AMD has hired an Apple veteran to lead its chip software developer and a Qualcomm engineer to lead its system-on-chip efforts, according to Reuters. Apple’s Wayne Meretsky and Qualcomm’s Charles Matar will join another ex-Apple employee, Jim Keller, who had previously designed processors for iPhone and iPad.

A quick glance at AMD’s current lineup of chips reveals the likely reason: This company is not prepared for a future in which you can sell more chips and, perhaps, make more money in smartphones, tablets, and other devices versus desktop and laptop PCs. Amid the company’s processors for PCs, graphics cards, memory, and embedded solutions is only one solution for mobile: AMD’s Z-Series, announced late last year.

That’s a massive problem, as Intel’s lackluster earnings a few days ago showed. PC sales are down, and PC processor sales are down as well. This is not the first time we’ve heard this song.

So AMD needs to get up to speed, and quickly, expanding its Z-series and making it a processor family that tablet manufacturers want to use.

It’s worth noting that AMD recently announced that it would offer ARM-based processors in its server chips, a move that VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi compared to “a major league baseball team switching to football.” They’re not expected until 2014, and server chips are generally not identical to mobile chips, but it does mean the veteran PC chipmaker could be inching closer to ARM mobile chips as well, such as those used by Apple’s iPad, iPhone, and iPod, along with almost every other smartphone and tablet on the market.

The big question: Is this too little, too late for perpetually sad-sack AMD?

photo credit: LoKan Sardari via photopin cc

We’ve seen the clash of titans in mobile as Apple, Google, and Microsoft have released new phones, tablets, and mobile operating systems. We’ve seen a single network connect over a billion people worldwide. We’ve seen the once-great mobile company of the far European north forced to hawk its headquarters to raise cash. And we’ve seen social media move from cutting-edge to mainstream as the Obama campaign celebrated four more years.

In every year, we see winners and losers: companies, devices, or operating systems. Here’s our look at some of the biggest successes and failures of 2012.

The winners

	Android What more can you say about Android? With 75 percent market share in the third quarter of 2012, the free mobile operating system from Google looks poised to take over the world.
	Samsung  Not many companies sell 55 million smartphones in a quarter. Samsung did, and it will probably do it again.
	Galaxy S III Samsung is hot in large part due to its top smartphone, the Galaxy S III. With over 18 million units shipped in the third quarter, and 30 million shipped in five months, it’s easy to see why.
	iPhone 5 Sure, it was Time’s gadget of the year. But more importantly, iPhone 5 catapulted Apple back into the smartphone leadership position, at least in the U.S.
	iPad Mini We called it immediately: light, portable, awesome, and expensive. And it even looked better up close and person in our review. But we had no clue it would become one of Apple’s best-selling iPads. And now that it’s probably going Retina in April/May, it’s just getting better.
	YouTube YouTube continues to be the online leader, by far, in online video with 800 million visitors and billion-view channels created by individuals and brands. Despite getting the boot from iOS6, YouTube just continues to grow, with 25 times the video streams of its nearest competitor.
	Twitter 2012 is the year that Twitter went mainstream, reaching 500 million users mid-summer and just recently announcing 200 million monthly active users. And despite major new API restrictions that soured its relationship with developers, a very public spat with Instagram, and an evolving shift from social utility to media company, the company continues to grow and solidify its space in fast-breaking news.
	Instagram With a sale initially priced at almost $1.3 billion and an exploding user count, not even a tone-deaf terms-of-service change that spurred a class action lawsuit and a possible exodus of some users can keep Instagram off our winner list.
	Google Android is hot — 75 percent market-share hot. Search is still a massive strength for the iconic company that runs an ad 30 billion times each and every day. And so Google makes over $100 million a day – and hits our list of hot companies in 2012.
	ARM With the vast majority of the chips in smartphones running ARM processors, ARM has people wondering whether the mobile juggernaut will challenge Intel for CPU dominance. That’s still a stretch, but not nearly what it was just a few years ago.
	Reddit With 3.8 billion page views and 46 million unique visitors in October — double the previous year’s numbers — Reddit is continuing its torrid growth. And it doesn’t hurt when the POTUS himself chooses your site to do an informal meet-the-people session — which required 60 dedicated servers.

Next page: The losers

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s in a peculiar spot with its mobile processors: Even though Apple designs the chips for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, the company relies entirely on Samsung to build them. That’s not a relationship that can last for long, given the increasing tensions between the two companies.

So who else can build Apple’s mobile chips? According to RBC Capital analyst Doug Freedman, Apple is in talks with Intel to take over Samsung’s role, though it would mean significant changes for both companies.

As Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt reports, Freedman notes that, for a potential deal to happen, Intel may have to build ARM chips for the iPhone and iPod Touch. That would be a notable move for the chip maker, as Intel has so far only built chips sporting its own x86 architecture. In turn, Apple may have to agree to switch the iPad’s processor to x86 — which would be similar to the move away from PowerPC processors on Apple’s computers.

When asked about the deal, an Intel spokesperson told VentureBeat the company doesn’t comment on rumors and speculation.

A year ago, it would have been downright crazy to suggest Intel may build ARM chips. That would be equivalent to Intel admitting that it missed the boat on smartphone processors and that its own attempts at mobile x86 chips weren’t worthwhile. But with Intel CEO Paul Otellini retiring next year – he’s been one of the main cheerleaders for Intel sticking with its own architecture — the door is open for the company to make some bold changes.

Freedman points out that Apple’s demand for mobile processors could surpass Samsung’s capabilities next year and that Intel also has the “upper-hand” over competing chipmakers like Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) and GlobalFoundries. He estimates that Apple’s chip-making contract could be worth $2 billion next year.

Photo: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

While the $35 Raspberry Pi computer gets a lot of kudos for being a cheap way to get into hardware hacks, Texas Instruments’ $13 Stellaris LaunchPad could soon steal the spotlight.

The LaunchPad is an ARM-based single-board kit that will let you tinker with hardware and coding at an incredibly low price. Even if you’re an amateur hacker, there’s nothing wrong with trying this out because it’s only 13 freaking dollars.

Check out the Stellaris LaunchPad’s specs:

The evaluation LaunchPad board comes with a USB cable. For software, documentation, and more, simply check out Texas Instruments’ Wiki to get started.

For more on Stellaris LaunchPad, check out the video below:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Hoping to disrupt the market for data center chips, Advanced Micro Devices announced today that it will offer ARM-based server chips in the future. This strategic move is akin to a major league baseball team switching to football.

“This is a historic day,” said Rory Read (pictured), chief executive of AMD, the No. 2-maker of Intel-compatible chips.

AMD’s mainstay is designing x86 chips for PCs and data center computers known as servers. Thanks to the internet, data center chips are growing in sales at a rate of 33 percent a year. But the problem is power consumption. Electricity is becoming the biggest cost in data centers, and chips that are too hot are in danger of melting down.

So AMD will now design chips based on the ARM architecture, which typically has lower computing performance but much better power consumption. ARM-based chips are the heart of low-power portable devices such as tablets and smartphones. Now AMD will create 64-bit ARM-based processors that can be used in data center servers.

Those server chips will use less power, which allows more chips to be put in the same space without overheating. That, in turn, allows for more densely packed server chips. AMD will also bring to bear a new networking technology, dubbed a fabric, that it acquired with its purchase of Sea Micro earlier in the year. Sea Micro’s fabric allows chips to communicate within servers at much faster rates, allowing the low-power server chips to work together in a more efficient manner.

“It’s all about power and efficiency,” said Jay Parikh, vice president of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, who spoke at the AMD event in a panel that included representatives from ARM, Red hat, Dell, and analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64. The improved chips and server technology will make it easier for corporations to deploy huge clouds, or web-connected data centers that centralized a lot of processing and storage tasks.

“There is no doubt that the cloud changes everything,” Read said. “The cloud is the killer application that is driving industry forward. We are uniquely positioned to lead in the era of cloud processors.”

Sea Micro pioneered a new class of servers known as “micro servers.” They included Intel’s low-power Atom chips that had older processing technology but used significantly less power. Sea Micro launched its first micro servers in 2010, putting 512 processors in a small cabinet that was about a quarter the size of a usual server cabinet. They also used a quarter of the power.

“Why is it important?” Read said. “The ecosystems are going to continue to evolve. We’ll apply the technology to segments where it has the best fit. We think ARM will play an important role. The x86 won’t go away. It will be around a long time.”"

Patrick Moorhead, analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said, “AMD’s announcement gives a lift to the entire micro-server market, and launch contributions from Facebook, Amazon, RedHat and Dell, help, too.  AMD brings over a decade of server experience at the chip-level and can offer customers AMD, Intel and now ARM solution choices. Intel, who currently has over 95 percent market share in the entire server market, has a while to formulate a response given 64-bit ARM servers ship in 2014.”

Read said the micro-server segment of servers will be the fastest growing segment of the server industry over the next five years. Lisa Su, senior vice president of AMD, said the ARM license will change over time as AMD moves more deeply into the business. For now, AMD is licensing a 64-bit core from ARM.

“The market will develop over time,” Su said. “The engineering teams are well under way.”

At some point in the future, AMD could still go deeper with the relationship by designing its own cores and doing a lot more customization by securing a license that allows it access to the ARM instruction set. That is the kind of license that Apple has with ARM. But the licensing an ARM core is the first step in that process. The delivery of the first chips is set for 2014, since ARM still has to finish the core in question and then AMD will have to do work integrating that core into a full working, fully tested chip.

In a separate conversation, Intel fellow Matt Adiletta said in an interview with VentureBeat that his own company has been exploring micro server technology going back as far as 2007-2008, when the focus was on low-power “server blades.” Over time, Intel has also become interested in the micro server market, but it did allow the market leader, Sea Micro, to be acquired by AMD.

“With its planned 64-bit ARM solutions, AMD brings the experience of a proven enterprise CPU provider to the ARM ecosystem,” said Jimmy Pike, vice president and senior fellow of the Dell Data Center Solutions group. “ARM has the promise of being a serious player in areas like web front-end servers and as a worker node in a Hadoop environment.  AMD’s opportunity is to deliver serious value in performance-per-dollar and performance-per watt-where low-power server platforms running massively scale out workloads can shine. The availability of 64-bit ARM solutions is an essential milestone needed to accelerate enterprise adoption of this technology.”

Brookwood said that the strategy is a good one for AMD, since Intel is very unlikely to take a license from ARM, which is Intel’s arch competitor these days. And AMD, which is far smaller than Intel, has to do things that Intel can’t or won’t copy.

“If you are AMD, you have to do things that Intel doesn’t want to do,” Brookwood said. “This is one of those things.”

Yesterday, I reported that the new iPod Touch would ship with the A5x processor. That was a mistake in reporting. Greg Joswiak, the vice president of iOS and iPod product marketing, said that the new iPod Touch will ship with the A5 chip, the very same inside the iPhone 4S — not the A5X, which is used in the iPad (2012 model). This error in reporting made sense considering the announcement of new iPods: The A5x, scaled down, could provide the extra horsepower that games need. Or so it seemed.

After confirming with an Apple spokesperson earlier today, the upcoming iPod Touch does in fact have last year’s A5 chip. That information can further be confirmed on Apple’s features webpage for the iPod Touch. But in light of this error, a larger question arises: How is an A5 chip, the same as in the iPhone 4S, going to keep the iPod Touch relevant? The iPod Nano and Shuffle both have very specific functions; the Touch has always been an iPhone minus the phone — all of the capabilities without the girth, the two-year contract, or cellular service. That’s the price. Buy a phone and get an all-in-one device, or get the Touch, pay less, but split the cost between the iPod Touch and something else.

For most people, that’s a no-brainer — buy the iPhone. And with the ridiculous sales figures the iPhone has, Apple knows this. So who buys the iPod Touch? Simple: people who don’t need or want a new phone but still want the benefits of the latest iDevice. We all know parents who buy them for their kids — the responsible sort that doesn’t need a constant connection with their children through another line on that expensive family plan. Or it’s a gift to friends, family, and neighbors. The iPod Touch has always been relatively inexpensive yet remarkably useful, so year after year, it made for one of the best holiday buys.

That changed last year when Apple announced the iPhone 4S but no new iPod — not the Shuffle, not the Nano, and not the Touch. These devices were barely even discussed. Only the iPod Nano was mentioned, and only because Apple wanted owners to upgrade the firmware so they would have access to new watch faces.

Not updating the iPod Touch made sense. The only real difference between the A4 and A5 as far as most people were concerned was that the A5 was a dual-core CPU while the A4 had only one core. But there’s more: The A5 is an ARM Cortex-A9 with a PowerVR SGX543MP2 on a 45nm chip, clocked at 1GHz but scaled back to 800MHz for the iPhone 4S. The A4 is an ARM Cortex-A8 with a PowerVR 535 GPU on a 45nm chip, also scaled back to 800MHz. That’s a whole generation difference in ARM-processing technology.

The reason the iPod Touch never needed to be upgraded is simple enough. Business Insider reported that for the iPad 2, the cost of making the new A5 processor was 75% more expensive than the A4. Apple built the chip to fit in the iPad but didn’t manage to scale it down to the smaller, easier-to-fit-in-a-smartphone 32nm frame. With only a year for each new product and only seven months from the iPad to iPhone 4S, Apple didn’t manage to do that, and the same A5 chip went into the iPhone. This can account for a number of possible reasons why the 4S was such an iterative update. There simply wasn’t enough space to add in features like an LTE antenna or a larger battery.

And the iPod Touch? As a hugely profitable company, one that’s struggled to fit this processor into a larger device while simultaneously knowing that every phone has at least a two-year lifespan, there was only one smart business decision to make: don’t release a new iPod Touch. The old A4 was in tens of millions of iPhone 4s sold worldwide, and they were all capable of running the same applications as the newer iPhone 4S. Meanwhile, the manufacturing of the iPod Touch, with no changes, gets cheaper and cheaper, and the product itself makes money either way. And most customers don’t know the difference because unlike the iPhone, the iPod Touch isn’t numbered. We media label them by generation number … but even in conversation, it’s still the same iPod Touch.

So the new iPod Touch? There’s very little new or noteworthy about it. Just like the iPhone, the iPod Touch lives on a two-year cycle because it has all of the same hardware. Only this time, for this new model, that hardware is already a year old.

Don’t get me wrong. You can read Meghan’s impressions on the iPod Touch for judgment on the actual device. And the upgrades since the last model are pretty major: It has the same 5MP camera that was in the iPhone 4, Siri, a widescreen display … and it even comes in six colors. It may well make for an excellent buy or a great gift.

But don’t be fooled — the iPod Touch doesn’t have new hardware. It has a bigger screen, but that’s it. Everything else is from either the iPhone 4S or from the iPhone 4 (like the camera). In one year’s time, the current iPod Touch will be two generations behind the next iPhone, which is historically when devices stop getting regular software updates and when applications require more power than the older devices can afford. In effect, Apple has limited the lifespan of the iPod Touch by a whole year by using an older processor and older parts while still charging a $300 premium for the device.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Anyone curious about both the iPhone 5 and iPod Touch may have genuine concern for the gaming prowess of both devices. Especially since Apple revealed that the two devices ship with entirely different chipsets.

The iPhone 5 uses the newer A6 processor that Apple only just announced today. The new iPod Touch, however, has the older A5X system-on-a-chip (SoC), the same chip that the iPad uses.

So what’s the difference between the two, and will it have any impact on games?

Let’s start with the A5X, since it’s been in use for six months. The A5X is an iteration on the original A5, which was essentially a dual-core version with an enhanced graphics processing unit (GPU). That GPU, interestingly, is almost identical to the one inside the Playstation Vita, as we noted back in our review of Sony’s handheld. The A5X is a 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 SoC, which has a quad-core PowerVR SGX543MP4 GPU. In the iPad, it’s as large as a 45nm processor, but as the chips in the iPhone and the iPod Touch are scaled down to fit their size, let’s assume the same applies here.

So while the new iPod Touch has a lower-resolution display (1,163-by-640 versus the iPad’s 2,048-by-1,536), it also likely has a lower clock speed, as all iPhone and iPods have compared to the larger iPad, at 800MHz. It is also a dual-core GPU instead of quad-core, which is to help keep battery life under control on the much smaller device (the iPad has an 11,666 mAh battery; the iPhone 4S has a 1,432 mAh battery). The additional two cores also aren’t required because of the significantly smaller display resolution. Gaming performance, therefore, should be similar to that of the iPad, assuming Apple increases the available RAM of the iPod Touch. Apple is notorious for not revealing technical specifications, specifically RAM. We’ll know more specifics after the new iPod Touch launches in October.

The iPhone 5 uses an A6 processor, which analysts expect to run a newer ARM Cortex-A15 processor. So far no consumer products are available with this new processor, though Samsung, Texas Instruments, and Nvidia are all preparing new chips with the new architecture. Apple’s iPhone 5 will be the first product to come to market with the Cortex-A15.

ARM reported to ITProPortal back in early 2011 that the Cortex-A15 “will be at least 40 percent faster than the A9 when it comes to raw performance, all things equal; same number of cores, same speed.” According to ARM’s website, “It is expected that mobile configurations of the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor will deliver over five times the performance of today’s advanced smartphones.” For smartphones like the iPhone 5, it can have a range from 1GHz to 1.5GHz. Apple has already stated today that the A6 is a dual-core processor is unlikely to release the next version of the iPhone with a single-core processor, especially after last year’s A5 was a dual-core CPU, so it’s safe to assume that the new A6 will also be a dual-core chip.

What this means is that for everyday activities like browsing the web, loading applications, and general tasks, the A6 is better than the A5X thanks to a more efficient, newer architecture. But what about gaming performance? It probably won’t be as good. The reasoning is simple: the iPad has significantly worse battery life than the iPad 2 because of the A5X, which is required to power the much denser display. The A5X solves the problem of speed by brute force, not by ingenuity or better design. That’s why the iPad can play games so well.

Alternatively, the A6, which we won’t know about the GPU inside until after the phone releases, uses a newer architecture that’s more efficient and offers a significant boost to overall performance. Apps like the new 3D maps run better, and on less power, on the iPhone 5 than on the new iPod Touch, but because battery life is far more important on a phone than a media player, more processing muscle isn’t better. It is for the iPod Touch.

In a strange twist, this also means that the iPod Touch, which again shares many of the same internal components as the PS Vita, is nearly identical in power to the portable game console. The only major difference between the two is the dual-core versus quad-core GPU, where the Vita is more powerful.

The iPhone 5 should still perform well, though it’s safe to bet that because the iPhone is adding in so many other power-intensive features like an LTE chip and a more powerful camera, Apple is more focused on making sure it can last the whole day than making game performance the top priority. But the iPod Touch doesn’t have those limitations; it will definitely be the more powerful gaming device. The price for increased performance, however, is going to be in battery life…and owning a secondary device to your smartphone.

And if you think that this is all speculation, consider this: Apple made no mention of the power increase of the A6 over the A5, yet it spent plenty of time stating that the A5X is far more powerful than past processors. Apple never downplays features of their products. The company only makes features stand out. And they didn’t do that with the A6.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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“The explosion of cloud apps is creating new problems in the data center,” Mark Collier, a Rackspace vice president, said in a statement. “ARM-powered OpenStack clouds [combine] a radically more efficient chip architecture with the flexible OpenStack cloud operating system designed to manage them at scale.”

ARM processors are known for their miserly power consumption and low cost, which is why ARM chips power 73 percent of all mobile devices. Those same qualities are important in a cloud environment, where speed and power need to be balanced with energy costs and heat.

Servers, and therefore clouds, have traditionally been built with x86 chips from Intel, an ARM competitor. No one has yet built a commercial cloud with the ARM processors, partly because software needs to be tweaked to run on the non-X86 chip architecture, and partly because most ARM processors are 32-bit, while enterprise software is often 64-bit.

But in recent years, as ARM processors added power to their long-known and valued efficiency, they’ve become a viable option for servers.

A key member of the partnership is Calxeda, an Austin-based hardware startup that launched an ARM-based server-on-a-chip processor late last year. Using exactly that technology, HP, another one of the partners in today’s announcement, managed to squeeze 288 quad-core ARM processors into a 4U server, packing an incredible 1,152 processor cores into a single server.

That kind of compact power can drive significant cloud applications.

According to Calxeda VP Karl Freund, “There is massive demand from end-users, ISVs, and members of the open source community to access this new technology.”

OpenStack is an open-source cloud architecture, supported by 180 companies, that is intended to drive open standards in clouds, reducing customer lock-in to any one solution (such as Amazon Web Services). Adding ARM capabilities could make it a very attractive low-power option for those partners, and others.

Dell, Marvell, and Red Hat have also each announced similar ARM-based server products, although it’s not clear if there are currently clouds operational with those companies’ solutions.

Image credit: RawCaptured/ShutterStock

Microsoft has finally shed some light on the different versions of Windows 8 we’ll see upon release, and thankfully, things are much simpler than past versions.

This time around, there are only three flavors Microsoft is pushing heavily: Windows 8, the version geared towards most consumers; Windows 8 Pro, for enterprise and enthusiast users; and Windows RT, which is the new name for Windows on low-power ARM processors (previously called WOA).

And fret not, IT workers. Microsoft says another version of the OS, Windows 8 Enterprise, will be available to organizations with Software Assurance agreements. It’s basically an offshoot of Windows 8 Pro, since it contains all of the features of that version plus an increased IT-management feature.

Notably, Windows RT will only be available pre-installed on ARM-powered devices like tablets and ultraportable laptops, so you’ll only have to worry about the other two versions of Windows 8 when deciding to upgrade your current computer. (For Media Center fans, Microsoft says it will be available as an “economical add-on pack” for Windows 8 Pro.)

The standard version of Windows 8 will include all of the great features we’ve already seen in the OS, including the new tablet-friendly Metro interface, updated Windows Explorer, and support for new Metro apps. Windows 8 Pro will add encryption, virtualization, PC management, and domain connection features, according Windows Communication Manager Brandon LeBlanc.

As we’ve covered previously, Windows RT will include touch-optimized Office apps. Explaining the Windows RT name, LeBlanc said the focus of the OS is on the new Windows runtime, which “forms the foundation of a new generation of cloud-enabled, touch-enabled, web-connected apps of all kinds.”

Below, check out a comparison chart between the three versions of Windows 8.

Photo via Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Bluestacks’ grand vision of letting you run Android apps on Windows is one step closer to reality. The company today has released a free beta version of its software, which now supports most of Android’s 450,000 apps.

The new release is a major upgrade over Bluestacks’ alpha version, which was made available for three months last year to early testers and was only able to run nine preselected Android apps. The new beta version, which supports Windows 7, Vista, and XP, gives you access to pretty much any Android app — though not all of them run very well.

Still, it’s a big step for the startup, which made waves last year when it first announced its emulation technology. Dubbed Layercake, the software emulates Android apps written for ARM processors on x86 processor-based Windows PCs. Without such emulation technology, software between the two different chip platforms is fundamentally incompatible (without being recompiled). Emulation is nothing new, but Bluestacks is the first company devoted to bringing the rich variety of Android apps to PCs.

“It’s really a whole new product,” said Bluestacks CEO Rosen Sharma in an interview with VentureBeat yesterday. The company has been working on the emulation technology for two-and-a-half years, Sharma told me, but now its original vision is finally coming into view.

While the Bluestacks software won’t appeal to everyone, it could be useful for those who want to test out Android apps, or users who want access to apps that don’t yet have desktop versions. And judging from the company’s Facebook page — which has garnered 75,000 fans within the past three days, for a total of  286,000 fans — it’s clear Bluestacks has struck a chord with a sizable audience of geeks.

I tested out the beta release over the weekend, and I was honestly surprised at how well it worked. After installing the beta — a process that took around 10 minutes — I was presented with a simple home screen with some pre-installed apps, including Fruit Ninja and Evernote. Apps can be run in a window or full-screen view, and they performed adequately on my Windows 7 PC with a quad-core CPU and 8 gigabytes of RAM (don’t judge me).

Games like Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds were playable (though the latter had choppy graphics and sound at times), and productivity apps like Evernote worked without much issue. Strangely, the new Angry Birds Space performed almost flawlessly (see the video below). 3D-heavy apps, like Google Earth, didn’t fair as well, and brought Bluestacks to a crawl.

Sharma tells me the company is constantly working on making the app faster. For 3D apps to work better, the company needs to make upgrades to hardware-accelerated graphics support, which he says are in the works.

The company has high hopes for the beta release of its software after the alpha release saw widespread engagement from users. Over a million users across more than 100 countries downloaded the alpha release and opened over 4.5 million apps.

As I wrote when the company announced its Windows 8 support, BlueStacks is poised to be especially useful on Windows 8, since it supports both traditional desktop and tablet interfaces. Tablets running the new OS will be far more appealing than those running Windows 7, so BlueStacks could win big if Windows 8 tablets take off. And given just how much Microsoft’s tablet future relies on Windows 8, there’s no reason to think that it’s going to drop the ball.

Bluestacks told me at the Consumer Electronics Show this year that it’s actively targeting Ultrabook makers to pre-load its app (it has already inked a deal with InHon, a Taiwanese manufacturer). The company’s technology is also ripe for licensing — I can just imagine how much Intel would love to use Bluestacks to power ARM-based apps in its upcoming x86-based mobile devices.

Campbell, Calif.-based BlueStacks has raised $10.6 million so far in a single round of funding.

Microsoft’s plan to bring Windows to ARM chips has been a curious endeavor, mainly because the company hasn’t offered up many specifics about how the new version of Windows will differ from the traditional x86 and 64-bit versions of the operating system.

That all changed today with a nearly-9,000 word blog post by Microsoft’s Windows unit president Steven Sinofsky, in which he divulged a slew of details on Windows on ARM (WOA).

The big takeaways are that Microsoft plans to have WOA PCs available when other Windows 8 computers are shipping, and the company will also include desktop versions of optimized Office 15 apps in all WOA devices.

Windows on ARM running on an early test device

To refresh: Microsoft announced way back in January 2011 that it would be porting Windows over to ARM chips. Doing so would give device makers an alternative to more power-hungry chips from Intel and AMD when developing Windows devices, and it would allow Microsoft to take advantage of the advances in power efficiency being made by mobile ARM chips.

The Office 15 apps, which will include Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and OneNote, are among the few desktop apps that WOA will support. The OS will include the traditional Windows Explorer file manager, Windows Explorer, and other desktop Windows features, but it won’t run traditional x86/64 Windows apps. Metro style apps available on the Microsoft Store, however, will run across WOA and all other versions of Windows 8.

As you can see from the screenshot above, Office 15 is aiming for a simpler style than previous iterations. There’s more white space than usual for an Office app, and it’s clear that Microsoft is using its Metro design cues wherever it can.

Another interesting aspect of WOA PCs is that you’ll never be able to turn them off. Microsoft is instead relying on a new “Connected Standby” low-power mode that will purportedly last for weeks.  “Connected Standby permeates the engineering for WOA PCs from the hardware through the firmware, OS, WinRT platform, and apps,” Sinofsky writes. Microsoft is also working on bringing the low-power mode to other Windows 8 PCs as well, but you’ll still be able to turn those off completely.

Microsoft says it won’t release Windows on ARM separately, so it will only be something that you can get when purchasing a WOA tablet or PC. The company will also be rolling out test PCs to select developers and hardware partners around the release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview at the end of this month.

Check out a video overview of Windows on ARM:

Some interesting evidence that such work is taking place emerged today in an academic paper written by a former Apple intern.

Apple Insider reports that Tristan Schaap, who is now an Apple engineer, wrote a thesis in 2010 on his 12-week job as an intern with Apple’s Platform Technologies Group, a division of the Core OS department.

The thesis was held secret because it contained sensitive information but was published by the Netherlands Delft University of Technology, according to iMore.

The paper said that Schaap worked with the group to get Darwin, described as the “lower half” of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system, to boot on an ARM processor from Marvell. The paper reported some partial success on the project.

Normally, the Mac OS X runs on a beefy Intel x86 architecture processor. ARM processors are more power efficient and are used in mobile phones and tablets; but they’re moving up in the world. If Apple moves the Mac OS X to ARM, it would likely have a more versatile and cheaper platform.

Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Marvell, Broadcom and Qualcomm are all working on ARM-based chips that are powerful enough to run Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system. So it wouldn’t be a stretch for Apple to try to port its software to run on those chips as well.

But there is no indication that Apple’s explorations into ARM were ever meant to be used in an actual product. Schaap is now employed as a CoreOS engineer, according to his LinkedIn profile.

[Image credit: ZDNet]

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Nvidia is forging ahead with its plans to revolutionize supercomputers and workstations with a number of announcements today. Among them, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center will be the first in the world to adopt a solution that combines Nvidia’s low-power ARM-based Tegra central processing units (CPUs) with Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs).

That combination could be a powerful way to improve computing power without consuming a lot of electricity. Power consumption and the electricity costs that go with it are now the No. 1 cost for maintaining supercomputers these days. Until now, Nvidia’s Tegra CPUs were used as mobile device processors, and most supercomputers used Intel microprocessors.

The supercomputers will use the hybrid architecture that combines the speedy serial (one thing after another) processing nature of CPUs with the parallel (many small tasks at once) nature of GPUs. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center plans to improve its energy efficiency by two to five times, according to the announcement today at the SC11 supercomputing conference in Seattle.

Of course, Nvidia is a long way from knocking Intel out of supercomputers in the big picture. Intel has 64-bit processors while Nvidia doesn’t and that’s an important feature for high-end computers. Intel is also using its manufacturing advantages to race ahead with low-power server chips, and it is starting initiatives to use low-power Atom chips in microservers.

The GPUs take advantage of Nvidia’s Cuda programming environment to perform non-graphics computing tasks on a GPU. The Barcelona center ultimately plans to deliver exascale-level performance while using 15 to 30 times less power than current supercomputers. Nvidia is the world’s largest independent graphics chip maker, but it has recently made headway in the processor market with its ARM-based Tegra CPUs.

An exascale supercomputer will, at some point in the future, be able to execute an exaflop. That is a billion billion floating point operations per second. A flop is the equivalent of taking two 15-digit numbers and multiplying them together. Right now, supercomputers such as the upcoming Titan machine at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory are targeting computation levels at 20 petaflops. A thousand petaflops is equal to one exaflop. So supercomputers have a long way to go to get to exascale.

Alex Ramirez, leader of Barcelona’s Mont-Blanc Project, said that CPUs alone often consume the lion’s share of the energy — 40 percent or more — in a supercoputer. By comparison, he said the Mont-Blanc machine will use the Tegra mobile processors to achieve a four to 10-fold improvement in energy efficiency by 2014.

Nvidia will create a new hardware and software development kit to enable more ARM-based supercomputing initiatives. The Barcelona version will feature a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 ARM-based CPU along with an Nvidia GPU. The center is starting with 256 Tegra CPUs and 256 GPUs. The kit will be available in the first half of 2012. Nvidia is naming the Barcelona center a Cuda “center of excellence,” the 14th such institute.

Nvidia is also introducing its Maximus circuit cards (pictured right) for advanced workstations. The Maximus technology can be used to design fancy cars and other high-computation tasks that normal PCs can’t handle. The Maximus cards will combine graphics and computation in the same system. The Maximus technology combines Nvidia’s Quadro professional workstation GPUs with Nvidia Tesla C2075 companion processors (which are separate computing cards).

Previous workstations forced designers and engineers to do compute-based and graphics-based work separately or offline. Now, with Maximus, they can do both of those kinds of tasks at the same time on the same machine, said Jeff Brown, general manager of Nvidia’s professional solutions group. The workstations will speed up science, engineering and design applications from Adobe, Ansys, Autodesk, Bunkspeed, Dassault Systèmes and MathWorks.

Meanwhile, Nvidia has joined with Cray, the Portland Group, and Caps to create a new standard for parallel programming known as OpenACC. That will make it easier to accelerate applications that use both CPUs and GPUs. The OpenACC should benefit programmers working in chemistry, biology, physics, data analytics, weather and climate, intelligence, and other fields. Initial support for OpenACC is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2012.

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Ushering in the era of low-power servers, Austin, Texas-based Calxeda is today announcing its EnergyCore ARM-based processor, the first ever chip capable of running an entire server at a mere 5 watts.

The EnergyCore server-on-a-chip uses 90 percent less power (just 1.5 watts while idle), takes up 90 percent less space, and is half as expensive as traditional server solutions, according to the company. Since it’s based on ARM technology, Calxeda’s chips are taking a cue from the low-power, yet highly capable, ARM processors used in smartphones and tablets.

“ARM is to processors what Linux is to operating systems,” Calxeda VP of marketing Karl Freund told VentureBeat in an interview yesterday, referring to the way companies can build innovative technologies on top of ARM’s original designs. The EnergyCore chips are based on ARM’s quad-core Cortex A9, and they run at speeds between 1.1 gigahertz and 1.4 Ghz. But the company also added in an 80-gigabit fabric switch, which will allow for high data throughput, as well as an energy management engine.

The complete EnergyCore server node also includes 4 gigabytes of RAM. Calxeda’s chips are 32-bit, but the company says it will be ready to jump to 64-bit chips once ARM’s designs are complete.

Calxeda says its chips are best suited for target applications like storage and file serving, or web apps. You won’t see much of an advantage using EnergyCore servers for heavy duty video encoding, but for most other server uses it’s an ideal balance between low-energy usage and a decent amount of computing power. The company competes directly with Intel’s Atom chips and firms like SeaMicro who are building Atom-based servers.

Calxeda already has a launch partner in HP, which today announced its new server lineup based using the company’s technology. “A single rack of HP’s Calxeda servers delivers the throughput of some 700 traditional servers and dramatically simplifies the infrastructure needed to hook them all together and manage the cluster,” said Calxeda CEO and co-founder Barry Evans in a statement today.

Calxeda, formerly known as Smooth-Stone, raised $48 million in funding about 14 months ago from ARM, Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC), Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners and Highland Capital Partners.

The news, delivered by Windows president Steven Sinofsky during an analyst call this week, means that Windows 8 won’t be fully compatible across all tablets and desktops. It’s a bit of a knock against Windows 8′s attempt to unify desktop and tablet interfaces.

ARM processors typically power smartphones and tablets today because they’re incredibly power efficient. But since the chip architectures are so different, software built for x86 CPUs will need to be recompiled to run on ARM.

Because of this, Windows 8 tablets running x86 chips will have a leg-up against their ARM slate siblings, since they will allow users to seamlessly jump across tablet and desktop apps. Windows 8 ARM tablets, on the other hand, will be limited to what’s available in Microsoft’s App Store.

As Slashgear reports, Sinofsky says Microsoft is concerned that x86 apps aren’t built with power efficiency in mind, and supporting x86 apps also opens the door to viruses and malware that plague Windows desktop users. Microsoft doesn’t want its ARM tablets to have a perceived security flaw compared to the iPad and Android slates. The company views Metro-styled apps as the bridge between the ARM and x86 platforms.

In other Windows 8 news, Microsoft said that it will take a 30 percent cut from Metro apps sold via its Windows 8 store, reports AppleInsider. By doing so, Microsoft is aping Apple’s commission amount for its App Store.

Check out a new demonstration of Windows 8′s Metro apps below:

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The payment is a huge win for Nvidia, whose investors have been wondering if the company’s saber-rattling with the world’s biggest chip maker was ever going to pay off. It gives Nvidia plenty of money to keep investing in its own graphics and processor plans, which have come into clear focus in the past week. The deal removes a lot of clouds from Nvidia’s future.

The deal settles acrimonious litigation between Intel and Nvidia over chip sets. It also allows Intel to proceed with a license to Nvidia’s graphics chip technology. Intel desperately needed that to clear the way for its Sandy Bridge chips, which combine graphics and a microprocessor in the same piece of silicon.

In a conference call, Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang said that the agreement allows Intel to integrate graphics technology (which may be subject to Nvidia patents) into its microprocessors as Intel is doing in its Sandy Bridge microprocessors. Nvidia also gains the right to make processors in general, including the ARM-based processor that Nvidia announced last week. It does not, Huang said, give Nvidia the right to make an Intel-compatible x86 microprocessor.

Intel will pay the licensing fee in five annual installments starting Jan. 18. All outstanding legal disputes will be dropped.

“This agreement signals a new era for Nvidia,” said Huang (pictured) in the call. “This marks a return to a healthy cooperative relationship we previously had with Intel for many years. We are pleased to have closed this chapter in Nvidia’s history and to have opened another.”

Nvidia is also free of any patent claims by Intel. In addition to the exclusion of Intel-compatible microprocessors, Nvidia will not have the right to the intellectual property in Intel’s flash memory and certain chip sets. The previous agreement between the companies was set to expire in March. The fees from Intel will translate into an estimated $233 million in operating income per year for Nvidia and 29 cents a share in net income.

Nvidia doesn’t need a microprocessor license from Intel because Huang announced last week at the Consumer Electronics Show that Nvidia was making an ARM-based microprocessor. That chip, code-named Project Denver, will be out within a couple of years and will focus on high-performance computing. It will likely run on the next version of Windows, which Microsoft said would now be compatible with ARM chips in addition to Intel-based x86 chips.

“Building yet another x86 processor when the world is a flood with them is a pointless exercise,” Huang said. “We are building a processor for the future.” He said ARM would be the largest processor architecture in the world and is attractive because it is open and growing the fastest.

Huang said the license payment was the biggest in Nvidia’s history. He also said that license fees from Sony related to Nvidia’s technology in the PlayStation 3 have amounted to $500 million since 2004.

“This agreement ends the legal dispute between the companies, preserves patent peace and provides protections that allow for continued freedom in product design,” said Doug Melamed, Intel senior vice president and general counsel, in a statement. “It also enables the companies to focus their efforts on innovation and the development of new, innovative products.”

With the exception of one “confidential” clause, the agreement is here.

Microsoft

Rumors of the ARM compatibility surfaced last month, signaling a fracture in the Wintel alliance between Microsoft and Intel that has held sway over PC technology for decades. Microsoft has tried to downplay that angle.

Steve Sinofsky (pictured), president of Microsoft’s Windows division, showed a working version of the future Windows running on Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia microprocessors at a press conference today at the Consumer Electronics Show. It’s not clear when the new version of Windows will ship. But when that happens, it will prove disruptive to the chip market, where Intel has been the dominant provider of chips that run Windows.

The Nvidia processor, known as Tegra 2, ran Windows fine. A future version of Nvidia’s processor, code-named Project Denver, will likely also run Windows with much higher performance. Texas Instruments is also doing a chip that could run the future Windows chip, while Qualcomm’s Snapdragon family of processors will be able to run the future version of Windows, which Sinofsky did not name but which is widely believe to be Windows 8.

“This shows we are broadening our set of partners,” Sinofsky said.

But he also noted that x86 partners Intel and Advanced Micro Devices will continue to work with Microsoft. Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer will show the same demos at his keynote speech tonight at CES.

Sinofsky started the press event with a discussion about the work Microsoft and its partners have been doing to build systems-on-a-chip, which glue together a bunch of chips into a single massive chip that can run a whole system (or most of one). The company has been trying to integrate lots of hardware and software together to create much smaller devices.

Microsoft has a bunch of other demos that show Windows can flow across phones, PCs, and tablet computers.

The company also showed off a new version of its gesture-based computing project. Version 2 of Microsoft’s Surface (pictured) computing tables — where you can wave your hand over the screen of a table-top computer to make things happen — was also demonstrated at the press conference. Microsoft’s Surface will be built into lower-cost technologies.

[Top image credit: "Microsoft Sweden"]

If all goes as planned, Nvidia could very well disrupt the duopoly of Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, which (while challenged by Via Technologies) dominate the market for chips that run Windows-based PCs. This is part of a chess game among giant tech companies to leapfrog each other or invade each other’s markets. Billions of dollars in chip and computer industry revenues are at stake.

Putting two and two together, it makes sense that a high-end ARM chip is what would be required to run the Windows operating system, which to date has only run on x86 (Intel-compatible) computers. Huang made the announcement of Project Denver at the very end of a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show, just before Microsoft began its own press conference where the subject is how to make Windows run on ARM processors.

Steve Sinofsky, president of Microsoft’s Windows group, said that the company is planning to show that Windows can run on PCs, slate computers (tablets) and mobile devices too. Huang said in his press conference that there were rumors that Nvidia was working on something big and that it was an Intel-compatible processor. But it turns out that the chip is ARM based. Huang referred to it as a “game changer.” The hint is that this is part of Nvidia’s master plan to wedge its way into Intel’s market, even as Intel tries to squeeze Nvidia out of graphics by putting graphics capabilities into its Sandy Bridge microprocessors.

MIPS Technologies is announcing this week at the Consumer Electronics Show – the tech industry extravaganza that takes place this week in Las Vegas — that it has created versions of its chip designs for cell phones and other mobile devices based on the Android operating system. And it has also won over some customers for its designs, including Chinese chip maker Ingenic Semiconductor, a new licensee that will use MIPS designs in chips for both smartphones and tablet computers.

“Customers are looking for alternatives to monopoly suppliers,” said Art Swift, vice president of marketing at MIPS, a decades-old company that was the key supplier of chips for the pioneering graphics computer firm Silicon Graphics. “In the mobile market, we think there is plenty of room for competition.”

While Intel both designs and manufactures chips, ARM creates designs for microprocessors that it licenses to a broad array of chip makers. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based MIPS operates the same way, creating a MIPS architecture that can be licensed to chip makers, who sell the chips to gadget makers. One of the newest gadget makers to adopt MIPS designs is Ingenic.

While the new customers are a big potential source of revenue for MIPS, it has a long way to go to catch up with ARM, whose licensees ship billions of chips based on ARM’s low-power chip architecture each year. MIPS chips have been beefier in terms of performance but haven’t been as good historically on power consumption, which is critical in small devices that operate on battery power. MIPS has done well in TV sets, particularly the web-connected TVs that are more like computers.

Still, MIPS is no slouch. The company is profitable (net income was up 235 percent in the most recent quarter) and revenues are growing (up 50 percent from a year ago). Its designs are used in more than 600 million chips a year, which are built into a wide array of digital consumer devices: networking gear, set-top boxes, TVs and Blu-ray players. MIPS is the market share leader in chips for digital TVs and set-top boxes, said Art Swift, vice president of marketing at MIPS.

Now it’s time to make some headway into the mobile device market with more power-efficient MIPS designs, said Swift. That’s because the mobile devices — tablets, e-readers or phones — require more and more performance to handle apps that feature rich media and graphics.

On display at CES will be two MIPS-based smartphones, a MIPS-based ebook reader, and several MIPS-based tablets. Both Ingenic and Actions Semiconductor are showing off MIPS-based chips running in these devices. Ingenic has shipped more than 25 million chips to date, mostly for gadgets in the Chinese market.

Less than a year ago, MIPS said it planned to enter the mobile market by designing chips that could run the Google Android software. Overall, including unannounced products, MIPS has seven wins for its designs in cell phones, Swift said. That’s a minor dent in ARM’s business, but it’s a start.

Swift said that Intel’s chips are still too power-hungry for the cell phone market. Quoting Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang, Swift said about Intel’s big and power-inefficient chips, “An elephant on a diet is still an elephant.”