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Computers from Wired News
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Call it the Tom Sawyer approach to selling CPUs.
VIA Technologies, the self-proclaimed No. 3 maker of Intel-compatible processors, has unveiled a new "reference design" for ultra-portable computers based on the company's own low-power chips.
Making a reference design is common fare in the high-tech industry. Chipmakers like Intel have been doing it for years as a way of proving the technical viability of a product concept. What sets VIA's approach apart is that the company is posting the computer-aided design (CAD) files for its OpenBook PC under a Creative Commons license. Anyone with design skills and a burning desire to get into the PC business can download the files, modify the design and go into business selling ultra portables.
Taiwan-based VIA will even help aspiring Michael Dells find Asian manufacturers to do the hard work of turning those CAD files into real, plastic-and-silicon products.
VIA's design is on the commercial end of a growing spectrum of "open source" hardware. On the other, more noncommercial end are hackable hardware kits like the Arduino platform, which was used by many exhibitors at the recent Maker Faire in San Mateo, California. Open source aficionados were also buzzing last week about the release of the OGD1, a development kit that could be used to create open-source graphics cards.
If VIA's idea takes off, it could help add more juice to the already-humming market for ultra portables. That market, which had long foundered on the impractical aspirations of a tiny minority of mobility-obsessed hardware geeks, took off in earnest last year with the success of the Eee PC, Asus' $400, Linux-based ultra portable.
For industrial designer Scott Summit, VIA's move is part of a gradual shift toward more highly-customized manufacturing, in which small companies and even individuals are able to design and build their own products, thanks to the decreasing costs of fabrication.
"The idea of open source manufacture is taking shape, and we're going to see more of it because the barriers (to highly customized production) are really starting to evaporate," says Summit.
VIA's design calls for a 2.2-pound PC with an 8.9-inch screen, a webcam, up to 2GB of RAM, an 80GB or larger hard drive, and built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (or, optionally, WiMax or 3G cellular data). It's not wanting for ports, either, with an Ethernet jack, three USB ports and an SD card slot.
The design is aimed at smaller design-manufacturers and upstart PC companies rather than big PC manufacturers like HP or Dell, who create their own designs (like HP's new MiniNote) from scratch.
"When we look at reference designs, they're helpful, they're insightful, they give us an optimal layout from an engineering perspective -- but they don't target what we're aiming for," says Stacy Wolff, a notebook design director for HP.
VIA's hope is that its design will encourage new designers to make ultra portables that are a little less ugly than the usual fare. It's a bet that the PC market will soon follow in the footsteps of the cellphone market, where what's under the hood is less important than how it looks.
"It's not really about the components inside at all," says VIA vice president Richard Brown. "It's personal jewelry."
Almost makes the idea of starting your own computer brand sound a little sexy, doesn't it? And for the chipmaker, it's not far from the notion that if you want to get a fence painted, start painting it yourself and try to make it look fun.
Stanford president John Hennessy calls parallel programming for multicore processors the biggest challenge computer science has faced in more than 50 years. But that's not stopping Intel from moving ahead with plans to bring even greater core counts to your laptop.
According to trade-media reports, Intel is readying a new breed of quad-core mobile processors for release this fall, marking what could be the first concerted effort by the chip giant to aim its high-end multicore processors at the general mobile market.
Just don't expect quad-core laptops to become an industry standard anytime soon. As DigiTimes notes, these chips won't come cheap, and will also suck down significantly more power than today's mainstream mobile Core 2 Duo processors -- a big no-no in the mobile space.
Intel has previously stated its intention to release quad-core notebook processors, but the company would not confirm the details reported by DigiTimes.
"I've always used the adage, the hardware is ahead of the software is ahead of the user," says Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, who says that quad-core processors in notebooks will not be suitable for mainstream consumers for quite some time.
"I can imagine a small niche [of adopters] on the notebook side, but I still think it's going to be three to four years before [quad-core laptops] become mainstream," he says.
In addition to high prices and power constraints, there's still a dearth of software (and programmers) that can properly take advantage of four processing cores, a fact that will make selling multicore laptops an even harder prospect for Intel in the near term.
Nevertheless, IDC analyst Bob O'Donnell says the decision to relocate quad-core from the desktop to the laptop may actually make sense when you look at future industry trends.
"If you look at where the market is going, we have notebooks sales surpassing desktops on a worldwide scale in 2009," says O'Donnell. "Notebooks are clearly the platform of the future; hence all the movement by Intel and others into the mobile space recently."
In the not-too-distant future, O'Donnell also says that notebooks may even become the platform of choice for which chipmakers will develop new technologies, platforms and, yes, even new multicore processors.
For its own part, Intel seems to be well aware of the challenges it and the rest of the industry face in creating software that can take full advantage of multicore chip technology.
Intel and Microsoft are expected to announce a partnership on Tuesday with the University of California-Berkeley and other universities. The venture will see both companies funding new research into parallel programming techniques.
"Given the many attempts at salting parallel computing in the industry over 40 years, there have only been relatively modest successes to date," says David Patterson, a professor of computer science at Berkeley.
Because the entire industry is now betting on multicore processors, it's also realizing that unless the software community catches up, there remains no compelling reason for consumers to buy 4-, 8- or any other multicore processor.
As Jerry Bautista, director of technology management for Intel's Microprocessor Technology Lab, puts it: "It's not the hardware that's really compelling. It's what you can do with the hardware that really is the interesting stuff."
