HRD = Hard Rectangular Drive

While majority of large storage manufacturers are focusing on more or less traditional methods (SSD) DataSlide is taking different approach. DataSlide is developing Hard Rectangular Drive (HRD). What is that?

This image shows basics of HRD.

What are advantages of this technology? From DataSlide:

capitalizes on standard base process technologies
to create a dramatically new way to store and retrieve data with magnetic media:
1. Leverage LCD process
2. Use standard HDD sputtering/plating MEMS process
3. Use HDD perpendicular media DSSC/Oerlikon-Balzers coatings

In addition to this it also features:

1. A piezoelectric actuator keeps the rectangular media in precise motion 

2. A diamond solid lubricant coating protects the surfaces for years of worry free service

3. A massively parallel 2D array of magnetic heads reads from or writes to up to 64 embedded heads at a time 

According to DataSlide it will produce 500MB/sec with less than 4W for magnetic storage device.
Technology wise, there is one head per secor with symmetric read/write. According to specification HRD is reliable as HDD (or better), can have capacity from 80 GB to 2 TB, 160,000 rd/wt compared to 35,00rd / 3,000wt for SSD.

DataSlilde has partnered with Oracle to embed Berkeley Database into storage drive. Full article is available here.

DataSlide’s Hard DB fits Oracle’s Embedded Global Business Units OEM Charter by incorporating BerkeleyDB into the actual storage device itself (essentially a low energy, cool running, high performance. shock resistant hard drive) to make a ‘smart’ storage device. The potential applications are many and varied. Examples are TCP/IP based systems and video applications requiring multiple concurrent streams, media indexing, fast positioning. forward. back. skip. scene/track will have significant perfoniiance improvements with this winning architecture.

Western Digital Solid State Disks

Western Digital has announced their latest product line of solid state disks, SiliconDrive III

Three different drives are offered, 2.5” and 1.8”. Details are listed in table below.

Feature	SiliconDrive III 2.5-inch SATA Drive	SiliconDrive III 1.8-inch Micro SATA Drive	SiliconDrive III 2.5-inch PATA Drive
Interface	SATA 3 Gb/s	SATA 3 Gb/s	PATA ATA-7
Max R/W speed	100/80 MB/s	100/80 MB/s	85/60 MB/s
PowerArmor	30GB to 120GB	30GB to 60GB	30GB to 120GB
SiSMART	Standard	Standard	Standard
SolidStor	Standard	Standard	Standard

PowerArmor feature drive corruption from an ungraceful power-down, brownout, power spike or unstable voltage level.

SiSMART is ability to read and display the remaining amount of a drive’s useable life.

SolidStor technology makes designers, supply chain managers and OEMs confident that their storage system choice exceeds the high performance, high reliability and low total cost of ownership.

At the moment there are no prices announced for these drives and it would be nice to see them in a benchmark.

3D hypsographic shaded print

It is interesting how things coincide…

In end of May I was in Wellington teaching “Cartography with ArcGIS” course and thought “I should write a post about that 3D print I did...” And several days later there is a post about 3D prints on Free Geography Tools blog.

Back to the 3D print I did. The print was done quite a while ago, for a NZ ESRI User Group Conferecne  in October-November of 2006. About one month before the Conference I got an e-mail with brochure about 3D printers from Contex. One of the vendors at the conference has these printers but they don’t offer print services. Eagle Technology is the main sponsor of the conference so was in contact with vendors. Luckily, there is another company in Auckland that has 3D printer and it is interested in collaboration. That company is 3D Print. When we met they showed me promotional GIS/mapping model they have. It was a standard size (30x30cm) tile with a city in flat area with satellite image draped on top. It wasn’t impressive since tallest feature on print was about 2cm tall. I have suggested that we put something together – I can provide data/model and they would print it. So we started working on this project.

I have access to topographic data for whole New Zealand including the 20m contours lines.  The question was what area to choose. One of immediate candidates was Wellington area for several reasons: conference is held in Wellington and terrain has interesting features. It didn’t take me long to create a DEM and hillshade from available data. Then I started experimenting with the colours. I have experimented a bit with elevation colour ramps (like described in this post). Here are some test combinations applied on top of Swiss hillshading. There are subtle differences visible in highest mountain region in southeast.




Here is one of the first tries I liked the best.

This is looking promising and I though it would be nice if I could get bathymetry data for Cook Straight. Luckily, National institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) was very interested and I got the shapefile data for Cook Straight. And it was really exciting to work with the data and see the results. Cook Straight has very interesting features as you can see. From supplied data I created the DEM as displayed below.

Next step is to combine two datasets. The result is shown below.

Now it is back to the colour schemas. NIWA has a colour ramp they are using but I didn’t like it that much.

And here is why. On its own I wouldn’t mind using it but it in my opinion it does not work well with elevation tint.
 
Here are some test screenshots.


After some testing I have decided to go with blue colour ramps and here are most likely candidates.



With colours almost sorted there was a next challenge – what data format will work the best for 3D print? According to printer’s manual it will work with VRML, 3DS and DXF/DWG data. I had a bit of problems with exporting data as VRML (I was using ArcGIS 9.2 pre-release then). Once exported VRML didn’t really give us the result we were expecting. There was lot of trouble reading the file and getting the texture (picture correctly positioned on top of model). In next try, I made a 3DS file and send it to 3D Print. Few days later I have also sent a DXF file and the image file of the final colour separately so they could experiment and choose the best option.

Eventually, the figured out the best data format and the way to print this (I am not too sure what format was used in the end) and they made first test 3D print from supplied data and this was the result.


Looking at this we have agreed that this is nowhere near to what we have expected. To make it better 3D Print made it bigger, to cover 4 tiles and to have a base and side walls. Each tile is 30x30cm and height depends on the features of terrain. The result was much better. The model was in our Auckland office and then taken to Wellington by one of our staff members about two weeks before the conference. Unfortunately, two of four tiles got broken in transport because the box with print was checked in at the airport. And that was under two week before the Conference!

Then the good guys at 3D Print decided to do more tweaking and make another run/copy of the model. The main reason for tweaking were the colours. All colours came out lighter then everybody has expected or liked. To my surprise, new model looked so much better than the first one.

Here are the photos of the second model taken with my Sony DSC P7 camera (old and not very good).


As you can see even new printed tiles broke but this is not visible when put together.
For the print we have included logos of all parties involved. Can you spot the spike under letter A in EAGLE?

There are some nice features of the terrain visible even if I use just two tiles.

Here are some close up shots to illustrate terrain and undersea features.



On the photo above you can see ‘terraces’ result of undersea configuration – large areas with very small slope. The same effect is noted on Free Geography Tools blog.

For this print we decided not to use solid base in order to save time and material for printing. Here is an underside of one tile.


Lessons learned
This was an interesting experience for several reasons. Firstly, working with new printing technology. Using 3D prints can really bring out the characteristics of the terrain (in this case). These are especially attractive for students and for people who can’t easily create mental picture of an area looking at the topographic map. 3D print as a company was very keen to work with us and demonstrate use of this technology in GIS and mapping.

Choosing symbology was quite difficult considering I had to combine bathymetry and terrain in single product. This would not be that difficult if it was a medium with known characteristics, like paper. In the first try colours used looked fine on screen and test print on paper but when used in 3D print they came out pale. To highlight the coastline I used orange colour that was too strong any line symbol was too wide. Lakes and swamp outlines were also too strong and too wide.

Printing in 3D is not cheap. One tile 30x30cm costs around $300 NZ. All together this printing costs were around $3,000 NZ. Once printed you should take care of the prints since there are quite fragile.
If I get the opportunity to do this again I would be delighted and hopefully the process would be less troublesome.

SATA 3.0 specification released

SATA-IO has released specification for SATA 3.0 standard on May 27th. Specification states transfer speed of up to 6 Gb/s and enhancements to support multimedia applications. Some of these enhancements are:

• A new Native Command Queuing (NCQ) streaming command to enable isochronous data transfers for bandwidth-hungry audio and video applications
• An NCQ Management feature that helps optimize performance by enabling host processing and management of outstanding NCQ commands
• Improved power management capabilities
• A small Low Insertion Force (LIF) connector for more compact 1.8-inch storage devices
• A connector designed to accommodate 7mm optical disk drives for thinner and lighter notebooks
• Alignment with the INCITS ATA8-ACS standard

As you would expect it is backward compatible with earlier implementations. Full presentation containing more information can be viewed here.
It should not be too long before we start seeing SATA 3.0 drives around since about 98% of all desktop hard disks today are SATA drives.

Carbon nanotube data storage

One of the major problems with today’s ways of storing data is lifetime of the media. I am guessing that you are making copies of your 4-5 old CDs so you could view or edit your old family photos. I’ve done that few times and will do it few more times before we get something more permanent. Digital archiving methods seems to be of relatively short lifespan – from 5 years ford CDs to 20 for computer disks. 
Possible solution is in use of carbon nanotubes. This method is described in an article in Nano Letters site. The technique is briefly described here

…technique of placing a single iron crystal only a few billionths of a meter wide inside a hollow carbon nanotube. Like diamonds, nanotubes are among the most stable structures in existence. Once inserted into the tubes, the iron nanocrystals act as data bits, physically sliding from one end of the tube to the other in response to an electric current and in the process registering either a "1" or a "0" in the binary language of computers.

It is still long way to go before this becomes a prototype but potential is there. For potential capacity here is what the abstract says:

The shuttle memory has application for archival storage, with information density as high as 10¹² bits/in², and thermodynamic stability in excess of one billion years.

All we have to do is wait until someone actually start making these devices.

Sharp LCD screen uses 5 primary colours

According to recent news here and here (I was unable to locate the source for this) Sharp made a full HD LCD display that is using 5 instead of usual 3 primary colours. In this model additional colours are cyan and yellow. According to Sharp this device displays images "identical in appearance to real-world objects."
Display resolution is 1920x1080 with 60.5” screen size and will be demonstrated in San Antonio, Texas at Society for Information Display Symposium.
The main advantage of this display is ability to display almost entire Pointer colour space. Once these displays become common on the market this will make visualization lot better and easier assuming that software manufactures start making drivers for this type of display. According to articles brass, skin tones, petals are really hard ones to reproduce and this screen just may be the solution.
We may see more news about this product after Sunday so stay tuned.

VPlay or having fun with video using Surface

Microsoft has a invested a lot in Surface development and it now we see more and more uses of it. It is now in every episode of CSI Miami, news and other places.
Cambridge research branch is working on a project VPlay. This project is about videos and interaction between users and videos in real time.

VPlay allows users to manipulate video in real time. Digital objects representing video clips, effects and mixers are displayed on the surface and can be easily arranged to create an ever changing video output.

This video show how this works quite nicely but the background audio noise is quite strong.

Here is shorter video illustrating input and output windows connected with a series of effect/modifiers.

This would be a nice application for a multitouch laptop with
Windows 7 maybe…

Students develop 3D computer interface

A group of students at Northeastern University has developed a prototype of 3D computer interface. This gave them 1st place at Senior Capstone competition for 2009. This is still a prototype but operation of it looks similar to what Tom Cruise was doing in the Minority Report.



But for this interface you don’t need the gloves to manipulate and interact with applications.
The prototype is working fine but it is a bit bulky. That does not diminish its functionality and applications.
Here is the video of test drive (4:40 long).


3D Computer Interface from Free Flow on Vimeo.


Once big companies get on hold of this I’m sure it will become small and fine tuned so we all can have the Minority Report experience.

GE develops 500GB holographic disk

GE is working on new type of optical storage media – holographic disk. Few days ago GE has announced a breakthrough in research and have demonstrated a disk (standard DVD size) that holds 500 GB of data.
This is very good news for businesses, in particular when it comes to backing up huge volumes of data. In any case this is great news since it is very different method of storing data compared to standard CD/DV/BlueRay disks.
In this video you can hear how does it work.

The process works by imprinting chemical changes in the form of patterns –- holograms –- within the disc. Those holograms are then read by lasers, similar to the ones in Blu-ray players. In fact, at 500GB, these holographic discs could offer 20 times the capacity of a single-layer Blu-ray disc.

There are some comments on the web that this is not that important because you can deliver the HD movies on flash memory devices. That is true, flash memory is cheap and capacity is constantly increasing. But they are missing the data side of optical media.
Considering the development of optical storage from CD to BlueRay it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect new types of disks quite soon with capacities of serveral TB on a single disk. Only time will tell if we were right.

Google Analytics API available for your site

Few days ago Google has announced availability of its Analytics API for your own web sites.
This is great news for web administrators and anyone wanting to find out more about the details of web traffic on your web site.

With Google Analytics, you can gather, view, and analyze data about your website traffic. By embedding our basic JavaScript snippet into your pages, you see which content gets the most visits, average page views and time on site for visits, which ads are driving the most visitors to your site, and more. You can also use the simple administrative interface to set up goals and filters to control what data goes into your reports based on your business needs. The best part: this sophisticated, full-featured web analytics package is free.

Additional benefit of Analytics API is ability to use Data Export API and then integrate it with your own data.
Indication of power of Analytics API is in fact that FeedBurner has stopped providing the same service in favour of Google Analytics.
With Analytics API one can view various reports detailing visitors (unique visitors, total visits, Pageviews, time on site, bounce rate…) traffic sources separated by direct traffic, referring sites, search engines etc. Not to mention that one can compare two metrics for a parameter or compare to a web site.


If you don’t like the default dashboard or reports you can check out and download have a look at Polaris for Google Analytics.
It provides new view of the dashboard but it is built using Analytics API.


Polaris comes as free version for one web site profile or only $15/year for multiple profiles. It is very low demand on system configuration. Old Pentium III with 512MB should be just fine… as long you have Adobe Air 1.5 installed.
This is definitely easier way to track web site traffic than to collect the log files, import into database and generate reports on your own.

BumpTop desktop released

While ago, in 2007 I wrote a short post about BumTop desktop with the video show how intuitive and entertaining it can be. Now BumTop has released it as a product. BumpTop comes as Free and Pro version. Pro version costs USD$29 and offers four extra features compared to Free version.
The best way to get familiar with the features is to watch the video.

Features
Main feature is definitely a 3D representation of desktop and fully physics engine. All elements on the desktop can be manipulated, moved, piled up and tossed around.
Another great feature is support for multitouch screens. If you are not sure what this means have a read over here.
Gestures are used to manipulate icons/files in certain ways. To assist you with gestures there is a Pie Menu available.
Piles – stack your documents and files into piles. They can be grouped by type so all MP3 files in one corner and PDFs in another.
Sticky note – just like sticky note that you can pin onto desktop or on the wall.
Search as you type – ability to search for any item on your desktop
Toss files –  files can be tossed to a printer, USB drive, recycle bin or e-mail.
Icon size – files used more frequently are bigger in size and heavier.
Facebook and Twitter – share your pictures with friends by simply tossing images to Facebook or Twitter widgets.

BumpTop comes with 3 themes installed Blue (Vista like), Next and Classic. If that is not to your liking then go to Customize.org and download one or more themes. At the moment there are 65 available for download.


Free and Pro version differences are listed here but here they are in compact form.

Feature	Free	Pro
Sticky Note	Max 2	Unlimited
Toss files to USB		Yes
Autogrow of files		Yes
Flip through piles		Yes
Thumbnails	Watermark	Yes
Customer support	Limited	Premium

In terms of hardware requirements they are on the lower side of scale.

• A 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7, with latest service packs
• A Pentium 4/Celeron 1.8GHz or Athlon XP/Sempron 2200+ or desktop/mobile equivalent
• Minimum 1GB system memory
• 15 MB available hard disk space
• Intel 915 integrated graphics or Nvidia GeForce 6200 or ATI X300 or better with updated drivers
• OpenGL 2.0 driver support required (may require additional drivers available at bumptop.com/drivers)
• Internet connection required for activation

So go and download it from download page (only 12.1 MB) and give it a spin, or toss or pile them up.
Just a thought for the end. If you are anything like me (for PC desktop that is) then it may be arguable if you need BumTop. Why? Because I have only 5 (five) icons on my desktop: shortcut to the user files, network, my computer, one remote desktop connection, recycle bin and Fallout 3. That’s it.
Here it is how it looks as BumTop.

On the other hand, if BumpTop supports some sort of tags or can use a file description of some sort I may reconsider putting files on desktop grouped by current work. I’ll let you know after testing.

Feedburner moving to Google

In 2007 Google has acquired FeedBurner and behind the scenes FeedBurner started moving technology, applications, etc to Google servers and data centres. Now they are moving user accounts over to Google. If you have a Google account that it can be very easy. There is a wizard to move your account from FeedBurner. You can keep the transfer page opened and wait for it to finish or check a progress of the transfer later on.

To log on to your moved feeds you have to change URL to http://feedburner.google.com/ and log on with your Google credentials.

As a result of this move you will notice that there is no more Visitors section on your Feedburner Analyze page. Below is a sample of the page.

I haven't tested everything yet so if you find any problems with reading feed from this blog I would appreciate any feedback. You can post a comment or send me an e-mail to ZergOne@gmail.com.

How to build supercomputer from PS3 consols?

Once you get bored playing games on Playstation 3 you can get few more and build yourself a supercomputer cluster. If you don't know how to do this don't despair. Advanced Technology & Manufacturing Center from University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has just the thing you need - detailed instructions how to set up your cluster.

The process is relatively simple:

1. Install Linux (in this case Fedora 8)
2. Set up Message Passing Interface and Cell SDK
3. Start number crunching

Of course I have left out all details from steps 1 and 2 but this should not be very difficult.
The resources page may be visited quite often especially if you are not familiar with Cell chip and graphics side of PS3.

Comment from a Professor Gaurav Khanna from UMASS about PS3:

For the same cost, you can build your own supercomputer and it works just as well if not better. Plus, you can use it over and over again, indefinitely.

So, don't turn off your PS3 yet!

OpenCL 1.0 specification released

I wrote a few posts about CUDA and utilizing power of the graphic cards for other types of calculations mainly for physics calculations. Nvidia is one of the major contributors for OpenCL (Open Computing Language) but not the only one. Working group includes Apple, AMD, ARM, Broadcom, IBM, Ericsson, Intel, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Activision, Blizzard and others. Obviously both hardware and software companies are interested in development of OpenCL.
Khronos group has released 1.0 specification on it’s site as PDF file and header files. PDF is a big 302 pages document and will be required reading for all keen developers.
What is OpenCL? From their definition it is:

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is the first open, royalty-free standard for general-purpose parallel programming of heterogeneous systems. OpenCL provides a uniform programming environment for software developers to write efficient, portable code for high-performance compute servers, desktop computer systems and handheld devices using a diverse mix of multi-core CPUs, GPUs, Cell-type architectures and other parallel processors such as DSPs.

OpenCL is created with several goals in mind. These include having open, royalty free standard for heterogeneous parallel computing, cross vendor software portability, creating foundation layer for parallel computing ecosystem.

Anatomy of OpenCL


Language Specification

• C-based cross-platform programming interlace
• Subset of ISO C99 with language extensions - familiar to developers
• Well-defined numerical accuracy - IEEE 754 rounding behavior with defined maximum error 
• Online or offline compilation and build of compute kernel executables 
  Includes a rich set of built-in functions
  

Platform Layer API

• A hardware abstraction layer over diverse computational resources
• Query, select and initialize compute devices
• Create compute contexts and command-queues
  

Runtime API

• Execute compute kernels
• Manage scheduling, compute, and memory resources

Memory model


What is next? Khronos will release conformance tests to ensure high quality implementations. This of course means we have wait to get first applications built on 1.0 specification of OpenCL. OpenGL is proven technology and implemented in thousands of applications. OpenCL has great potential since it is designed to integrate with OpenGL and other 3D APIs.
Time will tell how good it is.

SketchUp 7 released

Google has released a new version of SketchUp today. This is version 7 and it was in development for about two years.

 

Here are most important new features:

 

• crossing lines break automatically
• scaling without stretching
• new interact tool
• search 3D Warehouse from component browser
• download models locally
• create and save custom templates
• new user interface

 

Professional version (one you have to pay for) has some additional features:

• Create Dynamic Component (smart scaling, etc)
• Custom attributes – metadata
• Report generation
• Layout 2 features
• larger models and paper size support
• long live measurements
• curves, editable paths
• move, rotate and scale without changing tools
• export to images
• explode models
• Style Builder
• create custom sketchy styles
• multiple mediums available (marker, pencil, crayon, etc)

 

For download and some videos check out the SketchUp page.

 

Here are some videos from YouTube…

 

What’s new

 

Intersecting lines

 

 

Dynamic components

 

 

There is plenty more videos on YouTube but these are for version 7 specifically.

Have fun creating models and share them on 3D Warehouse!

 

P.S. if you feel like you are up to a challenge then head to Google SketchUp 3D Challenge and get busy.

USB 3.0 specifications and performance

About month ago Intel has released USB 3.0 or "SuperSpeed" USB specifications. It is not released to public but to technology partners and manufactures. Get it from here if you have xHCI contributor agreement. Release of this information was not as simple as it sounds. Intel was accused of withholding the information so they could get a head start in design and manufacture of first boards and devices.

Eventually, information was released and USB 3.0 will have the following specifications:

 

• 5 Gb/s data rate
• Fast Sync-N-Go
• download 27 GB in 60 - 70 sec
• Optimized power efficiency
• lower active and idle power requirements
• Backward compatibility with USB 2.0
• new devices interoperable with USB 2.0 platform
• hosts support USB 2.0 legacy devices

 

USB 3 cable interface

 

 

Results of speed test. If this is real life test this means it is very fast.

 

First commercial devices with USB 3.0 are not expected before 2010 and for widespread use until 2012.

Solid State Disk comparison

Solid State Disks (SSD) are becoming an option for your server, workstation or notebook. Deciding which one to get is never easy. If you are considering getting one you should do a lot of research. Tom's Hardware has an excellent article about current state of SSDs.

 

It also clarifies differences between the types of SSD - SLC and MLC.

All the premium products are based on Single-Level Cell (SLC) flash memory. You can identify these by their high write performance and I/O performance.

And then there is the flash SSD mainstream, although we’re having a hard time declaring this a “mainstream” segment when it still averages several hundred dollars per drive. The mainstream differs from the high-end in its utilization of Multi-Level Cell (MLC) flash products. These can be read quickly, but their write and random access performance generally lag behind.

Then they compare 14 SSD hard drives in various test configurations for workstation and a notebook.  Make sure you have enough time for reading, the review is 19 pages long and as usual, loaded with graphs of performance results.

The tests are

• access time, interface
• read/write, throughput
• PCMark benchmark
• I/O performance
• workstation performance
• streaming read and performance
• power consumption at DVD playdack

 

Finally the conclusions - there is no a single drive that will rule them all. Instead, consider the criteria for choosing SSD - performance, cost or both.

For me these drives are still too expensive, too small to go and buy. Most of drives reviewed are 32 or 64 GB. In my laptop I have 100 GB hard disk and I'm struggling with free space (I have to move data to external USB drive). Definitely when capacity increases (for mainstream products) to 128 or 256 GB I'll have another look at the cost/performance of SSD hard drives. For sure, they are here to stay and in long(er) run replace magnetic hard drives.

256 GB Solid State Disk announced by Samsung

So far solid state disks (SSD) were (and still are) expensive and have relatively small capacity. This is about to change. Samsung has announced that is has developed fast, 2.5" SSD with 256 GB capacity.

 

 

 

Disk is very compact in size, 100.3 x 69.8 x 9.5 mm. Interface used is SATA II  and should have sequential read speed of 200 MB/sec and write speed is 160 MB/sec. Mean time between failures is 1 M hours (over 115 years) with power consumption of 0.9 W in active mode.

Production is expected to start before end of year for 2.5" model. So far there are no indications of price for this little gem...

Multi-touch sensor video

Jeff Han is a founder of the Perceptive Pixel, a company dedicated to developing multi-touch sensors, promoting and developing applications for these. Their product is called Interactive Media Wall.

Watching Jeff working with it is very impressive and elegant in the same time. If you watch the videos posted on the web site you'll see what do I mean.

In video clip shown on the main page you'll notice almost non-existing user interface. Everything is based mostly on intuition and our habits. For example, to zoom in to picture (or video) place your fingers on it and move them apart. Picture is stretched to required size. Moving fingers closer will zoom out (shrink the picture)

To see this at action have a look at Jeff working here.

There are some elements that I have seen before but not in his previous demos. This includes some of the "physics" applied to the objects on the screen. Application of physics to desktop is demonstrated very nicely in 2007 (short post from June last year). Another common point between the two is use of gestures.

 

Some of examples where multi-touch sensors are used include maps and their use or manipulation. Here are some stills from his video.

 

If you are impressed and want to get one of these first make sure you have enough room because it is  8x3 feet big. And bring some money. something like $100,000!

 

Of course, they are not only one working with this technology. Microsoft has it's own Surface (my earlier post about it is here). Microsoft (Bill Gates himself) demonstrated "TouchWall" at the Microsoft CEO summit and they see great potential in this technology.

It's a natural extension of Office. We can take spreadsheet, word processing, presentation data, and get it into here.

This could be a good thing since they want to drive prices down so it becomes "kind of whiteboard".

I wish I could have one of these whiteboards...

GPU or not to GPU, that is the question

Not too long ago nVidia purchased Ageia and their PhysX technology (I wrote about this before). The whole physics will be (already is?) implemented as software solution in CUDA technology. Now GPU is working faster and doing more work than CPU! But wait! There's more! We can have not 2, not 3 but 4 graphics card in SLI mode!! Of course it will cost you dearly but you will get quite a significant performance boost.

On the other hand, Intel is saying who need's graphic card when you have 8 cores. To back up their statement they have demonstrated fire spreading generated on the Nahalem processors. Check out the video and article here. So, all you need is 8 or more cores and you're all set.

So, what it is going to be? I think it will be a status quo for a while. Graphics card manufactures will keep pumping out newer and better cards, CPUs will be multicore with 16 or 32 cores. The bottleneck is most likely to be the software - namely operating system and the applications. It is not easy to write software that does decent multi threading support for 4 cores not to mention 16 or more cores.

Anyway end users (and gamers) can expect better and more realistic games and even more eye candy.