Nvidia Tegra All-in-One Mobile Processors Aim to Nuke Intel's Atom ...

The NVIDIA Tegra 650 processor is the second product in the Tegra line, the first being the NVIDIA Tegra APX 2500 processor, which is enabling the next generation of Windows Mobile smartphones. “With the growing market demand for mobile Internet access, NVIDIA launched the APX 2500 computer-on-a-chip targeted at smartphones and handsets earlier this year. Recognizing that mobile Internet access usages will occur not just on smartphones and handsets but on compute devices as well, NVIDIA announced today their Tegra product line. Representing the first products to be targeted at the MID and portable device space, it is anticipated to bring integrated capabilities similar to the APX 2500 with NVIDIA’s graphics expertise, an ARM core, HD video,and advanced power management,” said Ian Lao, senior analyst at In-Stat.

This new processor features an optimized combination of an ultra-low power GeForce® GPU and an 800 MHz embedded ARM CPU, Due to their highly integrated design, NVIDIA Tegra processors achieve up to 10 times the power efficiency of existing products in battery-operated computer systems running compelling visual computing applications.



The company plans to demostrate this Tegra development platform at Computex.
Intel Corp. has been heavily promoting a new breed of pocket-size portable devices as a future market for its chips. Its competitors now hope to reap the benefits.

Chip suppliers for cellphones are moving aggressively to make products for the gadgets, dubbed MIDs, for mobile Internet devices. The contenders include Qualcomm Inc., Texas Instruments Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and others who license technology from ARM Holdings PLC that is a mainstay in cellphones. And there is a new entry: Nvidia Corp., Intel's crosstown rival in Santa Clara, Calif.

Nvidia, known for chips that manage graphics in computers, on Monday plans to announce its first chips for MIDs. The company already sells graphics chips for cellphones and recently began combining that technology with components that include an ARM application processor, which provides calculating functions akin to those of Intel's microprocessors.

Nvidia describes its new Tegra chip for MIDs as a "computer on a chip" that will be particularly good for tasks such as watching videos and playing games. Mike Rayfield, general manager of the company's mobile unit, estimates a device built around his company's new chip can play 26 hours of high-definition video on a single battery charge, compared with four hours using a new Intel chip called Atom.

Nvidia's announcement is pegged for a conference this week in Taiwan called Computex, at which Intel and its customers plan to show off machines built on the company's technology. Anand Chandrasekher , the Intel senior vice president in charge of its ultramobility group, estimates the Atom chip has been selected for "30-plus" devices that will start hitting the market by the end of this month.

He puts typical battery life of Atom-based products at four to six hours, which he says is fine for many users. Intel plans to deliver a successor chip by 2010 that will draw one-tenth the power and offer more usage per battery charge.

"It's not surprising that our competitors would enter the fray," Mr. Chandrasekher said. "We think the pie will be big enough that there will be room for multiple people."

Users of ARM's technology say they've been slicing off big chunks of the emerging market already. Sanjay Jha, Qualcomm's chief operating officer, estimates that 15 MIDs are being developed using its chips.

Seshu Madhavapeddy , general manager of a new Texas Instruments business unit targeting the MID market, says its latest chip has been selected for 40 devices including MIDs and smartphones. He said he can't provide a precise count for MIDs, since customers don't always provide details of their plans.

MIDs are a loosely defined category. The term is generally applied to devices that are smaller than a laptop and larger than a cellphone that connect to the Internet wirelessly using either Wi-Fi or cellular data technologies.

Apple Computer Inc.'s iPhone and iPod touch are considered early examples, as is Nokia Corp.'s recently introduced N810 device. Other devices are expected to evolve from existing product categories, such as portable gaming or navigation devices, says Richard Yeh, a director of strategic marketing for Samsung's semiconductor unit.

Besides battery life, perhaps the biggest point of contention among chip makers is whether the x86 chip design Intel popularized in personal computers has advantages over its ARM-based competitors. Mr. Chandrasekher argues that most new Web-based software was developed for PCs long before it was adapted for ARM chips, giving portables based on that technology a second-rate Internet experience.

That is changing quickly, says Tudor Brown, ARM's chief operating officer. In one major development, Adobe Systems Inc. -- whose Flash software technology is used in such popular sites as Google Inc.'s YouTube -- recently announced an effort called the Open Screen Project to bring users consistent experiences with the company's software across PCs, cellphones, MIDs and other devices. "That has really leveled the playing field," Mr. Brown said.

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Nvidia's mobile ambitions adding MIDs to the list
Nvidia is doubling down on its budding processor business for the next generation of mobile computers.

This week at Computex, Nvidia plans to show off its new Tegra brand for mobile application processors. Earlier this year, the company unveiled its first processor for smartphones, the APX 2500. It's now adding two processors to its Tegra brand, with plans to target the emerging Mobile Internet Device category, according to Mike Rayfield, general manager of the company's mobile business.

Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors, of course, but has been taking steps toward a mobile future since its purchase of PortalPlayer in 2006. The company is a member of the ARM universe, with an ARM11 processor core at the heart of the Tegra processors.

The ARM community, companies like Texas Instruments, Samsung, and Marvell, dominates the market for smartphone processors. But they are formulating plans for challenging Intel in the MID category, which by Nvidia's reckoning is loosely defined as everything from a 4-inch minitablet to a subnotebook like the Eee PC.

Intel has huge plans for this market with its Atom lineup of processors, but Nvidia thinks it can carve out a niche by promoting the power consumption of its Tegra processors, Rayfield said. Nvidia says the Tegra 600 series processors won't consume more than a watt of power running at either 600MHz or 800MHz, while Atom is capable of exceeding that limit.

The difference, according to Rayfield, is that Nvidia's design spreads the work out over several different hardware accelerators, rather than just one main processor like Atom. Texas Instruments made a similar argument earlier this year regarding its ability to move up from smartphones into more powerful computers.

One interesting part of Nvidia's strategy, however, is that the company's products are designed to work exclusively with Microsoft's Windows Mobile software. Unlike the PC world, there are several operating system options for mobile computers, and that number will continue to grow with the release of Google's Android and Palm's Nova over the next year and a half.

Rayfield acknowledges that Windows Mobile users of the past haven't had the best experience with their smartphones, but thinks that the most recent version of the operating system, and the forthcoming Windows Mobile 7, give device makers much more freedom to put catchy user interfaces on top of Windows Mobile. Microsoft's software also gives Nvidia's customers a fast route to the marketplace at an affordable price, he said.

Rayfield expects devices using the Tegra processors to arrive by the fourth-quarter holiday season. Nvidia has created its own reference design for a MID using the chips that it will show off at Computex this week.

Microsoft to shut down book scanning operations

Microsoft said Friday it is ending its quest to create an online library of the world's books as the technology titan revamps its strategy to battle Internet search king Google.
Live Search Books and Live Search Academics projects are being cancelled and the websites will be taken down next week, Microsoft senior vice president of search Satya Nadella said in an online posting.

"This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs," Nadella wrote.
"Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries."
Microsoft launched its online library projects after Google embarked on an ambitious and controversial campaign to make all written works available free online in digital format.
Microsoft Corp. is abandoning its effort to scan whole libraries and make their contents searchable, a sign it may be getting choosier about the fights it will pick with Google Inc.

The world's largest software maker is under pressure to show it has a coherent strategy for turning around its unprofitable online business after its bid for Yahoo Inc., last valued at $47.5 billion, collapsed this month.

Digitizing books and archiving academic journals no longer fits with the company's plan for its search operation, wrote Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's search and advertising group, in a blog post Friday.

Microsoft will take down two separate sites for searching the contents of books and academic journals next week, and Live Search will direct Web surfers looking for books to non-Microsoft sites, the company said.

Nadella said Microsoft will focus on "verticals with high commercial intent."

"We believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer and content partner," Nadella wrote.

At an advertising confab at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., headquarters this week, he demonstrated a new system that rewards customers with cash rebates for using Live Search to find and buy items on advertisers' sites.

Microsoft entered the book-scanning business in 2005 by contributing material to the Open Content Alliance, an industry group conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo. In 2006, it unveiled its competing MSN book search site.

Unlike Google, whose decision to scan books still protected under copyright law has provoked multiple lawsuits, Microsoft stuck to scanning books with the permission of publishers or that were firmly in the public domain.

The company said it will give publishers digital copies of the 750,000 books and 80 million journal articles it has amassed.

Microsoft's search engine is a distant third behind Google's and Yahoo's, in terms of the number of queries performed each month, despite the company's many attempts to emulate Google's innovative search features and create some of its own.

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Microsoft Will Shut Down Book Search Program
Microsoft said Friday that it was ending a project to scan millions of books and scholarly articles and make them available on the Web, a sign that it is retrenching in some areas of Internet search in the face of competition from Google, the industry leader.

The announcement, made on a company blog, comes two days after Microsoft said it would focus its Internet search efforts on certain areas where it sees an opportunity to compete against Google. On Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled a program offering rebates to users who buy items that they find using the company’s search engine.

Some search experts said Microsoft’s decision to end its book-scanning effort suggested that the company, whose search engine has lagged far behind those of Google and Yahoo, was giving up on efforts to be comprehensive.

“It makes you wonder what else is likely to go,” said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of the blog Search Engine Land. “One of the reasons people turn to Google is that it tries to be a search player in all aspects of search.”

Mr. Sullivan said that the number of people using book search services from Microsoft and Google was relatively small, but it included librarians, researchers and other so-called early adopters who often influence others. These users are now likely to turn to Google with increasing frequency, he said.

Both Microsoft and Google have been scanning older books that have fallen into the public domain, as well as copyright-protected books under agreements with some publishers. Google also scans copyrighted works without permission so it can show short excerpts to searchers, an approach that has drawn fire from publishers.

Microsoft’s decision also leaves the Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital archive that was paid by Microsoft to scan books, looking for new sources of support. Several major libraries said that they had chosen to work with the Internet Archive rather than with Google, because of restrictions Google placed on the use of the new digital files.

“We’re disappointed,” said Brewster Kahle, chairman of the Internet Archive. Mr. Kahle said, however, that his organization recognized that the project, which has been scanning about 1,000 books each day, would not receive corporate support indefinitely. Mr. Kahle said that Microsoft was reducing its support slowly and that the Internet Archive had enough money to keep the project “going for a while.”

“Eventually funding will come from the public sphere,” Mr. Kahle said.

Some libraries that work with the Internet Archive and Microsoft also said they planned to continue their book-scanning projects.

“We certainly expect to go on with this,” said Carole Moore, chief librarian at the University of Toronto. “Corporate sponsors are interested in whatever works for their commercial interests and their shareholders. Long-term preservation is not something you can look to the commercial sector to provide. It is what research libraries have always done.”

Microsoft acknowledged on its blog that commercial considerations played a part in its decision to end the program.

“Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer and content partner,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior vice president for search, portal and advertising, wrote on the blog.

Microsoft said it had digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles.

Google, which works with libraries like the New York Public Library and those at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and Oxford, said it had scanned more than a million books. It plans to scan 15 million in the next decade. Google makes the books it scans freely available through its search engine but does not allow other search engines to use its database.

“We are extremely committed to Google Book Search, Google Scholar and other initiatives to bring more content online,” said Adam Smith, product management director at Google.