Let’s face it, it’s been more than 30 years since ethernet claimed the vast mainstream of the networking business, and still there are network nightmares.
Vista set our office back for weeks as we tried to get all the computers calmed down and willing to talk to one another again. The Mac is still pretty standoffish, there are only a couple of computers in the office it will deign to talk to.
Granted, most offices probably have more competant IT services than we do here at JPR HQ but then again there are lots of families who are more mystified than we are about getting things to work together. Ironically, we’re finding it easier to get the entertainment systems set up and working with at least one computer than it is to get the office networks running smoothly. It’s our own fault, because we’re always bringing in new computers to try out for a while.
Lately, life has gotten a lot easier thanks to the cloud. It started  with Google Docs and the idea has been further refined by services like Dropbox, SugarSync, and Apple’s iDisk to name three.
Yes, it’s easy enough to walk the iPad over to the Mac and connect them so they can exchange the news of the day with each other, but it’s a bother. Likewise, I can move an external drive from machine to machine after first getting a little help from MediaFour’s MacDrive to convince the external disc to talk to both a Mac and a PC. All of that  requires more than a few seconds, and that’s a few seconds more than I really want to spend on such a mundane task. And, it doesn’t solve the problem of keeping that information in sync with the other machines I’m liable to be using in the office or out in the world. Admittedly, keeping active projects in the cloud, might not be the most secure way to manage projects but it’s a great way to maintain the integrity of a document even if I’m working with someone else on a project. Anyway, the devoted hacker is generally going to be mighty disappointed with the results of hacking my iDisk or Dropbox.
Apple has done a pretty good job of offering sync services for documents, calendars, pictures, music, and emails, but it all works a lot easier if you work within the Mac universe and compared to free or nearly free services, you’re getting relatively little for your $99 a year to pay for the service. Just before Steve Jobs took off for a medical break he told people to expect a considerably improved MobileMe and iDisk. As sadly nerdly as it is, I find myself very excited about what might be coming from Apple on this front.
After all these years, sneaker net still exists, we’re still forced to work around cranky networks, or cranky IT managers in some cases, but now the it’s all in the air and it’s a lot more elegant than a pair of sneakers.

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I’m proud to say that I have been elected president of the Siggraph Pioneers for 2011 and 2012.

My first act in this role is to invite new members to the organization.
If you’ve been involved with computer graphics for the past 20 years or more you’re eligible, and you should join us.

Why?
Because you have valuable experience you could share with others, and in particular youngsters entering the field.
Because you’ll get to see some old friends, and maybe share some old memories.
Because you’ll be recognized for your contribution to the industry
And last but not least because I invited you.

Computer Graphics Pioneer is an earned member category under ACM SIGGRAPH.
1. Membership is earned after twenty (20) years of contributions to some aspect of computer graphics and/or interactive techniques. All members of the computer community are welcome, engineers, academics, artists, sales and marketing representatives, etc.
2. Members commit to perform some service to the computer graphics community. This service may include conference or journal paper reviews, financial support of the mentoring program, serving as a mentor, or some other service as needs or opportunities arise.
3. Dues – Member dues are $47.00 per year – Regular ACM SIGGRAPH dues are $42. Pioneer dues are $47, so they are only $5 more.
Don’t let the price scare you off, if you’re already an ACM member it’s a small uplift.

We meet at Siggraph every year for a dinner, networking, and a presentation by one of the luminaries who helped get this industry going. It’s kind of like Facebook Live: you get to see old friends you haven’t heard from for a while BUT THERE’S A LOT MORE WE CAN DO.

And speaking about SIGGRAPH 2011, this year it’s going to be in beautiful Vancouver Canada. You should check the Visas & Passports data at this site.  http://www.siggraph.org/s2011/content/visas-passports

To start or renew your membership:
* Online: https://campus.acm.org/Public/qj/login_gensigqj.cfm’rdr=promo=QJSIG&offering=415P&form_type=SIG&CFID=17011319&CFTOKEN=97045466
* Call ACM Member Services 800-342-6626 (click here for details)

I’d like to hear from you. Contact me: jon@jonpeddie.com, if you have ideas to help the Pioneers help the graphics community, I’m anxious to hear them.

Jon

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Nvidia like many companies in the past two years has gone through some dramatic and bruising changes. How a company comes out of those events is the key to predicting their future.

I’m not going to review the past, if you don’t know it, you probably aren’t reading this.

Here’s what I see on the horizon for Nvidia.

Tegra, the company’s smallest product, smallest ASP, smallest results to date is probably going to show some life in 2011. The company is shipping Tegra 2 and will soon introduce Tegra 3 to OEMs – the rest of the world will not get much information on it anymore than they did on Tegra 2. News and leaks of design wins in phones and tablets have been dribbling through webosphere for the past nine months as the industry waited and watched for the results Nvidia predicted at their press conference at CES in January 2010. Few of those predictions happened and a lot of people wrote off Nvidia as a player in the SoC market. But one of the qualities of a great company is that they don’t quit; they keep pushing and redoing till they get it right. Nvidia believes in Tegra and has not only kept up its investment in R&D and marketing, but has actually increased the spend. That’s commitment and it’s got to pay off – 2011 may show the results.

News of Microsoft making Windows run on ARM will help propel Nvidia’s fortunes in the SoC space.

Tesla and CUDA. 2010 was actually the tipping point for Tesla. For evidence consider the almost clean sweep of HPC companies with Tesla based server chassis, starting with IBM, HP, Penguin and followed by others. Vector or parallel processor competitive products either failed, or flailed. Cell, FPGAs, direct GPU competitors, dedicated multiprocessor processor arrays, and multicore CPUs couldn’t deliver the bang for the buck in FLOPS/dollar/watt, nor did they have the infrastructure and tool set to make them useful. Nvidia’s long term and unwavering investment in Tesla and its CUDA tools are paying dividends. Although the HPC element will not be a big unit or dollar market it will be significant, measurable, and most of all influential. GPU-compute will not be limited to HPC and will find homes in everything from photo-editing to plastic molding. GPU-compute will also be a very high margin segment for Nvidia, and that contribution makes all the products better.

Fermi. Fermi is finally firm. After the redesign in 2010 which yielded the 500 series parts, Nvidia has a world class GPU again, and one with legs that will let it find product categories from laptops to mainstream PC, to gaming boards, to professional graphics and HPC. Fermi, like Tegra, was a long term, and difficult investment, with a very long range vision behind it. The company suffered severe criticism for abandoning the mainstream and gamer with the original 400 series Fermi design, and for being late with their DirectX 11 part. AMD capitalized on that and increased their market share. There was speculation that Nvidia had been scared out of the mainstream by Intel’s Larrabee and was concentrating on different areas. Chip design, and re-design doesn’t happen overnight, and so Nvidia’s redesign of Fermi could have been a reaction to the failure of Larrabee to arrive. Regardless, the 500 is a solid product and Nvidia will exploit the design for several years.

Quadro the cash cow. Nvidia has historically done very well financially in two small highly profitable segments: the enthusiast gamer and the professional graphics markets. At its peak Nvidia had 65% of the enthusiast gamer segment (now at about 55%) and has gone from 20% in 2004 to 92% in 2010 in the professional market. The growth was the result of Nvidia’s investment in the segment, support for the application developers, and paying attention to users. Nvidia got a little help from ATI’s difficulty in focusing in the workstation space. We expect Nvidia to hang on to a dominate position in professional graphics, but with such a tremendous lead in market share they will logically lose a few points. Nvidia gets better margins for their professional graphics than AMD.

Stereovision and Optimus. Nvidia was the leader in stereovision beginning in 2009 and still is, however, it’s just a small market (~300k units). But as stereovision grows, and it will, Nvidia’s brand is so strongly identified with it, that most people think Nvidia invented PC stereovision. Meanwhile, Optimus is Nvidia’s ticket to regaining its lost laptop market share. Optimus is a truly useful feature for anyone who needs high performance and long battery life and it has been adopted by several OEMs, along with Intel’s new Sandy Bridge EPG CPU.

Intel settled. The recent settlement with Intel that will put $1.5 billion into Nvidia’s bottom line is just one more bonus for the company removing management distraction and padding the profits. It’s also a moral win for the company.

Summary

Nvidia has invested heavily over the past two to three years in the company’s vision, a vision of “T”s – Tegra and Tesla. It suffered after being shut out of the IGP market by Intel’s claim of limited license, and it lost significant market share in laptops with its discrete GPUs as well. During those difficult years the company, reported its first losses in a decade; its share price plummeted and pundits described the company as being on the ropes. Maybe, but it survived (the second time), didn’t have massive layoffs, and is poised to enjoy the improving economy with a product portfolio that is very impressive.

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Or … a bunch of teenagers drinking and driving

The impact and influence of Apple on the rest of the PC and mobile phone industry is astonishing. Many of the CES tablets this year represent the herd-like knee-jerk reactions to Apple’s product introductions by industry veterans. As a result of all the jerking knees, about 100 new tablets have been introduced. It started at CES last year, it accelerated at Computex in Taiwan last June and continues at CES this year.

I estimate it costs about $1,000,000 to develop a tablet, and that’s probably conservative. That 1,000,000 figure assumes certain infrastructure, supply chain, and engineering & design teams already being in place and that it is being treated as a new model, not a company start-up. So, if 100 tablets have been brought to market in reaction to Apple, conservatively that represents a $100 million knee-jerk investment on the part of the industry. And it’s especially interesting in view of the detrimental comments about the iPad when it first came out.

Obviously most of these iPad wannabes are going to fail. It’s ironic coming from people who should know better, but like when kids do stupid things like smoking or driving after drinking, and you warn them about it. They always say, heh, that won’t happen to me – all kids think they are bullet-proof and somehow protected from reality. How many of these companies producing these 100+ tablets are kids who are dining and driving – with their investor’s money on the line? We’ll give you the mortuary report this time next year as we examine the tangled crumpled wreckage of the latest bubble.
Epilog: Part of the bubble-effect will be the inflated forecasts of the SoC and other component suppliers’ who have gotten design wins for these tablets. A lot of semi, display, and other component suppliers are going to have to do some fancy footwork when they explain to their investors why their enthusiastic forecasts weren’t realized.

Editors Note: When this blog post was first published it featured some suspect multiplication to get to a nice round billion. Even those among us who are math-challenged know that 100 times $1,000,000 comes to $100 million. The copy has been changed to reflect that, but the point remains: a lot of money, probably a billion dollars eventually, is going to be spent chasing the tablet market. Few will be chosen.

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The first CES conference in New York City in 1967 attracted 17,500 dealers looking for the next CE products.

Last year, just wobbling out of a recession the show had a surprising 126,641 visitors and a slight drop of exhibitors (2,500 compared to 2700 in ’09) and a smaller exhibit area (1.4M2ft. compared to 1.7 in ’09).

2011 however was up and first estimates are something north of 130,000 (maybe as high as 140,000) and 2,700 exhibitors – it felt crowded, and if you needed a taxi, bus, or the tram you know what I mean.

I’ve often questioned the value of this and other mega un-focused trade shows. Having just been to the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul I am struck by some of the similarities, and probably not the first notice.

Just as you can find dozens of carpet merchants at the Bazaar, I and others found dozens of tablet suppliers at CES. And if there are a lot of lamp merchants at the Bazaar, at CES there were a lot Sandy Bridge –based PCs and tablet merchants. At the Bazaar we found dozens of sellers of watches and jewelry, at CES their equivalent were the many dozen ARM-based products.

And like the Bazaar most of the hundreds of people crowding through the hallways were lookielooks and not buying anything. Who is the target at CES – the 5,000 members of the press and blogger society that attend? CeBIT, which drew 334,000 visitors in 2010, had only 5,000 press and media – 37% of the ratio of CES.

And if CES is all about CE and what consumers will want to buy, how come one of the biggest CE suppliers – Apple – wasn’t there?

Now truth be told I have been in booths where major buyers (like BestBuy) were talking with the exhibitor and discussion schedules and prices. Hard to imagine BestBuy had to send a team to Las Vegas, but there they were. And I have noticed lots of name badges with the title, "Buyer" on them. And sure, they were from small mom & pop no name shops in the boondocks, but that makes sense – for little operations CES is the grand bazaar.

CES is THE place to knock off a lot of meetings at once

But do you really think a company like Samsung or Philips spends several million dollars to go to CES to meet BillyBob from BillyBob’s TV appliances and repair in Grand Forks? How many will BillyBob buy bud?

So if the major chains do come to CES to shop then why does the show have 120,000 visitors? Who needs them?

The OEMs like AMD, Qualcomm, Nvidia, etc. tell me they like the conference because bring all their customers together at once.

CES is THE place to knock off a lot of meetings at once one supplier told me.

And the meetings, OMG the meetings.

Every hotel was jammed full with meetings and private suites showing future and current stuff. I almost get the impression the suppliers put up with the conference for the mom & pop shops so they can have a suite for the really big deals.

Trendy

CES can be good for spotting trends, but sometimes after the fact. This year it was Internet-enabled everything. Well I remember back in the dot com bubble it was Internet everything, but that didn’t happen and maybe now it is.

Every self-respecting CE supplier was touting their app store – thank you very much Apple for showing us how to do that.

There was some, but not a lot of stereovision. The big guys like Samsung, Sony, and LG of course were showing it, but it was one or two displays, not a whole booth of them.

Smart phones, dumb phones, and phones in things could be seen all over the place – hard to pick a trend out of that.

There was usual array of over amped car stereo systems and slick looking cars. I get a better sense of dealer-supplier interaction in the car accessory section than almost anywhere else.

New Tech

CES can be the place to see new technology, that may or may not make it in the market place. Usually such viewings are in hotel rooms, or meeting rooms in the booth or in the back of the South Hall.

I’ve seen many wonderous and fabulous things in such meeting and hotel rooms, and many of them, maybe most of them never made it to market. CES is a good place to do test marketing of new ideas and products. Kind of like a giagundus focus group, but a focus group of analysts, experienced reporters, and most of all prospective customers.

Too big? Split it up

Yeah, I think CES is too big and should be broken up into three shows, and separated by a few days. I suggest they run Auto day 1 to 3, Actual CE devices, (TVs, PCs, etc.) day 3 to 5, and technology and the stuff inside the boxes day 5 to 7. Also, I’d like to see more hall concentration. Autos in North hall as it is, CE devise in the Center hall (sorry Intel and Microsoft you’ll have to move) an technology in the South hall. After day 3 the north hall is closed, after day 5 the Center hall is closed. This would spread the visitors over more days, ease the congestion, and focus the demographics of the attendees.

Of course multi-product companies like Microsoft are going to have to have two or maybe three stands, one in each hall. Which if you’ve ever wandered around in the giant booths like Microsoft’s or Panasonic’s you can get totally lost – it’s like being in one of the casinos – where the hell am I, and how do I get out of here?

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Last week I gave a presentation at the Congress Of Future Engineering Software (COFES) in Tel Aviv on the Opportunities For Innovation In Design And Sustainability.

I was the token hardware person at a conference for softies, and I asked the question of those people, “can hardware help in design and sustainability – or is it just something we take for granted ?”

Does anyone, end user, software developer, IT manager, know what the FLOPS load/requirement of their application and their usage actually is? Do they care? And if they knew would they make different buying decisions?

Could more intelligent hardware selection impact not just operating costs and overall reliability – and uptime, but the quality of the ultimate design’s efficiency – its “Green-ness”?

This is a time of change, of inflection points, of serious long term decisions. Not just in AEC and CAD, but in all disciplines, all the way down to the chip that is powering your phone or tablet, and up to the super computer cluster locally or in the cloud you are drawing on. Today’s chips could be the butterflies Eckels missed.

Eckels? Butterflies?

Concepts like ‘Chaos Theory’ more colorfully known as the "Butterfly Effect" impact our life. Scientists know the environment is a fragile system depending on interaction with nature.

The original concept came from a 1951 science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury entitled “A Sound Of Thunder,” and was popularized by “The Twilight Zone.” The notion was a team of people go to the past, when dinosaurs roamed, and they roam on a floating walkway so they don’t disturb anything. But one of them wanders off the ramp. When they return to their time things are different and a totalitarian regime is in power and life is dark and depressing. Then they discover that the guy who wandered off the ramp stepped on a butterfly and the loss of that butterfly created huge consequences.

Today in laboratories all over the world decisions are being made on the size of the problem to be examined. Scientists and engineers bound their problems on the basis of compute cycles – how long will it take to get an answer? In the case of basic science, astrophysics, and quantum mechanics, where noble prizes are considerations, the computational examination may run for years – and how long it will run is decided on the amount of time the researcher has, and the accuracy of the desired answer is set accordingly. In the case of protein folding for example, the length of time of examination of the protein’s activity is measured in microseconds – but it may take a day of computation to see one microsecond of the protein’s behavior (accurately) – a figure of merit for the examination of a protein is 100 microseconds – one hundred days to see if the drug interaction you designed is effective.

The thing that quantum mechanics, protein folding, and astrophysics have in common with design for sustainability, is the size of the dataset, the accuracy or resolution of the matrix, and the machines it is run on.

Not only is a problem’s solution measured in petaflops or teraflops, it’s measured in megawatts. The recently announced Chinese supercomputer Tianhe-1 consumes over 4 megawatts. The soon to be commissioned Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois will consume over 80 Megawatts and requires a separate power source.

So now researchers have to size their problems by FLOPS, watts, and dollars in deciding how accurate an answer they want and when they can get it.

Now architects and designers who have been charged with designing a building or campus, and making it green and long lasting—sustainable— have to run calculations on all the environmental, geophysical, power conversion, recycling, and dozens of other factors that impact and interact with a building.

We’re not talking about designing the wonderful “One Hoss Shay,” that lasted one hundred years and a day – no way. We’re talking about stuff that has to stay, and pay, carbon neutral at least, and a co-generator if possible.

To create such a design you have to run big models, against hundreds of conditions, over a long – very long time. The longer and more accurate you can run the simulation, the more sustainable your design will be. You aren’t designing tract houses with a 20 year useful life – you’re designing monuments, the pyramids, except your pyramids have to sustain life, and like Hippocrates do no harm.

Can a little semiconductor really be that influential?

It’s not as simple as going to your local computer shoppee or IT manager and saying, give me the most FLOPS I can get for $50k. You have to know the tradeoffs. I’m going to skip discussing the visualization aspects, although that’s my favorite subject, and just assume you’ve got that covered (although in my heart I know you haven’t).

Now you have to dig in – how parallel is the problem, what is the matrix, the dataset like – is it regular, yielding nicely to a SIMD configuration, or bumpy and messy needing a lot of divergent serial processes? If you don’t know, then you’re not qualified to engage in a design sustainability project.

2010 was the year we really entered into the world of heterogeneous processing – the mixing of massively parallel processors and conventional serial processors. You may have heard it referred to as x86 and GPU.

GPUs, parallel processors, offer the highest compute density (in sq silicon) available, orders of magnitude greater than conventional x86 processors. GPUs offer the highest performance per watt and also the greatest raw computation per dollar.

But, they are also a challenge to program – parallel processing is complicated and often bewildering. Conventional processors are familiar, and you can gang a bunch of them together in clusters, and they offer a brute-force solution to most problems. Albeit while sucking up the most power, money, size, and delivering the least FLOPS relative to a GPU. But x86 processors are needed, this is not a situation of either or, it’s a requirement for both, that’s why it’s a heterogeneous problem.

If you and your IT staff and your applications supplier are lazy, too intimidated by the technological challenge of parallel processing, then you will not be able to run your design simulations, within your time and money budget, and get the most sustainable design. Now is your butterfly moment.

If your IT staff and/or your application supplier can find the parallelism in the datasets, in the design, in the vision of the project, and map that to the parallel processing capabilities of these new processors, you can run longer, more complex, and dare I say it, more beautiful simulations and resulting visualizations.

The free lunch is over. You can’t keep doing things the same old way – life, buildings, materials, laws, and a changing global weather environment won’t allow it.

Imagine, that little butterfly of a chip is going to change everything you do, and what you accomplish.

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Intel had a solid year of shipping 32nm processors from their Westmere family and followed the company’s “tick-tock” strategy to spread the engineering risk out among generations.

Intel has new competition on the low-end from ARM and ARM’s new best friend Microsoft and on the top from GPUs in supercomputers and server clusters. To offset some of that impact the company has moved into the low end low power SoC market and invested in software by buying Wind River and Mcafee.

Here’s what I see for Intel in the near future.

Processors and process. No company ships more processors than Intel – period. But even though Intel ships hundreds of millions of x86 processor into the PC and affiliated markets, it sees the billion mobile phones being shipped each year and it looks like green fields to them. The company has invested mightily in developing low power x86 solutions, and has even developed a SoC menu that can allegedly be built at TSMC, although there haven’t been any takers for it yet. The Atom family developed in Israel despite the initial skepticism from management in Santa Clara has proven to be a breakthrough product with long legs – I expect to see continuing promotions in and from the Israeli group. The Atom architecture is being positioned for anything that’s not a PC, and PCs selling for less than $500.

And no company has better process technology than Intel today – although there are contenders, not the least being the IBM-GlobalFoundries partnership. The company has been pounding out 32nm parts for over a year now. Skipping the next logical node, 28nm, Intel will be in production in 2012 with 22nm parts. Ironically some of the first parts will be FPGAs for a fabless semi customer. However, I don’t think Intel is going into the merchant fab business.

Get low. Intel is adopting their basic low power (in watts and FLOPS) Atom processor into three market segments: midsize mobile devices like tablets and netbooks, small mobile devices like smartphones, and embedded systems. The company will meet competition from ARM on the midsize mobile machines, ARM and maybe MIPS on the small mobile devices, and ARM, MIPs, SH, and others in the embedded space (which includes STBs for example). Intel has a huge list of embedded devices it is targeting with its Tunnel Creek version of the Atom processor. All of the new versions of Atom have embedded graphics using the Imagination Technologies GPU/video IP, which will put them on par with almost all the ARM-based OpenGL ES and Open VG GPUs.

Get big. Having recovered from the embarrassment of the Larabee misstep, Intel has dusted itself off and brought out a multi-processor development system called Knights Ferry. Intel has also been steadily investing in parallel programming tools and techniques to exploit multi- (x86) processors. The development of x86 parallel processing software by Intel is primarily for the HPC segment where the company is being challenged by FPGAs and even more so by GPUs. Slow to embrace Open CL, I expect to see big parallel processor software development and tools announcements from Intel throughout 2011. If Intel is to gain any traction with its many-core x86 designs it’s got to blunt the momentum of Nvidia’s CUDA ecosphere and cachet.

Hold the middle. Intel has dominated the mid to low end PC market in notebooks and desktops with their IGPs, capturing 63% and 46% respectfully. With the introduction of the first core i5 chip code named Clarkdale  the company put the IGP in with the CPU, creating a new category Embedded Processor Graphics (EPG). With Sandy Bridge (which we’ve been calling Sandra) the company integrated the CPU and IGP in one chip. This natural evolution is also designed to blunt AMD’s Fusion. It’s an interesting mix with Intel having better CPU performance and AMD having better GPU performance in their integrated parts. To offset AMD’s GPU advantage Intel is being forced to play nice with Nvidia and embrace its Optimus technology. As a result rumors of a settlement waft through the webosphere daily. As you might remember, Intel and Nvidia have been known to be quite prickly with each other.

Games, ray tracing, video, and workstations. Intel wants to be all things to all people (all the time). It has a footprint in every major segment and a varied level of success. Intel has valiantly listed the games that will run well on Clarkdale only to be scoffed at by Nvidia and AMD. When Sandy Bridge is made public, it too will have a games list, but sadly only DirectX 10 in a 2011 DirectX 11 world. Intel will side-step that issue and if they get pushed on it, they will point out that more people are and will continue to play DirectX 10 gamers than 11. Ray-tracing has long been a fascination of Intel’s as it looks like a tremendous cycle sucker. However, except for styling, CAD, and photorealism there really aren’t many applications for ray-tracing. And Nvidia is well on its way to convincing the world that you need GPUs to do ray-tracing. Intel may have a trump card however, with Imagination Technologies acquisition of Caustic Graphics Intel will have a GPU-based ray-tracing capability (if they choose to deploy it). Video in Sandy Bridge is good and maybe the ‘Intel can’t do video’ crap will finally stop. As for workstations, they own it. Intel’s challenge is figuring out how make the workstation market expand – they’ve got FLOPS to sell.

MIDs. Remember MIDS? Mobile Internet Devices – something between your phone and your PC? Introduced in 2007 at IDF Beijing, it was a category that never was realized – or was it? I think tablets, especially the less than 10-inch tablets are the long lost tribe of MIDs. I came here to praise MIDs not to bury them….

Summary. Intel does so many things right it’s hard to fault the company. And yet the stock market isn’t impressed. Barely keeping pace with the DJIA, INTC isn’t an exciting stock. However, for ten straight years Intel has been named one of top companies’ in corporate governance by the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes (DJSI). Intel needs to show some traction in the mobile space with tablets and phones to get the stock market to pay attention.

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It’s been just over a year since Intel and AMD reached their landmark settlement, and two years since the company entered into a joint agreement with ATIC on the fab. Those were huge movements involving huge sums of money and they take a long time to be digested. AMD never stopped doing what it does, and neither has its graphics group, the former ATI, but with these two monumental changes, the management of AMD has been able to focus better, and get their house in order. You can see the results of that new focus and vitality in some of the re-organizations, new hires, and change in marketing.
Here’s what I see on the horizon for AMD.

Fusion. Probably the biggest thing to impact the industry and certainly AMD is the absolute marriage of ATI and AMD technology in one chip. No one has anything like Fusion, nor will they for several years, if ever. But it’s not a slam dunk, just yet. There are still fabrication issues, balancing of x86 CPU performance vs. wattage, getting the OEMs and ODMs to think outside the box. A lot of questions still exist about the benchmark performance of the heterogeneous processor AMD calls an APU. Based on discussions with AMD, the graphics performance should be quite good. However, the first units to the market, the Ontario and Zacate, built in 45nm at TSMC’s fab will be average to good we think. The real performer will be Llano built in 32nm at GlobalFoundries. With Fusion processors AMD has the potential to claw away at Intel’s dominate market share. They also have the potential to eat away at Nvidia’s low end GPU market. But to do one they have to do the other -  and therein lies the gottcha. If AMD can’t convince OEMs that a Fusion is better than an Intel and Nvidia combo then all the company will accomplish is to replace their IGP sales. Neither Intel or Nvidia seem concerned, and talk on street is AMD will not gain much market share. This is a waiting game – we have to wait for the HPUs to show up and see what kind of traction they’ll get. I’m cautiously optimistic.

Digging holes – Bulldozer and Bobcat. AMD has been preparing two new processors, a big one for servers (but not workstations), and a little one for tablets and netbooks. AMD was criticized for not having a processor for the netbook segment in 2009 when that segment was busy stealing market share away from notebooks. This year tablets will steal market share from netbooks and notebooks and now AMD shows up with Bobcat for those markets looking for the sweet spot, the company’s new theme. In the server space, the company is going to offer 16 core and 8 core versions and try to segment the server market into two categories instead of the four that now exists. This is another wait and see situation for AMD. The strategy sounds good – more cores for less money, but the traditional server OEMs will make the buying decision of sellable benchmarks so AMD is going to have prove it.

Sweet Radeon. ATI got its act together in 2008 and brought forth its sweet-spot strategy and new scale up/scale down architecture. Renamed but carrying on with that strategy AMD has just introduced its latest part the Cayman series. Like Nvidia,  AMD has  a full line of new versions coming out. They will go toe-to-toe with Nvidia. First results haven’t been that impressive, and there seems to be some supply issues. Final benchmark results with driver tweaks probably won’t show up till CES, but we don’t think the Radeon 6850 and 6970 are going to be exceptional and it will take a dual GPU like the HD 5970 to win the gamer’s attention.

FirePro step sister. Like Nvidia AMD takes their consumer GPU and applies it to three markets: Consumer, GPU-compute, and professional. The professional brand is FirePro and due to limited resources AMD hasn’t been able to come close to matching the emphasis and support Nvidia puts into the professional space, and their market share results show it. Although the company has gained a little ground, it’s not likely they will capture even 10% of the market in 2012. The actual share percentage isn’t as critical as the ramp – if AMD doesn’t have a market share growth ramp (CAGR) of at least 10% by this time next year it’s going to hard to understand why the company doesn’t spin off the group.

FireStream hobbled. AMD’s GPU-compute product line suffers the same resource issues as the workstation boards. And whereas Nvidia has made Tesla a clear server part, AMD doesn’t even include it in their server product list. AMD has opted to offer the product relying on open source tools from Khronos known as OpenCL. And whereas an open system should win out in the long run, OpenCL has a ways to go. FireStream is a place holder for companies that don’t want to be locked into a proprietary system, although Nvidia supports OpenCL just as well as AMD does, but they don’t make a lot of noise about it.

Open everything. AMD has carried the open systems theme to other aspects of the industry for stereovision, physics, and ray tracing.

Super Catalyst. ATI had been criticized in the past about their drivers, and that has cost them dearly in market share in the professional space. It’s taken a couple of years, but those dark days are behind them now. In addition to having stable drivers, there are OC tools, and new built in processor features like stability programs for handheld video.

Summary
AMD was in pretty bad shape a few years ago and has made a remarkable and impressive comeback. Things don’t change overnight and the company still has work to, and it’s doing it. The stock market isn’t showing much enthusiasm for the company. Since September AMD share price rose about 20% while Nvidia’s rose (from a historic low) 30% in a market that rose about 15%. The investor community seems to be taking a wait and see attitude with a few of them betting on the company and buying in now at what they hope is a discounted price.

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Microsoft started it a long long time ago, and now Microsoft may now be the biggest victim of it – giving stuff away.

When Microsoft was striving for market share with its operating system, and later with its applications like Office, it established the policy of adding programs that were developed by third parties to augment either the OS or apps. Spell check is a good example. Small companies made accessory programs for Word that would do spell and grammar checking, and then Microsoft added it and made it free, built into the cost of Office. That was great for the consumer; you didn’t have to buy any extra software. It was hard on the companies that developed the accessories, and in a few cases Microsoft acquired them or licensed the technology.

This went well for Microsoft for a long time until a web search engine company began to grow and offered more and more services to attract consumers to its pages. Then the search engine company with the improbable name of Google, offered free office applications.

Free office applications weren’t new; Sun had offered them for years and still does. It’s called Open Office and is typically the second install a user makes.

Google’s slant was a little different, not only was the software free, but so was the storage of the files, and they are stored in the cloud so they can be accessible anytime you have on-line access. Google apps now added the dimension of free collaborative content creation and editing. And then Google had the audacity to offer an operating system for free too.

Without really planning it, Google also basically neutered a major vexation for Microsoft – piracy. Why steal Microsoft programs if you can get the equivilant on-line for free?

But this leaves Microsoft in a squeeze and in search for a new business model. It can’t afford to keep investing zillions of dollars into development of Office apps if they are going to be free. And even though the company managed to keep Office sales increasing while Sun’s free Open Office was available, they did it through a locked in mechanism – no one wanted to be incompatible with anyone else so you had to buy the latest version. The latest version always had new rich features that were nice, sometimes great, to have, but not really essential, so Open Office was often good enough – but not quite in some corner cases (Excel images being one of the most common problems).

Sun suffered from limited resources and that’s why Open Office became open, and why the company got sold to Oracle, which has little interest in free anything. But Google is different, like Microsoft it seems to have unlimited resources and wants everything to be free (except advertising). Google can, and will, match Microsoft on features so that won’t be much of a differentiator any longer.

But if Google and to a lesser extent Open Office succeed in beating Microsoft at its own game, and they become the dominate supplier of office apps, where’s the competitive push to make office applications better and better? It’s hard to compete with yourself, no?

So is free the path to no further development? Maybe. Browsers have been free, and there are competitors in the browser market, but there hasn’t been any real major improvement or breakthrough in them since Netscape was around. Sure, there are new features, but a browser is a browser is a browser and not one has much to offer over the other.  

You know why? It’s really hard to compete when you’re free.

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First look at new benchmark

DirectX 11 has been with us since Windows 7 was introduced in late October 2009, almost 14 months ago. And it’s not as if no one didn’t know it was coming, or no major OEM or game developer didn’t know what the specifications were, and even have access to some of the tools. So it’s hard to understand why so few games are available that support DirectX 11 other than they are cheap console ports and were never designed for DirectX 11.

OK, that explains the lazy PC hating game developers, but not a company whose life blood depends on being state of the art. So Futuremark was way late to the DX11 party, but as Jon always says when he’s late, “I’m worth waiting for.”

Futuremark’s 3DMark 11 is definitely worth waiting for. The span of tests, the art work, and the test data are impressive.

And the stress the games put on today’s AIBs is also impressive. It’s doubtful any of the GPU and AIB suppliers are going to sing the praises of 3DMark 11 since the FPS scores are in the teens. We’re assuming Futuremark expects the GPUs to grow into the test and maybe get better scores with their next generation parts.

3DMark 11 tests for volumetric lighting, tessellation, and physics, either combined, or individually. Already we’ve heard from one GPU supplier who criticizes the way 3DMark 11 tests for tessellation – the mud-slinging has started.

3DMark 11 tests

Graphics Test 1 has lots of light sources with many casting shadows in the scene. Volumetric lighting illuminates the cloudy water. Post processing is used for various camera lens effects. There is no tessellation in this test.

Graphics Test 2 has a few lights which cast shadows, volumetric lighting through cloudy water and tessellation on the structures, corals, rock and sea bed. Post processing adds depth of field and other camera lens effects.

Graphics Test 3 features tessellation on the pillars, statues and some of the vegetation. Volumetric lighting from the sun casts shadows in the scene. Post processing adds depth of field and other lens effects.

Graphics Test 4 also uses tessellation on the pillars, statues and some of the vegetation. There is volumetric lighting and multiple light sources with several casting shadows. Post processing adds various camera lens effects.

Physics Test focuses on CPU performance by simulating rigid body physics with a large number of objects. This test runs at a fixed screen resolution for all presets. There is no post processing, volumetric lighting or tessellation.

Combined Test. This test combines CPU and GPU workloads. The CPU handles rigid-body physics while the GPU is tasked with volumetric lighting, tessellation, post processing as well as simulating soft-body physics using DirectCompute.

As the test scores indicate this new test is stressful on the current batch of AIBs.

There are three versions of the benchmark, the basic edition which is free and will give you a basic score, the Advanced Edition which sells for a mere $19.95 and gives you everything but demo looping and image quality tools, and the crème de la crème Professional Edition for $995 which gives you everything including priority support.

The new benchmark has three preset tests, and two custom ones

Entry preset (E) is designed for benchmarking with a low level of load on the graphics card. The benchmark runs in 1024 x 600 resolution making it suitable for most entry level DirectX 11 capable systems including notebooks and netbooks.

Performance preset (P) is for benchmarking with a moderate load on the AIB. The benchmark runs in 1280 x 720 (720p) making it suitable for most DirectX 11 capable gaming PCs, though at launch high end hardware may be required to achieve a fluid frame rate.

Extreme preset (X) This preset is designed for benchmarking with a very heavy load on the graphics card. The benchmark runs in 1920 x 1080 (1080p). The Extreme preset extends the lifetime of the benchmark by representing the likely loads used by high end games in years to come. At launch it offers enthusiasts a suitable benchmark load for competing at the extreme end of system performance.

Custom settings can be run with customized settings offering a fine degree of control over resolution, anti-aliasing, tessellation, shadow quality, texture quality and many other graphical settings. When using a resolution with an aspect ratio other than 16:9, the benchmark runs in a 16:9 letterbox.

Individual test scores

The Advanced and Professional Edition users can see the individual scores for the graphics, physics and combined tests on 3dmark.com. These scores can be used to compare a single component such as the GPU or CPU when using the online services on 3dmark.com.

To arrive at the graphics test score each of the Graphics Tests produces a result in frames per second. The Graphics Score is calculated by multiplying the harmonic mean of four test results with a scaling constant: It is the scaling constant for the graphics score and the fps results for Graphics Tests 1-4. Futuremark says the scaling brings the score in line with traditional 3DMark score levels, but from a FPS basis it doesn’t, the scores are way low.

What do we think?

Futuremark has competition now. Unigine, SiSoft Sandra, and others will challenge 3DMark 11 for mind share and significance. Futuremark has the brand and is established at most OEMs. However, the new scoring is always like a new pair of shoes, the user has to get broken in to them. So there’s going to a lot whopping and hollowing till the GPU and AIB suppliers get comfortable with the new benchmark.

It would sure be a lot easier on the industry and the users if that could be avoided. We released this issue of TechWatch the same day the 3DMark 11 and the new Nvidia GTX 570 were released and by the time you’ve read this the forums and fan boyz will have lit up the internet with their opinions and remedies.

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