Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

There were rumors (here and here for example) about Apple using an an Intel Atom for its next generation iPhone, well they seems to be wrong: According to this New York Time article who found this out …thanks to a linked-In profile! :

Wei-han Lien, the senior manager of Apple’s chip team, dished out the morsel on LinkedIn, saying he’s busy at work crafting an ARM processor for the next-generation iPhone.

PA Semi NYT article (relayed from Electronista and TUAW)

So Apple, thanks to the 300M$ PA Semi buyout is entering the application processor design, but why? :

For a quick recap the hardware architecture of a smartphone is now pretty standard :

• a "big" cpu sporting all the applications and the high level OS: the application processor
• a 3G/2G modem chipset connected to the application processor, on which the 3G/2G protocol stack is running.
• a mix signal chip for power management and analog to digital conversions
• depending on the modem, a RF chip (connected to the antenna )
• …many various chips (wifi, Bluetooth being the most prominent)

The answer may be as simple as COST: After the phenomenal amount of money spent on 3G chipset modem development the real hardware margin are no more on wireless chipsets, but on the application processor themselves: see the very successful Texas Instrument OMAP line, the Samsung Arm line and others, versus the low margin, high risk 3G/2G chipset business of Infineon for example, or EMP, TI, etc…Qualcomm is a different story with their enormous IPR revenues, around 5% (!) of a mobile phone cost.

By making its own application processor, Apple will retain those margins for itself, while buying modem from other sources…and looking at the iPhone+iPod+whatevernewmobiledevice volumes we are talking here of perhaps hundred of millions of devices a year!  SO the savings, compared to the 300M$ buyout will be quickly amortized.

Of course the other big bonus when doing its own processor is that you can cram in it all the hardware acceleration you need for ….your software, and when your processor will be associated with only ONE OS, the possibility for optimizations (power consumption and speed)  are way above what a generic purpose processor may offer.

Any comments?

Thomas

Ok exit the Motofone F3 here is the Sagem my150x : Today I had briefly this baby in hand from an insider. The screen in monochrome, but with a particular technology that looks like old LED based VCR. Notification icons are “hardware based” like the F3, menus are pretty simple and quite well readable with a good contrast, no T9 for SMS. I was impressed by the sturdy sleek and fashion design, and the really great tactile feeling of the case (really similar to the great smooth Samsung plastics).

But what is really amazing is its BOM: 16$ ! Some “rumors” are telling that it will be sold 29 euros in Carrefour. And it seems that in UK Orange to sell Sagem my150x pay-as-you-go phone for 10!

This is the first phone sporting the Infineon ULC mono chip…and this is great!

For further reading check the following reviews:

TrustedReviews – Sagem my150X and MobileGazette Sagem my150x

Flash 10: Hydra and AIF (Adobe Image Foundation) and Hardware Rendering [ draw.logic ]

Very interesting stuffs those days around UI. Adobe is PUSHING (is it big enough?) , and really trys to begin a direct MS WPF/SilverLight/.NET direct competitor… they even have a server part (for Flex).In this annoucement what I find particularly interesting is the following: From Adobe here is what AIF is:

The Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit (…) includes a high-performance graphics programming language (…), codenamed Hydra, and an application to create, compile and preview Hydra filters and effects. (…). It currently ships in After Effects CS3 and will be used in other Adobe products in the future. The next release of Flash Player, codenamed Astro, will leverage Hydra to enable developers to create custom filters, effects and blend modes.

Hydra is a programming language used to implement image processing algorithms in a hardware-independent manner. Some benefits of Hydra include:

• Familiar syntax that is based on GLSL, which is C-based
• Allows the same filter to run efficiently on different GPU and CPU architectures, including multi-core and multiprocessor systems in a future update
• Abstracts out the complexity of executing on heterogeneous hardware
• Supports 3rd party creation and sharing of filters and effects
• Delivers excellent image processing performance in Adobe products

At last usage of hardware! and with the recent annoucement of AMD licensing some ATI hardware IP to Freescale and Qualcomm…. this is coming to mobile phone and perhaps faster than we think.

The only issue for me is … that I don’t see a real use beside video encoding/decoding for now , but it will come.

Thomas

Hello all…

Last week I attended the Open Source in Mobile conference in Madrid, at which I could get a demo of the “One-Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) XO device from Jeff Waugh, a prominent figure of the GNOME project.

For those of you not familiar with this project, the “One-Laptop Per Child” foundation wants to bring laptop computers to schoolchildren in developing countries. I will not here dwell on the price or success of the device, but rather focus on its software and really innovative user interface.

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Hi all

For my first post here, I have decided to just be an aggregator, i.e. spare you the hassle of browsing through all these blogposts about the most-hyped CE product ever: the iPhone… now you have it all here summarised in neat bullet points.

Kudos to Engadget Mobile for their extensive review, The Register for their numerous and humorous articles, as well as iFixit for their step-by-step reverse engineering.

Also worth noting that there is now a very extensive entry for the iPhone on Wikipedia.

In short: it’s a great device in terms of usability and design (so long as you share Apple’s tastes), but suffers quite significant shortcomings when it comes to business productivity (notably due to its poor email application) and lack of capability to have 3rd-party applications installed.

/Guilhem

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Checkout this amazing Video from : Microsoft Surface Video – Touchscreen, Multi Touch Coffee Table – Behind the Scenes – Popular Mechanics

Official Microsoft web site

Ok, it not new, but really not so far from production

Diagram by Intoaroute

Something that really buzz me about those new kind of interfaces is obviously the “home” and “personal” application and services, but I see also some possible tremendous change for the software development : with the raise of multi-core, parallel programming will be mandatory, and to leverage this horsepower, a paradigm shift is needed, to break the C/C++/C#/php/ruby, etc sequential view. And this new paradigm may be graphical programming. See this LabView/QNX article or this one at DevX:

The U.S. government, through DARPA, had previously awarded contracts to proposals for High-Productivity Computing Systems. A major premise of this thrust is that the performance of computers is outstripping our ability to harness the power through programming. It is logical to conclude that we need better methods to program them, and DARPA had funded three research languages. All three programming languages are textual X10, Chapel, and Fortress. It seems that the research has run its course, and the answer is that the breakthrough opportunities fall short of the grand hope of catching up with computers. This just makes me wonder all the more if a graphical approach will ultimately be an avenue for a programming breakthrough.

Technologies like those multi-touch screen may bring a lot to the developer ability to dig and build his system….and it is needed: look how poor are the current graphical languages in the “graphical” and above all the user interaction aspect: (below a LabView screenshot)

First a A4 Electronic Sheet of paper by Philips/LG Technology, found via Clubic:

This sheet of electronic paper is based on the E-Ink technology, and is able to display 4096 colors, for a 180 line of sight… with a thickness of only 300 micrometers. Battery friendly the E-Ink technology is only consuming juice when display is changing.

Then this one from Sony (thanks I4U):

A completely different technology: OLED/organic TFT on a flexible substrate, size of 2.5 inch and a resolution of 120*160 pixel …and 16,7 millions colors.
100 cd/m2 brightness, 1,000:1 contrast ratio and 300 micrometers thickness.

Great , the E-Ink technology is hanging around for years now, but really it is, for me, the most credible replacement to paper … if it needs to be replaced after all: I don’t know for you but the majority of what I read is on screen (computer, smartphone, nokia tablet), and what is not … it is BDs , books where the reading experience of paper is hard to challenge.

The OLED one is really interesting : imagine a device where a big screen is rolled inside, and you only deeply it when needed (either a smartphone or a laptop…).

Some great things are coming….and just for fun: the Teleglass T3-F to watch TV when commuting

Found at Khronos.org



this is a big wow!
NVIDIA is joining the game: after all they know how to do clean “numerical” hardware, leaving RF to classical chipset vendors…and the phone part of a cellular is becoming more and more a feature like another. I may have some concerns about power consumption has historically it is not something Nvidia was used to care about