Source: CNET
Written by Tom Krazit

Originally scheduled to launch next year, the new Xeon 5300 and Core 2 Extreme QX6700 should make an immediate dent in servers and in high-end workstation/enthusiast PCs. In those markets, users can take advantage of software that’s already been written to exploit four separate processing threads.

The usual suspects plan to use Intel’s chips in their latest products. Dell jumped the gun last week with the announcement of new quad-core systems, including new servers and workstations. Word broke of IBM’s proposed quad-core offerings last Thursday. And Hewlett-Packard is expected to follow suit on Tuesday with its own servers and workstations featuring the new Xeon chips.

PCs from Dell, Gateway, Velocity Micro and others with the new Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor should also start to appear in time for the holiday shopping season. That chip is beyond the needs of most PC users, and it generally falls outside their budgets as well, at a price of $999. But certain PC enthusiasts are always excited about the prospect of having the fastest PC processor on earth for a short time, which Intel’s QX6700 will be until AMD releases a competing chip.

Mainstream PC users won’t see the benefits of the quad-core processors for some time–well into next year, at the earliest–but Intel can a least claim a “first,” after several years of trailing AMD at seemingly every turn.

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Editor’s Note: At this time there are no hard indications that Apple will be releasing workstations with these chips, but industry expections are that Apple will adopt them for high-end workstations in their MacIntel lineup soon.

For a brief, digitally charged moment — OK, for seven days — the ZeroOne festival turned San Jose into the nation’s art and technology capital.

Beyond that, “ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge” helped lay the groundwork for “branding” the city as a digital arts mecca, said Dan Keegan, executive director of the San Jose Museum of Art. By the time the smoke had dissipated and the monitors were unplugged, the festival had drawn an estimated 50,000 people and generated attention from around the world.

This time, ZeroOne was paired with the 13th International Symposium of Electronic Art, a biennial gathering of scholars and artists from around the world who present papers on art, science and new technologies.

ZeroOne organizers hope to make the arts festival a biennial event based in San Jose.

Perhaps the biggest hit of the festival was a half-dozen cacophonous, fire-spewing robots from the Survival Research Lab of San Francisco which attracted more than 2,000 to a parking lot next to the McEnery Convention Center. A Commonwealth Club-sponsored speech by video arts pioneer Bill Viola also drew crowds.

Exact attendance figures are impossible to calculate, said Steven Brewster, an economic development officer for the city. Still, he added, “it was a true success. It further positioned us on a international stage, it showcased what we do best here in Silicon Valley, which is innovation of technology, and it tapped into the digital culture that grew up and exists here.”

At the opening festivities Aug. 8, about 500 gathered for a reception; 1,500 attended a meet-and-greet at the museum and another 1,500 watched as Akira Hasegawa’s “Digital Kakejiku” projected an ever-changing array of colors and patterns onto City Hall.

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Check out a narrated slideshow of some of the exhibits by The Mercury News

Source: PC World
Written by Lincoln Spector

Twenty-five years ago, IBM changed the world. It wasn’t intentional. When Big Blue announced a microcomputer called the IBM Personal Computer on August 12, 1981, it hoped only to make a nice profit.

The company did make money–but more important, the IBM PC, also known as the Model 5150, made a significant impact on the culture. Today, for instance, we call our desktops and laptops PCs, not microcomputers. The vast majority of the ubiquitous machines scattered around our offices and homes are direct descendents of IBM’s 25-year-old box.

Former IBM engineer David J. Bradley joined the microcomputer project in September 1980. It was “one of those things that engineers dream about…a brand new thing; a blank piece of paper.”

Before the IBM PC, business computers were mainframes or minis, large and expensive investments that weren’t intended for a single person’s use. Since the resources were shared, computing jobs ran slowly during business hours when everyone was at work. Dedicated, technology-savvy employees would often work through the night.

Personal computers existed prior to the IBM PC–the Apple II came out in 1977, and the Atari 800 came out in 1979, for example. However, these systems used proprietary components and designs.

IBM was in a hurry, so Bradley and his coworkers had to break company policy and use other people’s technology, including a processor from Intel and an operating system from Microsoft. The PC’s lack of IBM-owned technology made cloning possible, and cloning–Columbia Data Products’ MPC 1600-1 in 1982 was the first clone–made the PC a standard. “If we’d [built the PC] from the ground up,” Bradley told me, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”

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Intel Corp. unveiled its new Core 2 Duo processor lineup today, increasing the pressure on rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The 10 new dual-core chips promise markedly better performance and greater energy efficiency than Intel’s existing products.

The Core 2 Duo launch has been billed as Intel’s most significant since the introduction of the original Pentium processor in 1993. The introduction comes at a crucial moment. Intel executives have watched AMD expand its share of the processor market in recent quarters, and they want to reclaim the lost ground.

“We’re really bullish on Core 2 Duo, and we believe that it’s going to enable us to grow a significant amount of [market] share over the second half of the year. That’s our goal,” said Tim Bailey, director of platform marketing at Intel Asia-Pacific.

Among the chips announced by Intel are five processors designed for laptops and five desktop chips, including the high-end Core 2 Extreme processor for gamers. Pricing for the desktop chips ranges from $183 for the 1.86-GHz Core 2 Duo E6300 to $999 for the 2.93-GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800. Pricing for the mobile chips was not available.

Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme are based on Intel’s Core microarchitecture, which replaces the NetBurst architecture used in the Pentium 4. The same microarchitecture is used in Woodcrest, the latest version of the Xeon server processor, which was announced last month.

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Advanced Micro Devices will acquire graphics processor maker ATI Technologies in an effort to emerge as a more formidable supplier of chips for business computers.

AMD has traditionally worked with multiple partners whose chips can be used with its processors to build PCs. But the company intends to use the tie-up, announced on July 24, to deliver more tightly integrated processors and supporting chip sets, in an effort to lure more businesses.

AMD has made strides with businesses of late, particularly in the server space. Its Opteron server chip has claimed more than a quarter of server processor shipments, thanks to partnerships with companies such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun. It has also won major PC deals. However the company—whose goal is to serve at least one third of the PC processor market in the future—says it still needs to do more to gain businesses’ loyalties in corporate PCs, a market where Intel continues to dominate.

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Press Release: NEW YORK—May 26, 2006—In the reexamination proceeding initiated late last year by the Public Patent Foundation (”PUBPAT”), the United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected the broadest claims of the patent Forgent Networks (Nasdaq: FORG) is asserting against the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) international standard for the electronic sharing of photo-quality images. In its Office Action released yesterday, the Patent Office found that the prior art submitted by PUBPAT completely anticipated the broadest claims of the patent, U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672 (the ‘672 Patent).

Forgent Networks acquired the ‘672 Patent through the purchase of Compression Labs, Inc. in 1997 and began aggressively asserting it against the JPEG standard through lawsuits and the media in 2004. The company has the opportunity to respond to the Patent Office’s rejection, but third party requests for reexamination, like the one filed by PUBPAT, result in having the subject patent either modified or completely revoked roughly 70% of the time.

“The Patent Office has agreed with our conclusion that it would have never granted Forgent Networks’ ‘672 patent had it been aware of the prior art that we uncovered and submitted to them,” said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT’s Executive Director. “Making matters worse here is that this new prior art was known by those who filed the application that led to the ‘672 patent, but none of them told the Patent Office about it, despite their duty to do so.”

More information about the reexamination the Forgent Networks patent being asserted against the JPEG standard, including a copy of the Patent Office’s Office Action rejecting its broadest claims, can be found at PUBPAT Activities > Protecting the Public Domain.

Meanwhile, Forgent released it’s own press release that states: “The action upholds 27 of the 46 claims of Forgent’s patent. Forgent will vigorously defend the remaining claims that were not initially upheld in this first office action.”

Read Forgent’s press release.

Las Vegas has seen its share of title fights, but the only thing that will get pounded by the 64 finalists arriving this week for the 2006 TopCoder Open will be a computer keyboard.

With $150,000 in prize money up for grabs, the competitive coding contest draws some of the most talented developers in the world. The finals of the 2006 TopCoder Open start Wednesday at the Aladdin Hotel. Thousands of developers have been competing online for months in hopes of reaching the finals, where they will face off in two separate events.

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From the TOPCODER OPEN web site: Sponsored by AMD

2006 TopCoder Open – Overview

Are you ready to be dazzled? We’ve put together another incredible competition for you and even higher stakes. We’re giving away $150,000 and a trip for 64 finalists to one of the world’s largest playgrounds. Las Vegas awaits!

The 2006 TopCoder Open is here.

Competitions include:

* Algorithm Competition
* Component Design Competition
* Component Development Competition

Finals held at:

* Aladdin Resort and Casino*, Las Vegas, NV

Where else in the world can you marvel at dancing fountains (the Bellagio), see an erupting volcano (the Mirage), or watch pirates and sirens entertain on ships nightly (Treasure Island)? Not to mention downtown’s Fremont Street Experience that is a haven for pedestrians. Las Vegas has it all!

Important Dates:

Component Competition

* Registration: January 2, 2006
* Begins: January 18, 2006

Algorithm Competition

* Registration: February 13, 2006
* Begins: February 28, 2006

* Prizes for the Algorithm and Component competitions total $150,000

New to the 2006 TCO – the TCO Complete Coder Incentive Program!
Learn how you can earn more prize money by participating in both Component and Algorithm competitions.

*soon to be Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino

See the official Algorithm and Component rules and regulations for full details.

Editor’s note: Geek Warning-this article gets into technical detail regarding Itel’s future chip developments, but since both Apple and other PC makers will be using the same basic chip architecture, it’s useful to read the signs of the future.

Introduction
Over a year ago at the Fall 2005 Intel Developer Forum, Intel formally announced that they would be dropping the Pentium 4’s Netburst microarchitecture in favor of a brand new, more power-efficient microarchitecture that would carry the company’s entire x86 product line, from laptops up through Xeon servers, into the next decade. Not since April of 2001, when Netburst arrived on the scene to replace the P6 microarchitecture that powered the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and Pentium III, have all segments of Intel’s x86 processor line used the same microarchitecture.

This past IDF saw the unveiling of some significant details about this new microarchitecture, which was formerly called “Merom” but now goes by the official name of “Core.” (You’ll also see Core called NGMA, an acronym for “next-generation microarchitecture.”) Intel presented many of these details in a presentation on Core, and others were obtained by David Kanter of Real World Technologies. The present article draws on both of those sources, as well as my own correspondence with Intel, to paint what is (hopefully) an accessible picture of the new microarchitecture that will soon be powering everything from Windows Vista servers to Apple laptops.

A question of breeding?
Before I get into the more technical discussion of Core’s features, I want to quickly spell out how I view Core’s relationship to its predecessors. As Intel has repeatedly claimed, Core is a new microarchitecture that was designed from scratch with today’s performance and power consumption needs in mind. Nonetheless, Core does draw heavily on its predecessors, taking the best of the Pentium 4 and the Pentium M (Banias) and rolling them into a design that looks much more like the latter than the former.

Because the Pentium M itself is a new design that draws heavily on the P6 microarchitecture, I’ve chosen to place Core very generally within the P6 “lineage.” However, I ask the reader not to read too much into this loosely applied biological metaphor, because my comparing Core to its P6 predecessors and talking about its development in terms of the “evolution” of the “P6 lineage” is really nothing more than an way to organize the discussion for ease of comprehension.

Core, multicore, and the big picture
When Intel’s team in Israel set about designing the processor architecture that would carry the company’s entire x86 product line for the next five years or so, they had multicore computing in mind. But for Intel, having multicore in mind doesn’t mean quite the same thing that it means for Sun or IBM. Specifically, it “multicore” doesn’t mean “throw out out-of-order execution and scale back single-threaded performance in favor of a massively parallel architecture that can run a torrent of simultaneous threads.” Such an aggressive, forward-looking approach is embodied in designs like STI’s Cell and Sun’s Ultrasparc T1. Instead, Intel’s understanding of what it takes to make a “multicore” architecture is significantly more conservative, and very “Intel.”

Intel’s approach to multicore is not about keeping each individual core’s on-die footprint down by throwing out dynamic execution hardware, but about keeping each core’s power consumption down and its efficiency up. In this sense, Intel’s strategy is fundamentally process-based, which is why I said it’s “very ‘Intel.’” Intel will rely not on the microarchitectural equivalent of a crash diet, but on Moore’s Law to enable more cores to fit onto each die. It seems that from Intel’s perspective, there’s no need to start throwing hardware overboard in order to keep the core’s size down, because core sizes will shrink as transistor sizes shrink.

This talk of shrinking core sizes brings me to my next point about Core: scalability. The Pentium 4’s performance was designed to scale primarily with clockspeed increases. In contrast, Core’s performance will scale primarily with increases in the number of cores per die (i.e. feature size shrinks) and with the addition of more cache, and secondarily with modest, periodic clockspeed increases. In this respect, Core is designed to take advantage of Moore’s Law in a fundamentally different way than the Pentium 4.

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BEIJING (Reuters)—”DVDs? CDs? Games? Porn? What you want?” hawkers in Beijing’s Zhongguancun neighborhood whisper to potential customers.

Asked for computer software, one scurries off to check his cache, kept behind a nearby shed, and five minutes later holds out a Chinese version of Windows XP Professional for 30 yuan ($3.74)—25 after some friendly haggling.

A legitimate copy sells for about 2,000 yuan ($249.6).

“Come with me. There’s more,” says Li Fuzhen, who has sold bootleg films, music, software and computer games in this district called China’s “silicon valley” for three years.

And there was much more. Despite periodic crackdowns on piracy, China’s has a voracious appetite for cheap, unauthorized copies of software and other digital products.

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Source: Publish
Written by Andreas Pfeiffer

In 2005 and early 2006, my company, Pfeiffer Consulting, conducted an extensive research project collecting information about Macintosh and Windows operating systems.

During the research interviews, which included users of both platforms, many Macintosh users stated that they found their computers “more fluid,” more productive, easier to use. They were, however, most often at a loss when they were asked to quantify their perceptions.

These recurring statements were intriguing for us: From a purely functional perspective, both operating systems have become increasingly similar, and even in terms of user interface, the basic concepts and user interface paradigms used by Windows and Macintosh are almost identical.

This discrepancy between user perception and technical features led us to have a closer look at user interface differences, usability and productivity. During this research, we realized that the terms and concepts we use to analyze technology have remained surprisingly simplistic given the importance digital tools and devices have in our lives.

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