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iOS 7: A Big Win for Enterprise
A lot of people are talking about the new look of Apple iPhones and yesterday's official release of iOS 7 but what hasn't got much attention are the new features of interest to enterprise users.
Twice as Fast: New Standards Push System Performance
Performance may no longer be the focus of most chip announcements, but when you talk to the people in charge of connecting devices, performance still seems to be the key metric. At last week's IDF show, I saw the next version of the PCI interconnect, the new USB standard, new memory standards, and new video standards—all of which promise much higher speeds.
IDF 2013: Power, Not Performance, Now Reigns in Chipmaking
Performance matters, but power matters more. That's the big impression I took away from last week's Intel Developer Forum. While the emphasis on power efficiency has always been true for the makers of mobile processors, it's a relatively new direction for Intel, but it is evident in just about every product category.
IDF Recap: Intel Pushes Bay Trail Atom for Tablets, but ARM Pushes Back
Looking back over last week's Intel Developer Forum, I see a company that is trying to adapt to a declining PC market by creating a huge range of products designed to cover all sorts of computing devices from servers to PCs, tablets to phones, and data centers to wearable computing. The company's lead in process technology remains impressive. It is showing working 14nm chips at a time when no one else is yet showing working 20nm ones. But in all of the new markets, while the individual products are impressive, Intel is facing a variety of new and entrenched competitors that have some pretty cool technologies as well.
55 Years of Integrated Circuits: The Chip Changed Everything
It's not an anniversary that often gets notice, but today marks 55 years since the creation of the first integrated circuit by Jack St. Clair Kilby of Texas Instruments. In the time since, the chip has revolutionized electronics, underpinning all of modern information technology and consumer electronics from PCs to televisions, from radios to smartphones.
Intel Shows 14nm Broadwell, Points Toward Even Smaller Chip Processes
There have been a lot of interesting announcements at this year's Intel Developer Forum, ranging from new Xeon processors for data centers to Bay Trail for tablets. I'll be talking about many of these in later posts, but one of the most important announcements seems to have gone mostly overlooked: Intel showed working systems based on chips produced on a 14nm process at a point where the best process that anyone else has yet shipped is 28nm.
What's New in the iPhone 5S?
Apple would rather talk about experiences than performance, but walking out of yesterday's iPhone 5S and 5C launch, it's clear a big part of the positioning of the 5S in particular will be the phone's speed.
Xbox One Processor Detailed at Hot Chips, but Questions Remain
Microsoft gave details on the processors that will run its upcoming Xbox One at last week's Hot Chips conference, but I'm still left with more questions, specifically about how the processor will stack up to the one in Sony's upcoming PlayStation 4 and to existing PC processors.
AMD and Intel Discuss Processor Changes, But Big Moves Still to Come
While server chips get most of the attention at the annual Hot Chips conference, AMD and Intel used the occasion to talk about the chips they released earlier in the year while giving little more than teasers about the processors yet to come.
How Microsoft's Nokia Acquisition Makes It More Like Apple
Microsoft's announcement that it is purchasing the mobile phone division of Nokia will undoubtedly be a game changer in the mobile phone industry given Nokia's historic position in the market and Microsoft's ambitions. But for Windows Phone to emerge as a true third mobile alternative as opposed to an increasingly irrelevant afterthought, the combined company will have to move much more rapidly and become much more open-minded about changes. That's hard for any company, especially one in the midst of a huge acquisition and a departing CEO.
What's Next for Server Chips?
At this week's Hot Chips conference, the most interesting announcements were about high-end processors. These are designed for big Unix-based systems, but they show just how much power today's high-end chips can deliver. They aren't the kinds of systems that most of us run in our corporate server racks or that you see in big scale-out data centers, but rather are the ones that run mission-critical applications in large enterprises, or perhaps in high-performance computing situations.
Why We Should Give Ballmer Some More Credit
Reading the reactions to Steve Ballmer's announcement that he will step down as CEO of Microsoft sometime in the next 12 months, I was struck by the amount of vitriol directed at the man and at Microsoft. While I won't dispute that Microsoft has stumbled badly in mobile and online, you can't ignore the fact that the company has grown significantly with Ballmer at the helm. You can argue that the roots of Microsoft's missteps in those areas go back to decisions made years ago.
Why Hybrids or "Two-in-Ones" Don't Make The Cut (Yet)
While the concept is intriguing, the execution—and lack of apps, means they're still struggling to break through.
Lumia 1020: The Best Smartphone Pictures Yet
Let's start with the bottom line: The Nokia Lumia 1020 takes the best pictures I've ever seen from a relatively thin smartphone. I've been using the phone for the past 10 days or so and in many situations it did such a good job that I didn't need to carry my digital camera. It's far from perfect—I don't expect we will see any smartphone camera as good as a digital SLR any time soon—but it is pretty amazing.
RRAM: The Coming Alternative to Flash Memory
Yesterday, I wrote about the problems facing makers of traditional NAND flash memory, the kind of storage we use in our smartphones, tablets, and SSDs. Flash memory has grown tremendously over the past decade. Density has increased as prices have fallen rapidly to the point where it is now quite common to see small notebooks that use SSDs to replace hard drives and enterprise systems that use a lot of flash. This hasn't—and won't—replace hard drives, which remain cheaper and more capacious, but it has brought a lot of advantages to both enterprise and mobile storage systems. However, traditional scaling for NAND flash seems to be coming to an end, and as a result, we're seeing a lot more activity around alternative forms of memory.
Flash Memory at a Crossroads
For makers of flash memory, now may well be the best of times and the worst of times. On one hand, not only are we using more and more flash memory in our phones, tablets, and increasingly in our notebook computers, but flash has become an integral part of most big data center systems, from storage to enterprise servers. At the same time, the technology that has allowed flash memory to become so ubiquitous and to drop in price so rapidly over the past few years seems to be approaching its end.
How Fast Is a Haswell?
Every time there's a new generation of processors, I immediately think: how much faster will it run? I'm not talking about games here, but the kind of business and workstation applications that many enterprises rely on to get real work done. So as I've been able to get my hands on some of the new desktops running Intel's 4th-Generation Core processor known as Haswell, I decided to put the new chips to the test. I know the new processors are mostly being talked about because they are more power-efficient but performance matters as well.
BlackBerry: A Company Caught in the Middle
In many ways, BlackBerry seems caught in the middle. It's not the dominant provider of mobile enterprise messaging it once was and but is facing the reality of new, sexier devices that have made its older products look, well, old. With its market share declining, the company has created a more modern set of devices and a new enterprise server, collectively called BlackBerry 10. These have various new features I've been very impressed by, including "peek" to let you see your email and other messages quickly when you're another application; "balance" to separate your work and personal applications and information; and "hub" to combine all sorts of messaging into one view. But in running a recent pilot of the BlackBerry 10 devices and BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10, I've found that not only do users of other platform find the new BlackBerrys not to be very compelling, but that fans of the older BlackBerrys often wind up frustrated too.
How Chip Customization, Core Licensing Could Change the Processor Business
In this round of surprising developments in processor technology, we learn Nvidia and IBM are deciding to license their processors cores—Kepler GPU and Power CPU cores respectively—allowing other companies to include these cores within their own products.
LG G2, Moto X, and the Little Things That Count
What really impressed me at yesterday's rollout of the LG G2 and last week's introduction of the Motorola Moto X was that beyond the obvious technical features, both LG and Motorola have clearly been spending a lot of time thinking about how we use smartphones today. As a result, the hardware and software of both new flagship Android-based smartphones focus on simplifying the little things we do all the time.
