Intel's peek into the future...

Yes, thats right. Intel is eagerly looking into the future.. The CTO of intel - Justin Ratter, whose job is not about the current products but about the shape of technology (of-course Intel's) 10-20 years from now, disclosed plans for some real eye-candy tech in the recent technology conference Intel Developer Forum (IDF). There were some very cool niche technologies on display (or rather early prototypes).

1. Programmable Matter - Imagine a small crystal ball in your pocket, you step out of the house and put it on the ground, and presto! it turns into a Lamborghini! Reach your office and it turns back into the humble crystal ball. Put it on your desk and it turns into your Power Packed desktop...
Intel wants you to take this flight of fantasy and its working its way to the future with Programmable Matter - > small pellets of matter having a small processing core, independent memory and an electrostatically determined orientation with other pellets. They can shift shape (rather orientation wrt each other) and turn into a solid object as per "program". Imagine a solid model of a car in-design which reflects each change in design instantly for the designers to see if it looks good.

I will post the other 2 tech sneak peaks in the next posts. Have to go to a party tonight.. :)

Windows Live Messenger - 9 its a WPF baby

Microsoft's next in the Windows Live Messenger series is expected to have some serious eye-candy, all thanks to Microsoft WPF. Its going to be something looking very cool and probably the Vista Client will make some cool use of Aero like GUI extensions. It is still under wraps, but boy, we sure love to anticipate..don't we?

Convert C++ code into DNA?? Whew! what an idea...

Ever imagined a technology where you could write a nice C++ program, compile and debug it and then finally cross-compile it to be represented as a DNA sequence!! Sounds pretty cool, right?
Someone's already did it for PERL code and he expects to use BACTERIA as a hard (or soft?) disk... Just write your code, convert it into a DNA sequence, synthesize it in your futuristic multi-million dollar lab and inject it into a Bacteria Culture... and there you go!! Organic RAID storage of the future!! Imagine using bacteria culture dyed onto CD like platters..

Microsoft's Open Source Wing

Microsoft is bracing the OpenSource ideology as a part of its initiative towards future trends in computing. CodePlex - hosting open source projects is a supported partner of Microsoft. On offer for Developers is Microsoft support for starting with OpenSource projects. Check out Microsoft Open Source website here.... It has good sections for Learning about the tools available for the OpenSource venture.

CERN fears allayed..

In a comment to my previous post about the CERN's Large Hadron Collider,

Moody wrote:

"According to Sean Carroll (of Cosmic Variance), the likelihood of there being a dangerous black hole created is 0.0000000000000000000000001%. That's far, far, far less than a one in a million chance."

Thanks to Moody for sharing this information...

CERN - gifting you a black hole this season

CERN's latest project - The Large Hadron Collider is going to gift you a probable Black Hole. The CERN LHC lab will be creating small black holes by smashing protons and consider the tiny possibility that one of those cute little black holes gets hungry at the wrong time..

Fortunately, the chances of that happening are really small. But we dont want it to be that particular one in million case where things do go wrong..Good luck to the CERN scientists and hope their computers dont crash in the middle of the experiment.

MSI offers ATOM based Laptop

As I was reading in a tech magazine, MSI's advertisement for their laptop U100X caught my attention. The specs are like this:

Intel ATOM processor (1.6Ghz,512K L2, 533 Mhz FSB)
10" LCD
HDD, Full size keyboard... and so on..

How successful the ATOM processor is on a laptop is yet to be seen. I guess MSI is trying to offer a mobile Internet Device with the ATOM.

In another news snippet some time back, I read that a cell phone powered by the ATOM processor was running Windows XP without hiccups!! whew! seems like cell phones are going to pack more punch than ever. The touted power consumption is like 0.35W at idle load!! Intel engineers are working real hard... Keep it coming people..

Intel ATOM vs AMD Bobcat!! The processor wars

I had once posted about the Browsers wars.. the classic tug-o-war between IE and FireFox and as they say - history repeats itself, this time its the "Low-Wattage-Processors wars". Not much after Intel's ATOM hit the commercial market, rival AMD has burst the Bobcat bubble.

AMD's Bobcat is their answer to Intel ATOM and is designed for low power consumption functionality. These are targeting the Mobile Internet Device segment in the market. AMD Bobcat will be formally announced in November later this year. Some rumored technical specs say that the proccy will run at ~1Ghz with 128KB L1 cache and 256KB L2 cache.

Comparing both ATOM and Bobcat, the power consumption of Bobcat is likely to be around 8 watts - about three times more than that of ATOM, but Intel's design lays the extra burden of the NorthBridge running at 6 Watts, so the total touches almost the same figure in both architectures.
AMD's solution includes an integrated NorthBridge. The end point is that the commercial IMD segment is going to grow in leaps and bounds now and we can expect many price drops in the near future..