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Marvell introduces world to its plug computer
Santa Clara chip maker Marvell wants us to think small.
The company, which normally embeds its processors in cell phones and consumer electronics equipment, is introducing the SheevaPlug, basically a wall plug outfitted with a processor, memory and storage that can serve as a networked computer for your home.
Marvell
The idea is you plug this into the wall and then you plug your router into the device. Then you can add an external hard drive or a USB flash drive in through a USB port and voila, you have a network attached storage device.
Once you get this going, you can have people throughout a house draw centralized files and media from one device or you can grab stuff remotely from outside the home using the SheevaPlug computer. The computer is meant to be energy efficient sipping less than a tenth of the power of a home server computer.
The device sports a Marvell Kirkwood processor based on an embedded 1.2GHz CPU equipped with 512MB of flash and 512MB of DRAM.
Marvell won't be selling these directly but is encouraging manufacturers to build off the platform. Already, four companies, including Cloud Engines of San Francisco and Eyecon Technologies of Mountain View are working on devices. Developers can buy a software developer kit for $99 and come up with new ways to use the device.
In the future we might see these plug computers serving as network sentinels for incoming malware and viruses. Or they could take on new tasks we haven't thought of yet. It just depends on what manufacturers and developers do with the platform.
| February 24 2009 at 01:18 PM
Nvidia's Tegra ready to power $99 mobile Internet devices
Nvidia said it's ready to show how its Tegra computer on a chip will power a new family of HD mobile Internet devices that could sell for $99 to $200, or nothing at all with a subsidy from a mobile carrier.
The graphics chip maker said this new class of devices will provide users with a full high-definition experience that boasts a cheap price and a battery life 10 times that of current Intel Atom-based netbooks. Nvidia will be speaking more on its latest moves in mobile at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.
The devices will range from 3-4 inch pocket gadgets similar to the iPod Touch to bigger 12-inch tablets and more traditional-looking computers. They will be able to decode 720p and 1080p video and should be able to run for days. The Internet devices will run Windows CE, will support Wi-Fi and 3G and will be able to provide browsing on Internet Explorer and attachment viewing.
With its latest moves, Nvidia is poised to scramble the nascent netbook market. It just announced Windows Vista certification for its new Ion platform, which pairs an Nvidia graphics processor with an Intel Atom CPU. That should provide the basis for a more expensive laptop experience but with a cheap sub-$499 netbook price. Now, with this new line of HD mobile Internet devices, Nvidia can create a viable class of devices that will provide Web access and computing, but with a much longer life, a cheaper price and better video than a netbook.
"There has never been a better time to bring this functionally to people at a very low price," said Mike Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia's mobile business.
Rayfield said he expects carriers will want to subsidize the cost of the devices and sell them direct to consumers, as they do with cell phones today.
He said Nvidia is working with manufacturers who will assemble the new mobile machines. The first of these devices should appear in the second half of this year.
| February 16 2009 at 12:00 AM
Nvidia gears up for hard times, hires Bill Dally as chief scientist
Nvidia is pressing forward with its vision of a visual computing world and to that end, it's hired Bill Dally, the chairman of Stanford University's computer science department, as its new chief scientist and vice president of research.
The move illustrates Nvidia's drive even with a recession slowing other companies down. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told reporters during a dinner Monday that he will spend more money on research this year than last.
He said he's willing to spend money now to both weather the storm but also come out better positioned when it's done.
"It's a challenge during a recession because no one's buying but recessions don't last forever," he said. "At the end of this PC recession, I want to be prepared for any kind of change."
The addition of Dally will help Nvidia stay ahead of competitors AMD, which bought ATI, and Intel, which is developing its own high-performance graphics chip code-named Larrabee.
Dally is a pioneer in parallel computing, laying the foundation for much of the work that Nvidia does. He also worked at Caltech and MIT and is the co-founder of Velio Communications and Stream Processors. Dally replaces longtime chief scientist David Kirk, who has been appointed "NVIDIA Fellow."
Huang said the computer industry is facing an extraordinary economic storm, one that will alter the landscape significantly when it's done. He said the rise of netbooks, with their $399 price point, will establish a new benchmark for computer makers, who will have to innovate around this price point.
Nvidia is hoping to build momentum around its Ion platform, which marries a powerful Nvidia GPU with a low-cost chip like Intel's Atom. It's a dynamic solution like that that Huang believes can succeed in a new environment where consumers are looking to spend less and get more. He said consumers never looked back after PCs crossed the $1,000 mark ten years ago and they're at it again with netbooks.
"The $399 price point is here," he said. "It will get better and better every year and it'll be a PC."
| January 28 2009 at 02:53 PM
Nvidia looking to take computing to the next level
Nvidia is releasing a new set of graphics processing units that not only boast a crazy amount of speed, but come with the promise of helping take on a larger set of tasks by delivering a lot more usable horsepower.
Nvidia
Nvidia today released the GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 GPUs, which come with 240 and 192 cores, respectively. These chips can now offer up to a teraflop of horsepower for large scale computing.
Developers working with CUDA, a technology from Nvidia that allows them to write applications for the GPU, can now create serious programs that harness the power of these chips. For example, developers are working on video coding technology that allows you to convert two hours of HD video in 35 minutes, compared to 5.5 hours for a 3GHz quad core CPU.
Nvidia said this opens a new opportunity for what it calls heterogeneous computing, in which the GPU can work hand-in-hand with the CPU, helping offload some of the big tasks of the CPU to improve overall performance. For example, developers can divert some of the physics load in video game development to the GPU, freeing up capacity for other tasks. This marriage can also help with editing photos or even running an operating system like Windows Vista.
The latest GTX 200 GPUs will do a bang-up job for video game graphics as well. Combined with the PhysX technology from its acquisition of AGEIA Technologies, Nvidia can boast even more realistic graphics for games that take advantage of the new hardware.
| June 16 2008 at 01:00 AM
Intel's Paul Otellini and Asia
Intel
Intel CEO Paul Otellini
China, with its 1.3 billion population, has the advantage in the next wave of technology development because of the sheer "law of large numbers," Intel CEO Paul Otellini said Monday night during a talk at the University of San Francisco.
Intel has invested about $2.5 billion to $3 billion in China, building factories in Chengdu and Dalian and employing about 7,000 people, the largest investment in China by a foreign company, Otellini said. It has also made substantial investments in India and Vietnam in recent years.
The United States, meanwhile, isn't focused enough on grooming its next generation of engineers, he said. In a common refrain heard in Silicon Valley, he lamented that American universities educate and train foreign engineers, only to lose them because they can't get visas to work in the United States. The government, he said, is too short-sighted on immigration. "We created our own brain drain," he said.
Instead, the attention in the United States is too much on sports and Hollywood. But the the country can't sustain itself by selling $10 DVDs. "Would you rather have a country with 50 Intels or 50 Googles or 50 Warner Brothers?" asked Otellini, who sits on Google's board.
Then again, Otellini said he hopes the trend in environmental activism will encourage children to study science.
On a separate environmental note, Otellini said Intel is working to create carbon neutral factories, including recycling 98 percent of the water and chemicals it uses at its chip-making factories.
| November 27 2007 at 12:06 AM
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