanvon WISEreader here.

Silicon processors Fan Club

2010-04-05T22:22:00.000+05:30

We finally launched the club at Mallabhum Institute of technology! There was an inaugural program on Saturday the 3 Apr 2010. I talked about the Intel 4004 and mentioned how many exciting things are happening on the silicon processors! Just over the last few days of Mar AMD first and then Intel announced 12 core and 8 core processors respectively.It is amazing the original 4004 had 2300 transistors on them, the AMD 12 core processor chip had 2 billion of them; that's a ration of roughly about 2 million! Performance have increased correspondingly! Amazing how the x86 architecture has endured!

iPad Use Pattern

2010-03-22T20:53:00.001+05:30

iPads start selling 3rd April. So interest is building up about what the early uses are going to be like. Apple is veru choosy about giving out the devices to developers. A usage pattern was discussed in Business Week based on data by Flurry Analytics. The largest share of applications being developed are games. The games have a 44% share while entertainment has 14% ; followed by social networking at 7%. Sports, travel, lifestyle each take 6, 5 and 4 %. i was looking at the use of iPad as a reading device. in this initial lot of applications books and news have 3 and 2% share.

This is based on the first lot of samples that Apple chose to provide to developers. It is understandable that Apple will want to show off gaming as they are the most complex applications. Thus games do tend to show off the iPad capabilities in a strong light. It still is a sample of the application areas where iPad is going to be used. They'll probably change eventually but is a fair guide still as even the early developers interested may be a fair slice/representation of the eventual pattern. It could of course be skewed by what Apple thinks are the areas that show off their devices well.

iPAD Vs. Other eReaders

2010-03-19T15:10:00.000+05:30

Noe that iPad is out and is going to go on sale soon, Apple has started taking pre-orders, the question that's uppermost in many minds is will iPad make the other readers obsolete! The arguments that are being debated give you pause. one of the trends being cited by the proponents of iPad take over is that it is a multi function device while the others are a single function one. The other readers are aimed at simply replacing a printed book and/or magazines.

I too do feel very strongly, the one device we would carry around have to have many functions bundled into it. Nobody would really like to carry around a electronic book library then a smartphone and a laptop/netbook etc. This portable carry around toll seems destined to be a single device that can roll all these functionalities into one. It is hard to imagine the readers evolving into one that includes a phone and can let you do net surfing. Once you are into net surfing area the lack of color and/or a sophisticated yet simple interface, like the touch interface, becomes a very real shortcoming for the reader devices.

Whereas being more like a general purpose computing device the iPad can easily evovle into a combined device like that without trying too much!It'll be really interesting to watch what happens in this area.

Power 7 the IBM, the chips that make a Supercomputer

2010-02-28T20:40:00.000+05:30

IBM announced the Power 7 early Feb just ahead of the Intel announcement about their Itanium and Nehalem chips. Nehalem is going to have eight cores too.The specs are really impressive and makes for a useful base processor if you are out to build powerful servers or even a supercomputer. The chip has eight cores on chip and can handle 4 threads per chip.National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Univ of Illinois is actually building the latest supercomputer that's targeted to achieve 10 Petaflops of performance. The chip operates at3.5 and 4, actually a step down from 5 GHz operation of the Power 6 chips. This was done to reduce the heat generated in the eight cores that the Power 7 runs on the chip.

Other significant difference in the making of the silicon is the use of an embedded DRAM structure for the L3 cache, even though the L1 and L2 are SRAM structure. This helped reduce the transistor count on-chip. The L3 is 32 MB in size while the L1 is 32 KB and L2 is 256 KB in sizes. I'll need to look up other features that enhances performance. It'll be interesting to talk about in the advanced architecture course I am teaching currently.

8 bit MCU are hale & hearty

2010-02-27T12:21:00.001+05:30

You would be forgiven if you thought the days of 8 bit micros are over. Not so, they thrive in microcontroller role extensively. Just try to imagine how extensively they are used in various appliances, in industry and in the automobile sector! Proof of that comes with this new announcement where NEC is releasing a family of 14 new 8 bit microcontrollers. These are all flash based and meant for automotive use.

A range of peripheral devices including motor driver/controller and increased number of timer channels are included with the micros. The controllers also include LCD driver/controller, a CAN interface, and a sound generator all in a single chip. System BOM costs and development times could be reduced easily. The family members vary in the amount of on-board flash memory, RAM and a mix of the above peripheral types. The announcement was made on 19 Feb 2010.

Google Buzz

2010-02-17T22:55:00.000+05:30

One fine morning I discovered the "buzz" on my email, the GMail. There has been a lot of buzz about the service. Most compared it to facebook and twitter unfavorably. May be so, I have not been able to look at it in detail. But the simple convenience of having all the functionality at one location is really attractive. Gmail introduced the chat services from withing the mail, others followed suit. It was aimed at this convenience. Google has tried to provide the range of services conveniently at one place. If not exactly at one place, at least through the convenience of a Google account! It is a whole host of services too!

Good Anti Spam

2010-01-20T23:13:00.000+05:30

Sunbelt software has won a VBSPAM award from the Virus Bulletin. VB is the independent source that rates anti virus and anti spam products.testing was on spam catching capacity, low false positives and a benchmark known as the Honey Pot. It was rated at better than 96.85% SC or spam catching capacity. That makes it one of the best players in the top league!

Virus Bulletin has built up a solid reputation in providing independent advice on all kinds of malware and junk mail of course.

Resources: Virus Bulletin, Sunbelt Software, Vipre@email security, Honey pot tests

Take Care Malware Ahead!

2010-01-12T17:55:00.002+05:30

Malwares have proliferated, that is no news! So it is natural for users aware of the threat to look for remedies. That seems to have started a new market segment, that of fake anti-virus solutions. These rogue anti-virus do nothing more than swindle you a couple of tens of dollars. More dangerous one will collect the credit card details and take you to the cleaners. This has been a big business last year and topped $250 million according to some estimates.

There are several ways they sell you the fake / rogue stuff. The latest seems to be targeting Gmail groups. Posts offering fun videos are offered. If you should click on those links the fake anti virus gets downloaded and you are stuck. The most damage is the clean up of your account balance. At the least you'll have to go through the hassles of cleaning up your machine and rebooting the OS and all the rest.

End of the year, Beginning of another

2010-01-04T09:36:00.004+05:30

2009 finally went away, in came 2010. As you age, depending on the time spent on this planet, years pass by at a faster rate. It was just the other day 2009 was born, now it is in the past already. This is usually the time one looks at what was good during the year and what were not so good. You get a proliferation of all those top10 and top5 stories.

Few things that are likely to happen include eBooks. This is the first time that Amazon sold more eBooks that the printed version. Couple that with new readers coming on the market with easy access to content, it is not hard to see why many are predicting that eBooks are finally going to change the way our habits change. Emails are one such habit changing phenomenon. From pen and paper people went to email writing via the keyboard and the mouse. Will the printed books decline as the snail mail has! Like the music players you would now be able to carry a whole library with you. Like the music player again, you have easy access to new content easily. Whether it actually happens or not, I guess I'd like to see it happen.

This year also saw the beginning of something that I'd like to see happen. This is the wireless charging of batteries. This would be really convenient. The other thing happening with wireless also is a welcome thing. These interconnections that can now be done wirelessly, as with Bluetooth would be very convenient if we could get rid of all these messy jumble of interconnecting cables!

Scareware/ Rogueware/ Fake Anti-Virus

2009-11-21T21:07:00.003+05:30

Call it what you will, these operate the same way. Their aim is to somehow download a virus that will lock up your PC and force you to buy some fake anti-virus. What's worse is when you give out the credit card number to buy the fake stuff, you are vulnerable to further exploits. How about ransomware as a category!

There seems to a spurt in these activities currently. Anybody scares you to make you buy something should not succeed at all. It is a clear sign that what's behind the malware is mal-intentions. Stay away from them. We give way to temptations. Most common strategy is to promise you something tempting and drop in the initial seed. All the scaring/ rogueish activities then start.

So one solution is not to give in to temptation. Forget those offers of a full length movie that has been released just a couple of days back. May be they offer you the documentary on Michael jackson or whatever. Do not, do not give in to temptation unless you know the site for sure. The other strategy is to have a legitimate ant-virus installed, have it updated constantly and have your OS patched up.

eReaders are at a Turning Point!

2009-11-03T20:58:00.002+05:30

There's strong speculation that eReaders will break into the league of needed gadget from the mostly curiosity and novelty value it had so far. There are several contenders now. What used to be Kindle and Sony reader territory has several other devices now. Even Barnes & Noble has a device that they hope will push sales of their large eBook catalog.

Though I have not used one personally, I am kind of ambivalent about the device. I am not averse to reading a lot of PDFs on the screen. I have not been reading paper books, not too many of them, recently. So, probably lost touch with the curling up with book feeling! I can imagine a reasonably light device without the CRT or LCD glow, book sized can be good. Obtaining the book I want is easy with these devices. particularly if connections with large libraries are available, I can see that this can become the future many in one text book of choice.

Will it happen this year! It has been about to happen type for a while. I am not sure it will happen this year. But I do expect it will happen. There are quite a few good points for it, particularly with the electronic ink version of displays.

Renewable Resources

2009-10-20T12:20:00.002+05:30

It was in the fifties and possibly sixties that India took to irrigation on a large scale. Deep tube-wells became a boon as electricity started reaching wider areas. The thing worked so much so that we had a green revolution. Food shortages were gone. Tube-well and electricity, particularly free electricity for farmers became a political, vote gathering tool.

Recently NASA satellites discovered that the water table has gone down so much that there is o way we can catch up. Meaning the water table will keep going down and we will soon have problem with water required for irrigation as well as basic needs.

We have plenty of rainfall during monsoon yet there are no effective ways to recharge this water table. It just goes to cause floods by the end of the rains. How do we renew this resource, particularly when we do get a lot of water that can do the job. Rain harvesting, connecting the rivers and such other schemes have been talked about, but nothing much has happened! Unless we can get something done in a decade or two the water shortage is going to get real!!!!

Intel 4004 and the PC Revolution

2009-10-15T10:56:00.002+05:30

I wrote an article on how the PC revolution would not have happened if the Intel 4004 had not come on the scene! It is really curious how some major changes come along due to something that was not really designed to make it happen! Intel was out to design a programmable calculator chip-set. The designers happened to take a decision to make the chip-set a general purpose processor like. How ultimately the Japanese company failed to use the set but Intel had the wisdom to have right to the chip-set.

Even at that time nobody really though these chips could be used to make a computer. Initially these were targeted towards another flexible method of designing random logic. The 4004 evolved into 4040, then 8080, 8085 and 8088. 8088 straddled the external 8 bit world with an internal 16 bit world.

In comes IBM decides to design a computer using the 8088. Not that there were no attempts at making small computers earlier. There were quite a few that used the 8085 and used the CP/M operating system. How IBM contributed to the PC revolution was the decision to make the design available to everyone that wanted it. That started the attack of the clone brigade and the PC revolution was born. They are everywhere today, including homes. Possibly more than on in some homes. Ever wonder what would have happened if the PC had not arrived!

Smart Metering

2009-10-13T10:31:00.004+05:30

Smart metering of electricity consumption has become quite popular over recent times. Texas Instruments has just announced a new set of their ultra low power processors, the MSP 430 family that suits this application. These new processors in the F471xx, Fx461x and F44x serieses cater to the front needs very well with the array of analog resources they have on-board. Read about the 430 family here.

They are able to provide better than 0.1 percent accuracy for precise energy measurements. The ultra low consumption of these units helps with the battery life. Tamper proofing is possible with offered features.

Lag in Current Information and What's Taught at College

2009-09-09T20:49:00.003+05:30

I was commenting elsewhere about the lag in information becoming available and their appearing on navigation maps. It is sad that we can get up to the minute update on traffic conditions on roads but cannot get information about if a particular road exiests at all. Driving into a lake is a real possibility!

Since starting to teach at a college in the Computer Science and Engineering department, I find similar lag in what's happening in the industry and what's taught at colleges. The institute I teach in follows syllabus of West Behgal University of Techmology (WBUT). The syllabus changes but not fast enough, I guess. I started teaching advanced operatings system in the Computer Science and Engineering department( parts) and Distributed Computing in the IT department. While both are advanced courses they do not have any way of appraising students of the latest happenings in the OS arena and related areas. There is no way of introducing the concepts of Chrome or the Snow Leopard that is happening now. Windows 7 is almost upon us. There is a lot of activity in the server virtualization and if Cloud computing catches on then the whole computing eco-system is going to see some wholesale changes. Very quick updates of the courses are called for. Some short-term measures could be useful. Like getting students to listen to co-curricular talks on such frontier topics.

Koobface can do Ugly Things to You!

2009-08-18T08:12:00.000+05:30

Koobface is a worm that has been around for about a year now. It has spawened a few variants during this time and getting smarter in enticing you to click on links he offers. How these worms work is basically similar. It comes as a offer to view a video from a friend of yours. If you click on the link, you are asked to get a plug-in. Anything you do beyond this step is filled with danger.

If you click to download, the worm downloads itself, though you get a error message. It'll use your friends list at a social website such as the MySpace, Facebook and so on and send out the enticing message to all of them, mch as a mail worm would.

Besides infecting others, the nasty piece of software stays on your machine and can download other malware and make your machine part of a botnet. So do not clcik on a request to view a video from what looks like a friend- unless you are absolutely sure.

Analog TV Switch Off

2009-07-31T11:28:00.002+05:30

This happened sometime in middle of Jun in US. This was one milestone that passed sort of quitely, though initially there was quite a bit of noise about it. getting the set to box that was needed and federal subsidy on that etc. created some confusion.

Until TV manufacturing catches up and the insides of the TV is all digital, the TV box has been reduced to a high tech display box only. DTH and digital cable also operate with distinct STBs and use the TV box as a video display only. Somehow feels like such a waste. When are they going to getintegrated!

Google Chrome OS is Here

2009-07-20T15:11:00.002+05:30

So what, you might say. Looks like there is a lot going for it. Even if it is a reasonable alternative to the fat, sluggish Windows, it'd be attractive to many. Windows 7 apparently take away many of the objections to Windows OS in general, the OS is too heavy in general.

Chrome OS touts speed as one of the major USPs. If the speed of the Chrome browse was any indication, speed in the OS operation would really be welcome. But there are some questions. If the primary purpose is to get you to the net very fast, will it be good as a offline OS! Google may be trying to attract people to get to the office productivity suite they have in the form of Google Docs?

While that may well be the new paradigm, until it catches on completely, you need the old faithful desktop/laptop grinding out the office solutions. Will Chrome OS good for that! May be for netbooks like devices at a lower productivity scale but for a full fledged notebook!

The cloud centric view of computation is still clouded. I mean to take that up in a future opost. I have had comments on one of my posts from back in Feb about recent security disasters. This has held bak the cloud computing reaching the cloud 9 anytime soon. Even the earlier models of this paradigm the ASP, application service providers suffered badly duringthe last recession of 2000, better known as the dot com bust.

Outstanding Pocessor From Freescale India Design House

2009-07-04T15:23:00.002+05:30

Freescale announced a very well connected processor recently. Well connected in the sense it tries to fulfill the demand for providing ever more connectivity. The desired feature list was

• Version 2 ColdFire variable-length RISC processor core
• Pipelined Enhanced Multiply-Accumulate (EMAC) Coprocessor
• Cryptography Accelerator Unit (CAU) Coprocessor
• Real Time Debug Support with 6 hardware breakpoints
• On chip memories, including 64KB dual-ported SRAM on CPU internal bus and up to 512KB dual ported Flash on CPU internal and IPS bus
• Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0 Host and On-The-Go
• Fast Ethernet Media Access Controller (FEC)
• FlexCAN 2.0B Module• Minibus• Queued Serial Peripheral Interface (QSPI)
• 3 UARTs
• I2C bus interface
• Clocks and timers, including Independent Watchdog timer and Real Time Clock (RTC), 4-channel 32-bit timers with DMA support, 2-channel Periodic Interrupt Timer and 8-channel PWM timer• Dual 4 channel 12-bit A-to-D converter with Simultaneous Sampling• Random Number Generator
• Up to 96 General-Purpose I/O

This is the MCF 52xx Coldfire( Code named Kirin 3) processor from Freescale and seems to have been designed completely in their off-shore unit in India. From the time Texas Instruments set up a captive unit way back, Indian engineers have been contributing in IC development. Several initiative are supposedly on currently at different design centers in India. This is a kind of first for the country's design engineers.

Computer Revolution Would not Have Happened Without the 4004

2009-06-22T20:20:00.004+05:30

License of Intel Corporation's 4004 microprocessor historical material

Intellectual property release for non-commercial use applies.

The Intel 4004 completed 35 years in 2006. This was the first processor on a chip. That this processor was the beginning of a revolution, there's no doubt looking back today. Nobody had seen this as the beginning of things like the multi core processors we see today. When it was being marketed initially, these dinky little things were seen as an alternative means of designing digital circuits. The replacement of random logic as they called it back then.

These three gentlement started it all. But I do not know if they realized the full implication of their creation back then. Engineers Marcian E. "Ted" Hoff, Federico Faggin, and Stan Mazor came up with a design that involved a set of four chips called the MCS-4.Which is what happens i guess, most often. Nobody realized the phone will become what it is today. Additionally these engineers from Intel were actually tasked to create custom chips for a printing, programming calculator Busicom* 141-PF printing calculator. Instead of creating a dozen custom chips specifically for the calculator, they proposed a generalized solution. The product was never manufactured. But Intel had the foresight to buy rights to the chip from the Japanese calculator vendor. The rest, as the saying goes is history.

It is interesting to look at the original ad that launched it all. "

"The Intel ad in the November 15, 1971 issue of Electronic News introduced the Intel 4004 microprocessor and declared "Announcing a new era of integrated electronics." That programmable chip, the Intel 4004, became the first general-purpose microprocessor on the market—a "building block" that engineers could purchase and then customize with software to perform different functions in a wide variety of electronic devices".

New SPEC benchmarks for Server Performance

2009-06-16T11:58:00.004+05:30

When I was working with HCL back in late eighties is when I first heard about the SPEC benchmarks and whetstones and Dhrystones and so on. Those days issues were comparatively simply. We had to just establish that the supermini we were selling with Motorola 6800x running Unix were performing better than our competitors Intel based machine.

Things have change a lot since then. Many may not even recognize the category supermini. A powerful server today may contain processors with multiple cores, huge amount of cache and correspondingly really large system memory. This new set of benchmarks strives to measure the perormance of these servers. it also measures the enrgy efficiency, that is increasingly gaining importance to users. The set of benchmarks SPECweb2009 is a updated version of the 2005 benchmarks.It does not measure the multiple blade processor based servers though, not yet.

eCommerce, banking and support are the thre workloads defined. With the eCommerce workload performance is measure at different levels at performnce per watt available for the given server.

Apple's New IPhone, the iPhone 3G S

2009-06-11T11:30:00.005+05:30

Apple has come out with a new upgrade to its pathbreaking iPhone and the buzz is it is much faster. Along with a carrier contract it costs only$99! That too is nice! That's for a 8 GB model, it comes in 16 GBand a 32 GB model.It seems to have a whole array of features.

Starts with the camera. 3 MP camera is nothing to write home about. But video recording is easy. What's really new is that it has a macro focus mode. This must be a first in phones! Upload the videos to YouTube easily.

Quoting from Apple news release " iPhone 3G S offers incredible speed and performance, on average up to twice as fast as iPhone 3G, so you can render web pages quicker and launch applications faster. iPhone 3G S takes advantage of the OpenGL ES 2.0 standard for stunning high-quality 3D graphics, making mobile gaming and other graphic intense applications better than ever. iPhone 3G S is not only faster, but with longer battery life you can watch more videos, listen to more music, browse the Internet or keep using your favorite apps even longer. The new iPhone 3G S also supports 7.2 Mbps HSDPA for faster networking speeds."

Voice control manages many things including the music player and you can ask things like " What's playing right now?" There's a screen reader for visually impaired.

You can connect to the app store of course.

Apple has amazed once again!

Netbook reads eBooks

2009-06-02T21:06:00.002+05:30

I have talked about prduct definitions changing today elsewhere. Here's another variation. You get screens in netbook form factor that can do triple duty. two of the modes of thedisplay are the regular full color LCD backlit and a display you could read in sunlight. What relates to this product outline blurring issue is the third mode of epaper or the ebook reader mode. If you can do that the netbooks can read ebooks and who needs a Kindle only for reading eBooks!

According to the company, Pixel Qi, their 3Qi display screens should start appearing in netbooks very soon. Watch thi space!

Metrics & Measurements in Software

2009-05-04T08:49:00.002+05:30

I was writing a paper on the state of the software metrics & measurements. Looking at the situation that even now we do not have very clear measuments in software, we really do not understand it. What that means is we do not have enough theretical understanding of the development process to be able model it. Hence we donot have measurements either that clearly give me a means to measure what is happening. There is no means then, without a model, to hypothesize scenarios. Hence we do not have the ability to predict and control the development process. No wonder we have so muc trouble with software projects.

We keep calling the discipline the software engineering process but we are far from the engineering precision one would expect with any other engineering disciplines though.

Things to Watch Out For!

2009-04-11T23:46:00.004+05:30

There are couple of very interesting things happening. But, may be they are the menifestation of the same quest! TI's MSP 430, Intel's Atom and several other truly low power processors are driving the quest for ever more power savings. Other is cloud computing! That's driven by virtaulisation, savings on power and cooling and life time costs of IT. Bothe clearly indicate that doing more with less power is an issue everybody wants to achieve.

In the processor series the latest power house entrant is the Intel Xeon 5500 and ther's been a lot buzz in the blogosphere. Similarly the cloud manifesto, various cloud based services, concerns, worries are getting debated quite regularly. With its inherent advantage the cloud computing is going to be adopted sooner rather than later. Similarly these low, micropower processors are going to be everywhere!

The Embedded Ethernet

2009-03-30T21:03:00.002+05:30

Finished up writng on the subject recently for a developmental site. Some time earlier had written on another science & technology site about a security camera that you can access on the net and get the video clips. Which meant you need to be able to find the device on the net. In other words it has to have a unique IP address and a simple web server on it. Embedded Ethernet is all about this. Enabling devices to have this capability. I can imagine this happening on a large scale!

It'll be nice to have devices that tell you about itself via email for example. ou may have a vending machine that tells you when it has run out of a particular item. By a short extension you can have a fridge that'll tell you what to get from the store on your way back from work. There should be an opportunity here somewhere of enable net features in a modular way. You just plug-in one item and you are net ready!

Lenovo Pocket Yoga, Apple Netbook & an Interesting Angle

2009-03-23T21:26:00.004+05:30

Lenovo released some pictures of one of their concept devices the Lonovo Pocket Yoga. They claim that the device was prototyped
about 2 years ago. It not only is a netbook but double as a tablet too. They are not likely to productionaise it , at least not yet. Whay talk about it then!

Computerworld has an intersting angle to that. Mike Elgan says in this article that this is for staking the claim to this innovation before anybody claims it. The innovation being they decided to fit the display to a comfortable key board rather than trying to fit a keyboard to a coconventioal sized display unit. Sensing that the Apple may introduce a netbook in this kind of form factor, this is a pre-emptive bid by Lenovo from taking away the credit for the innovation. Apple did that with all display, no keyboard kind of mobile phones when they introduced the iPhone. There were other phones in the market that were all display, by the time iPhone arrived. But nobody seems to remeber that.

Cisco Blades

2009-03-21T10:11:00.003+05:30

Cisco and networking gera has almost been synonymous. There are competitors such as Juniper but Cisco is the name that has highest recall when networking is mentioned. They have been happy supplying the computing infrastructure so far. Now they want to be the suppliers of the computing engines too that run on the infrastructure they supply. Data centers, the servers are the targets now. This is one area which used to be identified with Wintel servers, IBM and Sun and the Virualization software vendors like the VMWare.

Virtualization is a big deal in the data centers, if for nothig else other than increasing the utilization of the servers. blades have an advantage of adding to the resources easily. Now Cisco wants to address this product. What kind of hardware this is going to be is not known clearly yet. If Cisco products have to make an inroad into the market shares of existing players it'll have to have some very clear USP that appeals to the Data center owners/operators. There's some interesting things happening in the marketplace already. IBM is reported to be trying to buy Sun. Given Sun's curren woes it might just come off!

India To Introduce Smart Passports

2009-03-17T22:40:00.003+05:30

Infineon technologies has announced on 3 Mar 2009 that it'll be supplying the chip cards for contactless security microcontrollers for India's smart passports. In the introductory phase some 30,000 passports are going to be issues to diplomatic passport holders by Sep 2009. It'll be later expanded to the general passports too. India issues some 6 million passports a year.

The information printed in the passport booklet is recorded into this security chip system that is housed on the back cover of the document. It is supposed to facilitate quicker immigration procedure as authentication of the travellers antecedants are instantaneous. Frauds become that much difficult too.

1080p HD processing with TI TMS320DM365

2009-03-12T19:19:00.004+05:30

High definition video at 1080p takes quite a bit of processing. If you have to manage the compression/decompression of MPEG4 with H.624 or the AVC or the part 10, as it is variously called, takes additional work if it is do done in real time. Texas Instruments just just announced a processor, a system on chip that is directly addressed at this niche. All the video equipment you can think of, the recoders, the LCD TVs of this world are all going to need this kind of component.

TI has been building up to this kind of capabilities for a long time now. Ever since they introduced the Da Vinci architecture they have been creating a ecosystem of development tools and production components. The ecosystem includes relevant software tools as well.

This particular chip is ARM926EJ-S core, 2x video image co-processors that can take care of H.264, MPEG4, MPEG2, MJPEG, JPEG and WMV9/VC1 codec operations. it has other useful subsystems on the SoC device that include video processing engines, external memory interface, ADC, Flash memory as well as flash card interface, DMA engines, USB ports and 64 bit general purpose counters.

Any designer contemplating this kind of HD video systems need to take a close look at this device. It is a serious conteder in this space.

Read Books On Mobile

2009-02-10T11:00:00.004+05:30

Google has released a slew of products during the first week of Feb. When one is out on the road, there are often situations when you are waiting for flight or train or something or the other. It would be nice if you had access to books! What if you had ana access to 1.5 million books! You could, for example, download any of those and read it! It's possible now with the Books on mobile service of Google. They have converted 1.5 million books in public domain for access by mobile devices! They are fully searchable too.

You are not too comfortable to read on those small displays of the mobile phones? Many of us are not. Over time that is changing. Displays are getting bigger, it cannot get too big of course if it has to retain the advantage of mobile phone. Let's see what happens, how our reading habits change or some change happens on the mobile devices!! Right now, iPhone and Android phone only are supported.

1 TB SSD, 2 TB HDD and G Drive !

2009-02-03T23:05:00.003+05:30

Solid state drives are fast closing the capacity gap. It has an inherent advantage of higher reliability to start with but the capacity has been a problem. But it seems to be closing fast While a TB drive in HDD came only some time back, SD capacities in the hundreds of GB got announced in quick succession in the recent past. Comes the announcement of a TB SSD now in 2.5 inch format in the CES in Jan this year.

Seagate announced 2 TB drives now in the HDD space. The increments in capacities seem to have slowed down now. There's not much you could do with the spindle rotation, seems to have stabilized at 7200 maximum. Access times have reached a plateau. So, when would the SSDs take over! Soon, very soon but HDD s are not going to fade away anytime soon. There'll be quite a long overlap period.

Whichever technology takes over, how's the usage going to change? Are we going to keep a bunch of these monster drives by the table top or we'll store them somewhere on the cloud! There's a lot that is stored today on the cloud alread. Will Google's GDrive take that over? Is it coming at all? Seems like it is!!!!

Androids Are Here!

2008-09-24T12:30:00.003+05:30

The Google Android OS based phones have been announced. T-Mobile the service provider, Google and HTC together announced on Sep 23 the the new phone G1 at New York. The biggest feature touted is the open source of the application that brings in the opportunity for third party applications on the base released now. What the base does have is the touch screen with gesture based interface with a few tweaks like "long press" or touching an icon for a while opening the related menu. It has a browser that is built on webkit and is called a Chrome light. You can read Word, PDF and Excel documents on the phone. Integration with MS Exchange is yet to happen though. Many Google applications like Gmail, Google maps, you tube, Flickr and Gtalk are already available. Access to Amazon MP3 store and Android application stores are built in too. The phone slide out a full keyboard.

Where does the openness lead to? One could change basic applications too. Would it lead to chaos! We shall see!

Androids Are Coming!

2008-09-23T22:11:00.002+05:30

Not the androids that are out to take over our world but the Android OS for mobile devices are likley to come out soon! Some features it is likely to give it an edge over iPhone are speculated to be as follows. iPhome is weak in IM and Andy is likely to have that covered quite well. Android is likely to have support for video recording at the ready too. A major geeky attraction would be the ability for users to tinker with open source Android. A genuine keyboard support may work around a virtual keyboard for many. Video recording out of the box is likely to be available. Support of better resolution on the phone camera is likely too. One of the mahor grumble against iPhone has been the locked in state of the phone, Andy could make a unlocked phone available out of the box too. Stero Bluetooth and MMS support couyld be there too, but then how attractive they are as features is anybody's guess! Flash/Java support is going to be there too looks like. Being open source the Android should not give you chained down feeling in any form too!!

Intel Into SSD Game, Debuts 80 GB Device

2008-09-15T21:17:00.002+05:30

Further signs, if you needed one, of SSD devices being mainstream is here. Intel announced two 80GB devices the X18-M and the X25-M in 1.8 and 2.5 inch formats. While HDD densities are spurting too, they had reached 80 GB capacities only a few years back. Whereas the catch up gang is evolving really fast. Real life SS drives have started coming out only in last couple of years. It were the UMPCs that started using them, now they are being made available for laptops and desktops now.

However, interestingly HDD capacities also have gone through 160 GB, 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB avatars very very quickly. So death of the HDDs are not imminent by any stretch of imagination. Similarly there are lot of applications where SSDs are going to take over and expect to see both the storage technologies parallely for a long time!

eBook Readers Are Here To Stay

2008-09-04T18:05:00.002+05:30

Amazon's Kindle was quite a hit. Now they have improved version in the market. There's news another consumer electronics maker launching a reader in the UK. He too is backed by a services from which readers can download books besides being some supplied on the reader at the time of purchase.

Will all this obsolete the paperback or books in general! There are two views as usual. Looking at the download model that supplies songs to us and delivers video to us it is easy to imagine that will become a dominant mode of delivery of yet another thing turning digital. Whether hlding the reader and reading from it is going to become a comfortable experience will decide what prevails. But then take into account the generation that is comfortable with the whole digital ecosystem. The people who are comfortable in downloading audio, viewing YouTube and so on. And they can tilt the balance quite easily. But like most things in this world both will co-exist. In what ratio is the question.

4 Cores to 6 Cores Then What!

2008-08-20T21:07:00.003+05:30

Intel announced its about to release the Dunnigton processors that are 6 core Xeons aka known as X7460 and are built using the 45 nm technology. Intel as well as independent analysts expect a nice(significant) performance increase in the 6 core avatar. What is not known right now is the cost to this performance increase in terms of power consumption as well as heat dissipation. Both of these are concerns of server builders to whom these chips are directed. It'd be a concern of the consumers of the servers built with the Dunningtons, the builders of the data centers. Watch this space for further developments!!

2008-08-19T15:00:00.004+05:30

On the one hand we have this trend towards very small ultra mobile PCs that are smallscreen, keyboard and so on to make them highly portable may be even pocketable. Besides the now famous ASUS Eee series we have almost all other major makers joining in. Even Lenovo has a Ideapad S10 that is in this category. Interesting a totally contrary trend has started to take hold. Laptops with really large screens. Acer Aspire 8920 with a 18.4" and HP Pavillion HDX with 20.1" screen are two examples. These large screen heavyweights are computing heavyweights too and have fast graphics capability making them suitable for CAD, sysmography and such other compute and graphics intensive work. With the large screens these systems can double for a presentation systems and completely avoiding the need for a projector in small groups.

Right now the share of the market these PCs command is very small but according to an IDC projection is set to cross 1.2% of the market or 3.9 million units by 2012! So watch out!

It's Set Top Box Time Again!

2008-08-12T21:13:00.003+05:30

It was mid Jun and things developed fast and consequently I am back at STB development again! Quite a few interesting angles to it! First off, it is a transitory product by all means. But things have gotten so complicated that will we ever see a true digital TV! CAS systems, middleware systems used on the STB has gotten on so many different ways that seeing a standardized way of doing these things looks far away. Unless these stabilize there's no simple way of integrating this little box into the TV unit. We continue doing strange back and forth anlog to digital conversions back and forth.

Another interesting part of this related to content is how people are interested in movies uniformly all over the globe! There's a push to deliver movies to get the consumers the feel of playing movies from a DVD player. In other words streaming them so that it starts playing almost as soon as the consumer chooses it. High enough bandwidth will make it easy. But then that is not easily available all round, in our country in particular. There are several solutions to get around these problems floating araound. We too should be getting to work in the same area. It would be interesting to see how all these shape up!

ARM7-based MCU with FPGA Interface

2008-07-02T15:34:00.004+05:30

Atmel has announced an ARM7 based micro-controller AT97CAP7E that has an FPGA interface to multilayer AHB bus. Obvious question is, what good is that? With this configuration the function implemented in the FPGA looks like an internal function implemented on the MCU. Typically FPGA interfacing has to be done through EBI interface subject to control timie overhead for manipulating the EBI. Typical functions such as LCD controllers, DSP algorithms, and proprietary customer IP are some examples of what could be done. AHB or the advanced highspeed bus aka ASB, the advanced system bus is the implementation of the Advanced Microprocessor Bus Architecture(AMBA) floated by ARM and now licensed to others. This is the ARM's version of on chip bus for silicon on chip devices. Competitors are IBM CoreConnect and Silicore Wishbonebus systems.

About Vista

2008-05-13T20:35:00.003+05:30

Business Week reports many corporate majors may just skip the Vista and switch to a new OS only when Windows system 7 is available in couple of years from now. "We're considering bypassing Vista and going straight to Windows 7," says GM's Chief Systems & Technology Officer Fred Killeen. vista needs a lot of system resources and by the time the PCs in the enterprise can be enhanced it'll be time for the next version anyway.

Vista acceptance has been a problem right from the start. OEM's had to start shipping ready to install XP discs also along with systems they shipped with Vista. Now, as the above shows, large corporates are really wary of the switch the Vista is so bloated. What exactly is the reason for this bloat! Is it just some sloppy software management or are the reasons are deeper. This Gartner report seems to suggest the problem is actually deeper. It claims the OS is "collapsing" and MS needs to do drastic things to take care of the issues. The Computer World report says " Calling the situation "untenable" and describing Windows as "collapsing," a pair of Gartner analysts yesterday said Microsoft Corp. must make radical changes to its operating system or risk becoming a has-been." Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald of Gartner think "Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts."

SWF And FLV Formats Become Open From Now On!!

2008-05-02T20:25:00.003+05:30

Adobe announced May 1 the formation of the Open Screen Project. As the first step towards this initiative they made these two popular formats open. The stated objectives of this industry alliance are;

- Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
- Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
- Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
- Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for
devices free

That is clearly an attempt at pre-empting and making the Flash to be the pre-dominant platform for Internet content delivery. But then, they have the dominant position anyway. So the initiative should be an welcome one for developers, content delivery organizations and so on.

The consortium already shows a mix of these interested parties. The organizations involved as per the announcement include "Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless. The project is dedicated to driving rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. Also supporting the Open Screen Project are leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to reliably deliver rich Web and video experiences live and on-demand across a variety of devices."

Nvidia 9800GTX Revisited

2008-04-22T22:46:00.003+05:30

Though my first reaction was of being wowed, looking at reviews that have actually tested these cards, this does not look like such a step up! Which is strange to say the least. When such new generation cards come out one would expect significant gains in performance. However, this does not seem to offer anything new that is substantial.

For example these cards use the dame GPU cores from the previous generation that has no change in the instruction set or the stream processors. rather than being a high end device, Tom's Hardware Review feels is "just another version of G92". Truly strange!!

XP+Eee PC- Is UMPC getting more mainstream!?

2008-04-16T19:33:00.003+05:30

Over the recent past I have mentioned about how UMPCs are being seen more and more. Now comes news that a Eee PC version with XP loaded has been released. That certainly provides the little wonder with a familiar face! The CEO of ASUS expects fully 60% of these devices to become the Widows machines. The review is not all that good. But then comes news that MS is ready to a tailoring job for the little kid on the block. While the standard XP pro makes heavy weather of managing the small display size, in general it id a little heavy for the small machine. What we can expect to see is a lightweight build of XP and tailored to fit these UMPCs.

IBM Does It Again!

2008-04-11T07:04:00.007+05:30

IBM seems to have done it again. They just announced a supercomputer(Power 575 "hydro cluster" supercomputer) built with the latest 5 GHz Power6 microchip. As quoted on Engadget , according to IBM, that processor should deliver "two-to-three times the performance per core of comparable HP or Sun processors," while still requiring only about the same amount of energy as previous Power5 processors. Which I'd think is a considerable achievement.

Sun spokesman was not impressed though. The spokesperson cited sun's efforts to get optimum performance through multi-threading rather than raw horse power.

While multi-threading does help to squeeze out the last drops of computing power, you cannot get what's not there in the form of raw power. Raw power has to increase to get the higher computing power always, you can get the cream out with fine tuning on top of that later.

HP Joins The UMPC Rumble

2008-04-10T21:50:00.002+05:30

I talked about the ultra mobile PC or the mini notebook elsewhere recently. Looks like the game is gathering steam ans the heavyweights like HP also is not far behind! HP has jumped in with their 2133 Mini-Note PC, 9" display and magnesium alloy chassis with a starting price of $599 with Windows and $499 for Linux operating systems. According to C/Net the highlight are as follows.

The box has a C7-M 1.6 GHz processor, 2 GB RAM, 8.9 " TFT active matrix display. Nice things about it are its solid construction, stylish design and nearly full sized keyboard. But the negatives are fairly strong too; weak performance, unimpressive battery life, tiny touch pad etc.

Yet overall it is a nice balance of small size, comfort and functionality possibly would make this quite a favorite!!

Virtualization Vulnerabilities

2008-04-10T21:34:00.003+05:30

Virtualization is growing at about 40% a year. Eventually large amount of computation resources are going to be on virtual machines. Unlike physical machines a compromised virtual machine would mean vulnerability of several virtual machines hosted on one virtual server. So people are trying to think what could be possible problems.

Here are couple of them being talked about. One issue is if someone can take control of the "hypervisor" or the top level controller for the virtual machines on the server, it can siphon off data from several machines and yet remain almost invisible. The second scenario is that a virtual machine can simply be transferred electronically from one real server to another. Apparently such a machine in flight could be snagged and controlled. I personally do not understand the complete mechanism involved but expert point out the issues in the article mentioned.

Conclusion reached was that such attacks may not have happened yet but it'd be good if the developers of the virtualization technology can think about these ideas and try to ruggedize the machines/software against such possibilities.

Intel Developers Forum At Shanghai

2008-04-01T22:29:00.004+05:30

Intel Developers Forum is during 2 to 3 Apr at Shanghai, China. It'll be an interesting event and announcements coming out of the event would have long term impacts. Those will be very relevant to my interests. But what this post is about is an entirely different technological achievement of the humankind. Tom's Hardware Guide sent a team to Shanghai for the event. And they report here about the maglev train in Shanghai that travels at 301 kms/hr! They have posted a video clip of their ride, go see that. It's amazing! Particularly when it crosses another train on the tracks, it just takes couple of seconds before they cross each other!

Have read about the technology right from my childhood when it was more of a scientific fantasy. Now we have a real life system that's transporting people at this fantastic speed!! Amazing.

X48 From Intel

2008-03-25T23:30:00.003+05:30

Intel has introduced the X48 chipset for motherboards as Tom's hardware announced. The issue at discussion was if the chipset is bringing anything really new to the table. Overall finding is that it mostly is X38 features available now at a little better performance. Even the FSB 1600 support but even that was really there with the x38.

XMP memory mode does seem to be an added feature. The motherboard introduced with X48 chipset looked like the exact same one as the one using X38 set. Final conclusion seemed to be;

"The boards might not differ much from their X38 forerunners, but that hasn't prevented Intel from charging motherboard producers a price premium for the additional validation. Though a few manufacturers saw the price difference as a good reason to ignore Intel's latest offering, others saw an opportunity to use the higher-validated X48 Express to highlight their products' high-speed capabilities."

NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 Released!!!

2008-03-18T23:45:00.004+05:30

Engadget announced today that this latest powerhouse is ready for the market. I hopped over to the NVIDIA site to take a look. It claims "With two on-board GPUs, a GeForce 9800 GX2 based graphics solution is bar-none the fastest graphics card available". Once coupled with NVIDIA nForce motherboard, this is a perfect combination for a high powered gaming platform besides HD Blue-ray movies. The site cites specs that are truly impressive.

256 Stream processors, memory-1 GB, memory interface- 512 bits, memory bandwidth- 128 GB per second and the benchmark number is Texture fill rate at 76.8 billion/sec.
Wow!!!!

AMD Has 780G Chipset With Graphics Integrated

2008-03-10T23:38:00.003+05:30

AMD have succeeded in advanced graphics into CPU support chip-set to such an extent that a simple CPU chip can handle HD video processing on the motherboard quite easily. This is a kind of grounds up design since acquisition of ATI by AMD. The chip-set has integrated the graphics functionality of Radeon 3200. HDCP and HDMI capabilities were built into the chip-set families with the prior generation 690G.

It is simply the shape of things to come. Advanced graphics capabilities are required as displays get sophisticated and there's a demand from entertainment side of the business of supporting HD video. HDCP is getting a place of its own, that should reduce the stress levels of the mivie industry execs to a large extent. HDMI also is gaining popularity as the video connector of choice.

MSP430 Ultra Low Power Micro

2008-03-04T00:18:00.003+05:30

Texas Instrument's ultra low power micro family has a couple of new members. MSP430F261x and MSPf241x. The 261x and 241x serve as a high-end pin and function-compatible migration path for customers using the 64-pin F16x and F14x families.

On-chip memory has doubled to 120 kB, GPIO pin count is now 64 and performance has increased to 16 MIPS. In addition, there is 8 KB of RAM, 12-bit 200 kSPS ADC (two), 12-bit DAC, (two) USCI, DMA, MPY timer_A3/B7 and WDT+. These devices are compatible in price with their predecessors, the F16x and F14x.

The family is well suited for embedded applications such as Sensor systems, industrial control systems, handheld meters etc.

The family is quite large now and has a wide variety of resources in a range of configurations of the micro chip.These include

MSP430F2416: 92KB+256B Flash Memory, 4KB RAM
MSP430F2417: 92KB+256B Flash Memory, 8KB RAM
MSP430F2418: 116KB+256B Flash Memory, 8KB RAM
MSP430F2419: 120KB+256B Flash Memory, 4KB RAM
MSP430F2616: 92KB+256B Flash Memory, 4KB RAM
MSP430F2617: 92KB+256B Flash Memory, 8KB RAM
MSP430F2618: 116KB+256B Flash Memory, 8KB RAM
MSP430F2619: 120KB+256B Flash Memory, 4KB RAM

That gives a designers truly flexible choice to pick a device for a specific application. Watch this page for more news in future.

Best of CES and Trends They Represent

2008-01-21T19:50:00.000+05:30

I was looking at the best of CES awards here. As you all know the CES show, biggest consumer electronics show concluded recently at Las Vegas. Choice of best products in each category obviously has a weightage of latest concerns of consumers; whether the the choice is by a jury or a popular vote. Let's try and look at these and see if we could discern the trends.

Philips 42", LCD 1080p HDTV is a winner. This has a lot of power saving features, primarily the back-light dimming. Saving power is becoming a big deal after all.

Moto Rokr E8 phone. Mode changing through touch screen is a great feature on this. Touch screen seems to be every where and it's changing the way interaction happens with most personal devices, be it iPod like devices or phone.

A PC for the car! Azantec has built in-dash PC's that can handle GPS navigation, Blue tooth phone integration, audio and media playback . It was just waiting to happen and now Azantec has come along and created two product that do just that! Both models have Intel Core 2 Duo, 1.66 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB HDD and a DVD combo drive. 4 channel stero with 50 w power and a FM radio are managed by these machines. besides they are XM/Sirius ready, can be upgraded anytime. Trend wise, car navigation is becoming a requirement ever more. With a PC sitting in the car, I'm sure we'll see more applications meant for cars alone.

There are several other categories of products but there's one more product that certainly deserves a comment. In fact it starts a category of its own, that of do it yourself gadget. The lego of the gadget world if you like!

Bug labs has a platform with a processor onto which you could add several hardware gadget to roll your own. A digital camera, a GPS device and so on. Write you own gadget software and you are in business! Need a camera that records geographical location on the photos taken! That customisation is now easy!

CPU+GPU+CGPU!!!

2007-11-25T21:41:00.001+05:30

This was waiting to happen ever since AMD acquired ATI. "Fusion" chip that combines a CPU and a GPU on the same real-estate is going to be a huge step up in terms of performance. Super graphics and what that can do to graphics intensive computing like in Game, CAD/CAM and so on is going to be interesting to watch. While this is coming in 2008, Spider has already arrived. Spider is a combined main board with multiple hi performance graphics cards.

Apple's Leaping Leopard!

2007-11-25T20:35:00.000+05:30

About a month ago the latest version of OS x from Apple was released. Though the verdict was that there were no revolutionary changes, the version had 300 of evolutionary changes alright. Apple's fame UI got even more of a polish. Since starting my writing career, I got the opportunity to rewrite some blog posts on this topic. I am kind of surely turning into a fan of Apples machine. Having seen an apple machine around 1990, I turned an admirer. But one of it's machine did never looked close to being affordable. Wintel machine were prevalent all round in workplace too, besides these being the most popular machine it had the most applications running on them. So the occasion never arose nor I could afford an apple machine yet. I have gone through at least three of the wintel machines even at home by now.

But, I am really hoping I'll be switching to a Apple machine soon. Particularly now that Apple machines too are Intel based machines and runs the windows applications through the "boot camp" facility. Whatever I have read about the OS X it sure feels like a very interesting OS to use and I am kind of itching to get my hands on one of these!

Another Terabyte HDD, green too!

2007-10-19T20:56:00.000+05:30

WD has announced a 1 TB drive which is green in the bargain. While Hitachi came out with a 1 TB drive almost 5/6 monthsback, there has not been any other contender in the intervening period. Now comes this drive from the Western Digital. They achieve the power saving by controlled slowing up the spindle motor. So while it does save power it is not a peak performer. Which is to be expected. According to the artcle cited here the device could be seen as a large store for media files on your PC but not as the primary drive.

64 GB Solid state Drives

2007-10-14T19:54:00.000+05:30

Alienware announced the availability of a optional 64GB solid state storage on two models of its desktop line. Looks like the improvements on these all electronic drives is relentless. But then as a replacement of HDD devices the target to be chased is a fast paced target! While 64 GB would have been very respectable and close to state of the art in hard drives, things have moved fast in the recent past. Most PCs come as 160 GB hard drives as standard.

It is certain a huge amount of storage is going to be available with machines that we use everyday. Will the solid state devices replace the electromechanical devices is a difficult question to answer. Possibly, what’s going to happen is the lower end( by no means anything to turn up your nose at, if 64 GB is an example) will be ruled by the all electronic devices while the top end honors go to the electro-mechanical boxes.

802.11n Draft 2.0 is ready!

2007-10-11T22:58:00.000+05:30

There has been a lot of sqaubbling over it right from the start. Now things seem to be settling down. Draft 2.0 is out now. Draft standard conformance testing has already started and many manufacturers said they would have products ready soon. These they claim will have firmware upgrades when the final 3.0 draft is out.

HP Gaming PC

2007-09-29T22:47:00.000+05:30

That's a welcome change I think! HP has come out with a gaming PC.

HP has so far been known for solid engineering desktops, good general ones too, besides a long tradition of solid engineering. Now comes news that they have released Blackbird. A really highend machine squarely addressed to the gaming developers/gamers. And that's a welcome adventure for the company, I guess. Appears to the outcome of their recent acquisition of VooooPC.

500 GB(!!) External Drives are becoming Mainstream

2007-08-23T16:14:00.000+05:30

Tom's Hardware news letter date Aug 22 reports on testing of 500 GB external hard drives. Full test report here.

HDDs with this kind of capacity can easily store the deigital media we want to keep handy. Be it music video, podcasts, recording from PVRs and what have you. Being external it gives us a lot of felxibility in transferring data to and fro the home PC. Eventually a personall computer is seen by most players as the control center for the home entertainmaint networks of the near future!

What about the interfaces. USB is popular, present everywhere but can be quite a bottleneck at 30 MB/s transfer rates. Hig speed HDDs of today can transfer data at 3 times that rate quite easily. Firewire interfaces 1394a or b is an inprvement at rates of 400 and 800 Mbits/s data rates.

Even at these rates data transfer could get fairly extended, for example if you are trying to transfer a full length feature film even at MPEG 4 compression!!

eSATA seems to be a nice solution coming along. This does not require a PC to be connected to the drive to transfer data. Much like the OTG of USB standard that lets direct recording of data to the HDD from a imaging device or for transferring your music libraby to the MP3 player for example!!

Detailed comparative test data is available at the link indicated at the beginning.

H.264 CoDec SoCs

2007-08-07T22:59:00.000+05:30

H.264 video encoding/decoding entered the standard books fairly recently. Software implementations came out almost simultaneously, FPGA implementations followed. True hardware implementations in the form of SoCs are going to come out soon. What’s interesting is the different emphasis being put by different manufacturers.

Manufacturers expect a whole range of market utilizing different combinations of low power chips that handle low resolutions at say D1, other products aim full 1080p resolution even if at a power penalty. Some are targeting high frame rates beyond 30 to 40 frames.

There’s a kind of wait and see happening in the handheld video products. Unless some kind of majority views develop regarding resolution color depth etc, everyone would be hesitating to commit things in silicon I guess.

Security video applications seem to be becoming quite vibrant causing designers to look at low latency, quick error recovery and video stream multiplexing capabilities.

With the compression capabilities available with mpeg4 interesting things are bound to happen, we shall be watching!

(Ref EDN IC Design Newsletter, 2 Aug 2007)

(c) Debasis & Associates, 2007

How Dense Can You Get! How's 10cm X 7.2 cm!!

2007-07-01T12:06:00.000+05:30

An ultra small system board at 10 cm by 7.2 cm ( pico-ITX form factor) is amazing! Resources that are accommodated in that small space are a VIA C7 (1 GHz.) processor as well as VIA VX700 media processor. Media processor by itself is amazing too. It can process MPEG 2 and 4 as well as WMV 9 hardware decode and display acceleration at HDTV resolutions. 1 GB DDR II system memory supports the processors.

Miniaturization was possible because of real small footprint of these two processors, C7 at 21 square mm and the VX700 at 35 square mm, occupying a total board space of only 16.7 square cm.

Power consumption also is very low. The processor and the media processor consume 9 and 3.5 watts respectively. Combined with low power RAM the system board can run standard productivity and multimedia applications at a cool 13 w and that’s a big boon for embedded applications.

Video On Handhelds-Is It Going To Happen!

2007-05-25T19:49:00.000+05:30

Hardly any doubt it is going to happen. Question is when!

Bandwidth availability is an issue. Once the standard definition is handled, HD increases the demand by orders of magnitude. Problems peculiar to moving platform such as doppler effect etc has to be tackled of course. Huge amount of standardization has to happen too.

What applications will dominate? Network TV being broadcast over thus medium will happen of course. On demand download and replay is bound to happen too. In-line learning!!! I have a feeling that's going to happen too.

Finding defects in a Blink-Blink Testing

2007-05-02T15:15:00.000+05:30

This is what Micahel Bolton Has to say about blink testing (From a communication in Agile testing forum in yahoo groups).

"Blink testing is the practice of looking at data or behaviour while altering some dimension in which we're viewing it. Often, this involves removing some information that we might consider important in other observational modes. In that sense, blink testing uses a defocusing heuristic; many forms of testing emphasize focusing heuristics.

I (immodestly) claim credit for naming Blink Testing. That was in March of 2005; the name was inspired by Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink", and by James Bach showing me a couple of his variations on the technique, which he called "grokking" at the time. I don't claim credit for inventing blink testing; testers have been doing things like it forever. In fact, my claim of naming the technique is only a claim of independently thinking up the name and applying it to software testing. I wrote what I believe to be the first article published on blink testing in software, in Better Software Magazine's September 2006 issue."

One of the examples he cites there brings out clearly what he means by defocussing heuristics. Example follows here,

"My colleague James Bach once showed me a rapid testing technique that he had caught himself using. While investigating a hard-to-reproduce problem, he had taken a log file from a Web server and had pasted each line into a cell in Microsoft Excel. He used Excel’s conditional formatting feature to change the color of cells that contained a particular error message. He then zoomed out to a 25 percent view, making the actual data invisible, but we could still see regular repeating bands of color. When we noticed irregularities, zooming back in allowed us to see what they were. The pattern always varied just after a connection had been made to one particular server. Had we looked at the data carefully, at full size in black and white, it wouldhave been much more difficult to see the exceptions. We had changed the context in which we observed the data, and we saw the problems more easily by removing information."

Sounds like the forest and trees issues where one can miss the overall pattern due to close scrutiny to details. Also looks like a paradigm shift mentioned by Edward DeBono, looking at a problem from a different point of view.

An obvious question is what techniques to apply at what kind of situations? That, I believe, will have to come out of the experience and innovation of the tester.