Intel Details Upcoming Mobile and Six-Core Processors – HotHardware

With the International Solid-State Circuits Conference less than a week away, Intel has released additional details on its hexa-core desktop, next generation mobile and dual-core Westmere processors. Much of the dual-core data was revealed last month when the CPU manufacturer launched Clarkdale (our review is here if you want additional information on the CPU and its integrated graphics core). When Intel set its internal goals for what its calling Westmere 6C, the company aimed to boost both core and cache count by 50 percent without increasing the processor’s thermal envelope. Towards this end, the new Westmere chips will incorporate additional technologies to reduce the CPU’s power consumption at idle.

Westmere 6C (codename Gulftown) is a native six-core chip as shown above. Intel has crammed 1.17 billion transistors into a die that’s approximately 240mm sq. The new chip carries 12MB up L3 (up from Nehalem’s 8MB) and a TDP of 130W at 3.33GHz. In addition to the addition of hardware AES encryption instruction decode support, Intel has made a number of improvements to Gulftown’s power consumption. Up until now, Intel’s efforts to reduce CPU power consumption focused on what it calls the “Core” the “Uncore” hardware couldn’t be powered down or controlled to the same degree. Starting with Westmere, both sections of the CPU can be fine-tuned to minimize power consumption without adversely affecting processor performance. As part of its bid to increase CPU complexity and performance without driving up system-level power consumption, Westmere will also support low-voltage DDR3, which uses an operating voltage of 1.35v (down from 1.5v standard). According to Intel, using the lower voltage memory reduces memory power consumption by about 20 percent overall.

Mobile

The big mobile-specific tech that Intel has debuted with Arrandale (32nm Westmere 2C) is a Turbo Boost for graphics mode. While Intel’s standard Turbo mode is available as well, the chip can also cut CPU frequency and ramp the IGP higher to improve graphics performance. Intel refers to this as “HD Graphics with dynamic frequency.” How much of a boost this mode can deliver depends on which processor you’ve got. Intel’s spec sheets for the Core i3 processor list a 500MHz standard frequency with a 667MHz maximum dynamic frequency while the Core i5 mobile parts top out at 766MHz. That’s 1.33x and 1.53x above stock, respectively.

There are two ways to take Intel’s Dynamic Frequency technology. On the one hand, it’s true that Intel’s integrated GPUs have historically been terrible choices for gaming; what the parts have lacked in hardware functionality, they’ve made up for in terrible driver support. Arrandale’s integrated IGP is more advanced than any of its desktop predecessors, but the “new” features Intel baked into the on-die GPU, such as hierarchical Z support, are technologies ATI and NVIDIA launched nearly nine years ago. Trailing your competition is one thing, trailing your competition by a decade is something else entirely.

On the other hand, however, Intel’s new IGP is indisputably the fastest, most gaming-friendly part the company has ever built. A 33 percent (or 53 percent) higher clockspeed isn’t going to turn Arrandale’s IGP into a discrete part from ATI or NVIDIA, but it should provide noticable performance improvements provided that the processor speed tradeoff doesn’t obscure them. The ability to trade CPU cycles for GPU horsepower gives even a modest system additional flexibility; it’s easy to see how this sort of capability could end up integrated into Intel’s Atom product line in the not-too-distant future.

And Now For Something Completely Different

In addition to its x86 CPU briefings, Intel will present a number of paper’s at the ISSCC. Chief among these are the company’s ongoing research into so-called “digital intelligence,” high-speed point-to-point interconnects, and reconfigurable computing. Intel will also give more details on a 48-core single-chip processor it unveiled last December. One of the features the company will discuss is the chip’s use of so-called circuit switching rather than packet switching when passing messages. By mapping out the route from core to core before actually sending a message, Intel claims it can vastly accelerate the speed at which information is passed within the chip structure.
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Intel reveals next-generation Atom details

Intel has revealed the launch specs for the first-ever line of x86 products that contain both a GPU and CPU on the same die. Pine Trail, the next-generation Atom platform, will pave the way for future integrated CPU/GPU parts from both Intel and AMD.

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Intel P55-based motherboards

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Exclusive: Apple dictated Light Peak creation to Intel, could begin migration from other standards as early as 2010

Remember how Intel showed off its new, advanced optical standard — Light Peak — this past week on a Hackintosh? Well it turns out there’s more to that story than you probably know, and it all leads back to some revealing facts about the connection… literally and figuratively. Engadget has learned — thanks to an extremely reliable source — that not only is Apple complicit in the development of Light Peak, but the company actually brought the concept to Intel and asked them to create it. More to the point, the new standard will play a hugely important role in upcoming products from Cupertino.

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Exclusive: Apple dictated Light Peak creation to Intel, could begin migration from other standards as early as 2010

Intel announces Atom CE4100 for insanely powerful cable boxes and Blu-ray players

Intel’s CE3100 media chip has been behind some of the cooler demos they’ve done here at IDF, and it’s just gotten a big brother, the Atom CE4100. As you’d expect, the big change is the replacement of the CE3100’s Pentium M core with an Atom core, but this thing is actually kind of a monster — it can decode two 1080p video streams with various high-end audio codecs, it adds MPEG-4 support and 3D graphics capability, and it can even capture uncompressed 1080p video. Of course, it’s up to manufacturers and cable companies to actually put all this power to use, but Intel’s promised us some hardware demos from partners — stay tuned.

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Intel announces Atom CE4100 for insanely powerful cable boxes and Blu-ray players

Intel acquires two software firms | Nanotech – The Circuits Blog – CNET News

Intel has quietly snapped up two software companies in the last 30 days with aim of boosting development of applications that take better advantage of chips with more than one processing core.

In a company blog, the chipmaker indicated the acquisition of Cilk at the end of last month and then Rapidmind earlier this week. Both are small companies that employ under 50 people. The acquisitions follow the purchase of software company Wind River Systems in June.

“Over the last few years, there has been a gradual emergence of multicore microprocessors. It’s put parallelism in more and more machines,” James Reinders, chief evangelist and director of marketing and sales at Intel, said in a phone interview Friday, explaining why Intel bought the two firms.

“If you look at traditional applications, ones that we use everyday, it’s fair to say that most are not exploiting parallelism–at least not to the full extent,” Reinders said.

A multicore processor is defined as any chip with more than one processing core. Today, almost all Intel chips that go into laptops, desktops, and servers have at least two cores. The challenge for Intel is to make sure that applications take advantage of all the cores–so-called parallelism. This has historically presented a challenge for software programmers.

“The operating system does stuff for applications in parallel,” Reinders said, referring to operating systems such as Windows. “But considering that we can produce more and more cores every year, to truly get the benefit of what the future holds, applications need to change. And most applications haven’t changed,” he said.

The goal is to facilitate the development of parallel programming. “How do we help software developers tackle parallel programming? Both companies had teams of experts that had been focused on this problem. So, they’re kindred spirits,” he said.

Writing about Cilk in a blog, Reinders said Intel sees “great opportunities for Cilk to integrate with our parallel tools…including Intel Parallel Studio.” The firm’s technology enables “mainstream programmers to develop multithreaded (or parallel) applications…Providing a smooth path to multicore for legacy (older) applications that otherwise cannot easily leverage the performance capabilities of multicore processors,” according to Cilk’s Web site. Original Cilk research was done at MIT.

Rapidmind was founded five years ago as Serious Hack and grew out of work at the University of Waterloo. It boasts advanced technology for helping software developers with data parallel programming for multicore processors and accelerators.

The cost of the two acquisitions was not disclosed.

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Facebook app lets Intel PCs donate processor power | Nanotech – The Circuits Blog – CNET News

Can’t donate your personal time to a good cause? Intel is providing what may be the next best option.

Intel teamed up with GridRepublic on Monday to launch a Facebook application that allows the spare processing power in a PC to be used to fight diseases and study climate change.

The massive amount of data crunching necessary for high level research is often extremely expensive or not readily available–or both. Intel’s solution is Progress Thru Processors, a computing application built on the Facebook platform that allows people to donate their PC’s available data processing capacity to research projects such as Rosetta@home, which uses computers to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases.
GridRepublic application allows computers to work on public-interest research projects when the machines are not otherwise in use.

GridRepublic application allows computers to work on public-interest research projects when the machines are not otherwise in use.

(Credit: Intel)

In addition to Rosetta@home, Progress Thru Processors participants can choose to contribute processor power to the research efforts of Climateprediction.net and Africa@home. Climateprediction.net is dedicated to increased understanding of global climate change by predicting the Earth’s climate and testing the accuracy of climate models. Africa@home is currently focused on finding optimal strategies to combat malaria by studying simulation models of disease transmission and the potential impact of new anti-malarial drugs and vaccines.

“By simply running an application on your computer, which uses very little incremental resources, you can expand computing resources to researchers,” Deborah Conrad, Intel vice president and general manager of corporate marketing, said in a statement.

The application was launched Monday as a public beta and available to all Facebook users and is available for download here.

The application will activate only when a PC’s performance is not being fully utilized. When the participant’s computer usage demands more processor performance, the application defers and sits idle until spare processing capabilities become available again, Intel said. The application runs automatically as a background process on a PC and will not affect performance or any other tasks, according to Intel.

Progress Thru Processors does not require participants to leave their computers powered up unnecessarily. By keeping their PCs on only as they normally would, participants will still be contributing, Intel said.

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Why 2010 Will Be the Year of the Tablet | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

After years of enticing rumors, ambitious prognostications and flat-out blather, 2010 may finally be the year that the tablet PC evolves from being a niche device to becoming a mainstream portable computer.

The tipping point comes via word to Wired.com from a well-connected industry executive that mainstream heavyweights Dell and Intel are collaborating on a touchscreen tablet due for release next year. Though our source has learned little about specifications of the device, what’s apparent is that the tablet will serve as a subscription-based e-reader for displaying newspapers, magazines and other media, giving Amazon’s Kindle — particularly, the nearly $500 large-format DX model — a run for its money.

As notable as the format is the business model: The tablet will be free for consumers who opt into a contract subscribing to one or more digital media subscriptions, according to our source. That’s similar to how telecom companies currently subsidize cellphones when customers agree to two-year contracts.

Our source, who requested to remain anonymous due to a non-disclosure agreement, said the companies are aiming to launch this product in about six months.

Dell and Intel are just the latest examples of a growing trend. MKM Partners analyst Tero Kuittinen said he, too, has heard rumors about not just Dell, but also handset makers Nokia and HTC delivering tablets by end of first quarter 2010. Nearly everyone has now confidently reported that Apple is launching a tablet by early next year. Singapore start-up Fusion Garage and TechCrunch are rushing to release the CrunchPad touchscreen tablet by this November.

Market research firm Display Search now projects the touchscreen market will triple in the next few years, from $3.6 billion to $9 billion.

“The iPhone was a big catalyst for the whole touchscreen industry, even if it’s just from a 3.5-inch mobile phone,” said Jennifer Halgrove, an analyst and director of display technologies with Display Search. “It encouraged people’s imaginations, and now companies are saying, ‘Oh, I can make a bigger one, and I can also have this user friendly interface.’ That really opened this industry.”

The idea of the tablet computer is nothing new to the tech industry. The development of tablet PCs can be traced as far back as 1888, when the United States Patent office granted a patent to electrical engineer Elisha Gray for an electrical-stylus device for capturing handwriting. In more recent years, plenty of hardware companies, such as Hewlett-Packard and Acer, have presented tablets that have only succeeded to fulfill a niche. Controlled with a stylus on a touch-sensitive “digitizer” screen, tablet PCs have traditionally been tailored toward artists and designers, failing to break into the mainstream.

But in recent years, costs of touchscreen components and software have been declining, and new types of touchscreens are emerging in the display market, Colegrove said. After stylus-controlled digitizer touchscreens came resistive touchscreens, which were very cheap to produce but suffered from low durability and poor transmittance. Then, a newer technology called capacitive touch became available, in which electrodes sense a user’s fingers on the X and Y axes, negating the need for a stylus.

In 2007, Apple featured capacitive touch technology (which it marketed with the more friendly term “multitouch”) in its iPhone and iPod Touch, which have sold 40 million units worldwide to date. Clearly, there is a mainstream audience for these keyboard-less computers, and Apple opened the doors with a superior user interface.

“The touch-based user interface is something we got from the handset market,” Kuittinen said. “And now that you have this innovation, it’s easier to go back to the tablet concept, and say, ‘Wait a minute, let’s add this.’ All of a sudden the device is a lot more appealing and sexier, especially since you have multitouch.”

A $0.00, media-centric tablet from Dell and Intel would certainly be competitive against Amazon’s Kindle in terms of price. Who would buy an Amazon Kindle reader if a free tablet were made available? The Kindle 2 costs $300, and the large-format Kindle DX runs for $490 — and even after purchasing a Kindle, consumers must still pay for content.

At Amazon’s Kindle DX launch event in May, The New York Times teased the idea of subsidizing longer term subscription commitments, but only in areas where “home delivery is not available.” Still, no such subsidy model has yet come into fruition for Amazon’s Kindles.

The idea of opting into a contract might initially sound like a turn-off, but Kuittinen told Wired.com that for cellphones, carrier-subsidy has been an extremely successful method to reel in customers. He said he would expect similar results with a subsidized tablet.

Kuittinen added that he has heard the Dell tablet would measure 5 inches — slightly larger than an iPhone but smaller than a Kindle. However, he said he is skeptical about Intel’s involvement with the product. Given the nature of the company, Intel would provide the guts of the device — perhaps a low-powered processor such as the Atom, which is currently used in netbooks. Kuittinen said this processor is not adequately energy-efficient to power a tablet PC compared to the ARM-based chips used in iPhones and devices running Google Android.

“There’s really no other viable alternative,” he said. “Android has such a strong moment right now. It’s going to be so much easier to develop for it.”

The low cost of Intel’s Atom chips would help keep the a rumored device’s overall price down in order to make subsidy not too hefty for content providers involved. But the software would be the key ingredient to drive the success for this device, and an Intel-based machine would either have to run a Windows or Linux-based operating system.

A tablet produced by Dell and Intel would most likely run a mobile version of Windows 7. In presentations marketing Windows 7, Microsoft has been heavily promoting the upcoming operating system’s support for multitouch. Windows 7 is slated for an October 2009 release.

The challenge for Dell and Intel is unlikely to be the creation of the product, but rather cementing negotiations with content partners. The companies will find it difficult convincing large newspaper companies to convert from being an advertisement-based business to a fee-based business. However, they might be more open to the idea if Dell and Intel keep their tablet at a low cost.

Intel and Dell declined to comment on this story.

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Why 2010 Will Be the Year of the Tablet

Intel Said to Win Nokia as Customer for Mobile Chips (Update2) – Bloomberg.com

June 22 (Bloomberg) — Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker, will supply Nokia Oyj with processors for mobile devices, a breakthrough in its effort to enter the phone market, a person familiar with the matter said.

The deal will be announced on a conference call tomorrow, said the person, who declined to be identified because the details are confidential. Intel scheduled the call for an “important announcement” with Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president of the company’s ultra-mobility group.

Intel, whose microprocessors run more than 80 percent of the world’s personal computers, has struggled for about a decade to get a foothold in the market for mobile-phone chips. Chandrasekher leads a group that sells a scaled-down version of Intel’s personal-computer processor. The chip, called Atom, is designed for mobile devices that access the Web and send e-mail.

“Even if they get just a piece of Nokia’s business, it’s a big deal,” said Will Strauss, a Cave Creek, Arizona-based analyst for research firm Forward Concepts. “Nokia is still the biggest cell-phone maker in the world.”

Claudine Mangano, a spokeswoman for Santa Clara, California-based Intel, declined to comment. Laurie Armstrong, a spokeswoman for Nokia in the U.S., didn’t immediately return calls seeking comment.

Otellini’s Plan

In 2006, Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini scrapped his predecessor’s $5 billion investment in chips for mobile devices, after the company was late to the market and failed to win enough customers.

Now Otellini is again pushing to get Intel’s chips into phones, a bid to lessen the company’s reliance on computers, which account for than 90 percent of sales. A total of 1.21 billion mobile phones were sold globally last year, according to ABI Research in Oyster Bay, New York.

Intel shares fell 33 cents, or 2.1 percent, to $15.68 today on the Nasdaq Stock Market. They have gained 7 percent this year. Espoo, Finland-based Nokia fell 46 cents, or 4.3 percent, to 10.29 euros.

Intel Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith said in February that the company needed to land one of the top five mobile-phone makers if it wanted to build a significant business.

Texas Instruments

Intel is challenging Texas Instruments Inc., the largest maker of chips used to run programs in mobile phones. San Diego- based Qualcomm Inc., meanwhile, supplies the majority of communications chips for phones. Both companies have said that Intel would struggle to break their dominance because its products use too much power.

Intel announced in February it had landed LG Electronics Inc., the world’s third-largest phone maker, as a customer. LG will use an Intel processor to make a mobile Internet device, a cross between a mobile phone and a computer.

Intel’s attempts to create a mobile business have foundered before after early announcements of interest from customers, said Jim McGregor, an analyst at Scottsdale, Arizona-based research firm In-Stat.

“They’ve been dreaming of getting a significant win at Nokia,” he said. “It’s a big announcement, they’re a key guy. The only question now is whether they will actually come out with a product.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Ian King in San Francisco at ianking@bloomberg.net

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Intel Said to Win Nokia as Customer for Mobile Chips

Intel to refresh laptop chips Monday | Nanotech – The Circuits Blog – CNET News

Intel will refresh its lineup of chips for ultraportable laptops on Monday.

The new dual-core processors–targeted at Apple MacBook Air-class laptops–include the 2.53GHz SP9600 priced at $316 with 6MB of cache memory and a thermal envelope rating of 25 watts. Slotted below this chip is the 1.6GHz SU9600 (3MB cache) priced at $289 with a thermal envelope rating of 10 watts.

The lineup also includes a single-core 1.4GHz SU3500 with a thermal envelope of only 5.5 watts. This is priced at $262.

Intel ULV and LV chips due on March 30, 2009:

* SP9600 / 2.53GHz / 6MB cache / 1066MHz FSB / 2 cores / 25W / $316
* SL9600 / 2.13GHz / 6MB cache / 1066MHz FSB / 2 cores / 17W / $316
* SU9600 / 1.60GHz / 3MB cache / 800MHz FSB / 2 cores / 10W / $289
* SU3500 / 1.4GHz / 3MB cache / 800MHz FSB / 1 core / 5.5W / $262
* ICP900 / 2.2GHz / 1MB cache / 800MHz FSB / 1 core / 35W / $70

Note: ICP900 is a “Celeron” branded chip.

These new chip models being launched Monday are not the rumored “CULV” (consumer ultra low voltage) processors targeted at inexpensive ultra-thin laptops, according to sources close to Intel. Those future chips–which Intel will not necessarily label CULV–are not due to summer, the sources said.

The future ULV processors for inexpensive ultra-thin laptops–similar to the $700 Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv2 expected to hit the streets next month–will be priced to allow PC makers to roll out attractive, sleek laptops that are not priced in the stratosphere, like the $1,999 Dell Adamo or $1,799 MacBook Air.

Let’s step back for a minute and examine Intel’s ULV lineup. Intel low-power mobile processors have been around for a long time but gained prominence with the introduction of ultra-thin luxury laptops such as the MacBook Air and the ThinkPad X300. The newest ULV chips, for instance, power Dell’s new Adamo ultra-thin laptops and the update to the ThinkPad X300, the X301. (The Adamo uses Intel Core 2 Duo SU9300 and SU9400 processors.)
Intel Netbook, sleek ULV laptop, and mainstream laptop segmentation

Intel Netbook, sleek ULV laptop, and mainstream laptop segmentation
(Credit: Intel)

So, what is the new line of ULV chips due this summer for inexpensive ultraportables? These processors will be a departure from Intel’s strategy to date of putting ULV chips into sleek luxury laptops only. The new chips will target the price segment well below the $1,800-and-up luxury laptop market. Prices for these ultra-thin laptops would range between $600 and $1,300, according to Intel.

The processors–at least according to Intel’s theoretical game plan–will not compete with the Atom processor that powers Netbooks, which fall below the $500 price point.

But this will be tricky and potentially not clear to customers. For instance, is a $700 Atom-powered Hewlett-Packard Mini 1000 Netbook with built-in broadband Verizon wireless and an 80GB hard disk drive better or worse than a not-so-full featured Pavilion dv2? We’ll have to wait and see how this shakes out.

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Intel to refresh laptop chips Monday

Intel had a little roadmap event today to shed some light on its massive $7b fab investment, and the focus was mostly on the upcoming transition to 32nm processors — highlighted by the first-ever demo of a working 32nm Nehalem-based Westmere chip. It was just a demo, so there aren’t any hard benchmarks available, but eventually the tech will show up in the Calpella platform’s dual-core Clarkdale laptop processors that integrate two processor cores, a graphics core, and a memory controller all in a chip the size of one 45nm quad-core Clarksfield chip. (Yes, the codenames are confusing as hell.) Intel wouldn’t lock down the schedule for any of this stuff, but when we asked them about the rumored Calpella delays we heard about this morning we were told that parts of the platform will definitely go into production sometime in 2009. Video, slides, and the full press release after the break.

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Intel demos first-ever 32nm processors

SAN FRANCISCO — The global credit crisis may have caused the decline in consumer and business spending that is assaulting the giants of high tech. But as the dominant technology companies try to emerge from this slump, they may find themselves blaming people like David Title just as much as they blame Wall Street.

Mr. Title, a 35-year-old new-media manager at a film production company in New York, has dropped his cable subscription and moved to watching most of his television online — free. While shopping for a new laptop for his girlfriend recently, he sidestepped more expensive full-featured computers and picked a bare-bones, $200 Asus EeePC laptop, also known as a netbook.

“We’ve reached one of those moments in tech history when there are low-priced and free alternatives that are both user-friendly and reliable enough to make the switch,” Mr. Title said. “Then there’s the extra bonus of saving some cash.”

Silicon Valley has been gripped by a growing sense that the economic retreat might do more than depress earnings. There is too much ingrained optimism here to think that the tech sector will not bounce back, stronger than before.

But the fear now is that consumers like Mr. Title, and businesses operating with the same cost-cutting mind-set, will erode the high-margin businesses of the information technology industry — slowing some technologies and companies but giving new momentum to others.

A normally confident Steven A. Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, expressed this very fear last week after announcing the company’s first big reduction of its work force. “Our model is not for a quick rebound,” he said. “Our model is things go down, and then they reset. The economy shrinks.”

This has happened before. The dot-com bust earlier in the decade dragged down high-fliers like Sun Microsystems and America Online but set the stage for a new generation of Web powerhouses like Google and other innovative Internet software companies like Salesforce.com, founded on disrupting the status quo.

The recession of the early 1990s sent I.B.M., then the dominant force in technology, into a five-year tailspin. But it also propelled Microsoft and Compaq, later acquired by Hewlett-Packard, and Dell to the forefront of computing.

Indeed, Silicon Valley may be one of the few places where businesses are still aware of the ideas of Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist who wrote about business cycles during the first half of the last century. He said the lifeblood of capitalism was “creative destruction.” Companies rising and falling would unleash innovation and in the end make the economy stronger.

Recessions “can cause people to think more about the effective use of their assets,” said Craig R. Barrett, the retiring chairman of Intel, who has seen 10 such downturns in his long career. “In the good times, you can get a bit careless or not focused as much on efficiency. In bad times, you’re forced to see if there is a technology” that will help.

So who’s up, who’s down and who’s out this time around? Microsoft’s valuable Windows franchise appears vulnerable after two decades of dominance. Revenue for the company’s Windows operating system fell for the first time in history in the last quarter of 2008. The popularity of Linux, a free operating system installed on many netbooks instead of Windows, forced Microsoft to lower the prices on its operating system to compete.

Intel’s high-power processors are also under assault: revenue tumbled by 23 percent last quarter, marking the steepest decline since 1985.

Meanwhile, more experimental but lower-cost technologies like netbooks, Internet-based software services (called cloud computing) and virtualization, which lets companies run more software on each physical server, are on the rise.

Penny-pinching shoppers like Mr. Title could have the most immediate effect on the tech industry, particularly if more people consider canceling their cable subscriptions to watch video online, or drop their landline telephones to depend on their cellphones or on Internet calling services like Skype.

Many consumers appear ready to abandon the costly desktop computer altogether. Analysts expect PC sales to fall in 2009 for just the second time in the last two decades, with desktops falling even faster than they did in 2007 or 2008.

The only bright spot in the PC industry is netbooks. Analysts at the Gartner research company said shipments rose to 4.4 million devices in the third quarter of 2008, from 500,000 units in the first quarter of last year. Analysts say sales could double this year despite a deep worldwide recession.

Two lumbering giants, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, missed the first wave of these tiny, stripped-down machines, allowing Acer of Taiwan to grab market share. Acer pushed Apple out of the No. 3 spot behind H.P. and Dell as sales soared 55 percent. Dell and H.P. are making the devices now.

Even the mighty Apple, whose iPod and iPhone revenue had helped insulate it from the first phase of this recession, reported last week that revenue from its desktop line fell 31 percent from the same period a year ago.

“The day of the Rolls-Royce laptop and the high-end computer may not be totally over,” said Charles King, an independent technology industry analyst in Hayward. Calif. “But certainly the audience for that type of product is getting smaller and smaller.”

Companies have also started to examine what they can do without and what they can do differently, and their choices may alter the competitive and lucrative landscape of business computing.

Hoping to save money, Arista Networks, a start-up based in Menlo Park, Calif., has much of its internal technology processes online, or “in the cloud.” Instead of buying its own hardware and software systems from the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, it opted for e-mail and online document services from Google and online sales and manufacturing software from Netsuite, based in San Mateo, Calif.

It is spending a fifth of what it would be for traditional technology, said Jayshree Ullal, Arista’s chief executive.

She smells a trend. “I think 80 percent of the new high-tech and small to mid-size companies are doing what we’re doing,” she said.

A spate of start-ups have seized on cloud computing. Companies like Intacct offer online accounting software as an inexpensive alternative to Microsoft’s products, and giants like Amazon.com sell access to data centers for business operations. Amazon has outpaced the traditional hardware makers with such services.

The number of virtualized new servers has doubled over the last three years, which has driven the revenue of VMware, one of the leaders in this cost-saving technology, to an estimated $1.88 billion last year from $387 million in 2005.

The makers of open-source software also continue to benefit from the growing appeal of their often cheap, if not free, products. Sun Microsystems distributes 65,000 downloads a day of its MySQL database, which has turned into the favored business software of new companies. The job search engine Indeed.com shows a thriving job market for MySQL and Linux developers.

Linux has proved popular as well on a new crop of smarter devices — be they phones, TVs or set-top boxes — that have captured software developers’ imaginations. The new products they build will undoubtedly challenge the status quo.

“Companies like Intel, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments that make chips for these devices are hiring Linux talent as quick as they can,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. “They know the future is netbooks and mobile Internet devices.”

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$200 Laptops Break a Business Model

Optimizing Adobe Flash Technology on Intel® Media Processor CE 3100 Will Enable Rich and Seamless Web Content on TV More >>

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Intel and Adobe to Extend Flash Platform to TVs

Lots of neat and ground-breaking laptops will be on display this coming week at CES, and Voodoo may just lead the pack.

The world has never seen the HP branded Voodoo Firefly prototype, dubbed the  “HP Firefly with Voodoo DNA,” a laptop that features a uniquely positioned multi-touch touchpad, dual displays, and enough gaming muscle to tear through Far Cry 2 without a flinch. But here at LAPTOP we had a chance to play around with the behemoth of a notebook before it goes before the public eye in Las Vegas.

It’s one of the most innovative gaming notebooks we’ve ever fragged on. Voodoo provided us with an exclusive look at what is only a concept notebook. However, that doesn’t mean some of this machine’s innovations won’t wind up in other HP or Voodoo PCs.

Design
Calling this titan a Firefly is like naming a rabid pitbull “Cupcake.” After all, HP tells us it weighs 13 pounds including a massive pound power brick, and looks a lot like the laptop version of HP’s Blackbird desktop system with Voodoo DNA. With a 17-inch screen, it isn’t as large as the 20.1-inch HP HDX, but its not a system you would want to carry on your back (nor do we think you could even find a bag for it!)

The Firefly’s keyboard features customizable backlighting, much like the keyboards on the Area-51 m15x and m17x from Alienware. It also has HP’s QuickPlay controls for playing, skipping, and pausing music or video. There are toggle switches for wireless and audio mute, as well as controls for volume, treble, and bass levels. The entire notebook has the light etching and imprint design found on HP’s dv series notebooks.

Multi-touch Invasion
Pulling some features from the Voodoo Envy, the Firefly has a multi-touch trackpad. The Firefly’s pad is uniquely positioned to the right of the keyboard (sorry lefties) where gamers would normally keep their mouse. With three fingers on the pad, your left finger can be used as a left click, and your right finger as a right one. Hypothetically, this should mean that you could play a first-person-shooter quite well without a mouse. In Far Cry 2, however, we noticed that it was actually pretty hard to accurately aim. Moving around was easy, though, and much more efficient than trying to do so with a regular trackpad.

Double Vision
Underneath the large 17.1-inch 1920 x 1200 display is a second 4.3-inch LCD with 800 x 480 resolution, similar to the Fujitsu N7010’s which is found above the keyboard. This dwarf display acts as a second monitor at all times, so you can easily drag any window or application right onto it. We loved having the ability to check our Gmail during a frag match, or watch YouTube videos while working on the bigger display. The secondary screen’s resolution was a bit too high for us, though. Text looked too small and we found that we were squinting on Web sites while trying to type in new addresses.

Loaded with Gaming Muscle
Under the hood of the 17.1-inch Firefly we found a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad Core CPU, 4GB of RAM, a pair of ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 GPUs running in CrossFire mode, and a 7,200 rpm 250GB hard drive. The Firefly spec sheet said the machine is capable of overclocking, but we didn’t touch the BIOS.

We weren’t permitted to run any benchmarks on the Firefly, since it remains a concept machine, but we did run Far Cry 2. We cranked the graphics up to Very High with Direct X 10 enabled and then went around setting the tall grass on fire with a flamethrower. Even with all of the effects on full blast around us—trees blowing in the wind, fires raging, enemies shooting—the game ran silky smooth. The machine consumes 170W of power; that’s not bad for a desktop, but quite the power sucker for a notebook.

We did notice that the Firefly slowed down a good deal when we tried to watch a YouTube video on the small screen while we were running Far Cry 2, but gameplay was fine when we substituted another video site, Ustream.tv, for YouTube.

X-Fi in the House
The Firefly doesn’t have a set of measly speakers or a budget soundcard. It packs in Creative’s X-Fi audio technology, which features Dolby sound and support for 5.1 surround sound speaker sets. Music sounded excellent out of the two tweeters underneath the display, and blasting grenades were loud and booming.

See in the Dark
The Firefly is the first notebook we’ve ever heard of with a night vision webcam. Theoretically it should let you make video chats in complete darkness with your gaming pals, since it switches to infrared mode in low or no-light conditions. However, the software wasn’t loaded on our machine. We’d love to see HP include this kind of feature in al types of notebooks so we can test it in the real world.

Final Thoughts
Though the Firefly will not come to market, we’re glad Voodoo is attempting to push the gaming notebook envelope. Features like a backlit keyboard and the ability to overclock the system have been done before, but this is one of the first notebook with a secondary display directly beneath the primary LCD, which could be used for all sorts of applications.  Moreover, the multi-touch trackpad was a stellar idea, and its placement is ideal for gamers, assuming HP and Voodoo can figure out how to make it work better for first-person shooters. Sure, the Firefly is not the sleekest concept we’ve seen, but we’ll be excited to see how Voodoo and HP leverage and tweak its innovations going forward.

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HP mini-Q nettop with dual-core Atom 330 CPU

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HP mini-Q nettop with dual-core Atom 330 CPU