A leaked presentation authored by Sun has shed some light on Intel’s plans for its Dunnington processor, which appears to be a six-core server chip where all six cores are part of a single chip. Intel had previously hinted that Dunnington would have four cores or more, but it hadn’t been clear whether the company would reuse its multichip module strategy of cramming several distinct chips into a single package.

After months of deriding rival Advanced Micro Devices’ strategy of cramming four cores onto one chip, Intel is set to take that concept a step further.

Intel chose to build quad-core chips by taking two dual-core chips and putting them into a special package. This approach was scorned by the chip design purists, but it allowed Intel to get quad-core chips out quickly while AMD struggled for a year with the technical challenges associated with building Barcelona, a quad-core chip with all the cores on one die.

Dunnington will arrive just before the Nehalem generation of chips, which will be quite a mishmash of designs. Intel will have a wide variety of Nehalem chips, including ones with two, four, and eight cores, chips with up to 16 threads, and some with integrated graphics.

Dunnington would be Intel’s first monolithic design since its original Core 2 Duo chips released in 2006. The presentation indicates that Dunnington has six 45-nanometer Penryn-class cores integrated onto a single die. Each pair of Penryn cores shares 3MBs of Level 2 cache, and each of the six cores can access 16MBs of Level 3 cache. That’s a ton of space to store frequently used instructions, which could be a help for the chip in avoiding the front-side bus bottleneck to the main memory that’s still apparently in the works for Dunnington.

(Credit:
aceshardware.freeforums.org)

This slide from a leaked Sun presentation uncovers Intel's six-core Dunnington processor.

On Monday when we launch the voting for the Webware 100 awards, we’re also going to go live with our partnership with the Web 2.0 Expo. This event, which starts on April 22, is the biggest Web 2.0 show there is, and we’re thrilled that Webware and the Webware 100 will be part of it.

We will announce the Webware 100 winners on April 21, the day before the show opens, and we will celebrate the winners with a party during the Web 2.0 Expo booth crawl, on April 24 at 4:30 p.m. There will probably be other festivities as well. Watch this space.

CNET, Webware’s publisher, is no stranger to running big awards programs. We also run the Best of Show Awards at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Webware will have two full Expo passes to give out; details of that program will be announced shortly. Our readers can also get $100 off any educational program at the Expo, or a free exhibits-only pass, by using the priority code websf08ob3 on the Web 2.0 Expo registration page.

There are all the usual widgets to play with, like weather, a clock, sticky notes, and a monthly calendar. What sets it apart from other widget engines, though, is the universal log-in, meaning if you’ve got it installed on two machines you can share the same set of widgets (including saved notes and feeds) without having to juggle them back and forth. This is a feature often overlooked by some of the big guys and aimed at people who want to share a similar experience at home and on work machines.

I did run into a few problems though. It’s not a 1.0 release, so I’ll give it some slack, but widgets were slow to respond and not nearly as conscious of my desktop real estate as I’m willing to tolerate. While it’s great to have some killer design, if it means I can’t fit more than three widgets on my screen, there’s a problem. It also takes forever to shut down. I clocked it at about a minute and a half, which would be tolerable if it didn’t place a small splash screen over all my other windows to let me know it was closing.

Despite some of the irks, there are a ton of nice touches that stand out. You can skin the entire environment in one of three ways. Text and object size can also be manipulated, letting you fine-tune the look and feel of each widget with simple sliders. These are the kind of things I want in every widget engine.

View Survey

Sobees is a really slick-looking widget desktop that's got a few small quirks. (click to enlarge)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

It’s also got a neat take on the built-in RSS reader that reminds me of the latest release of Netvibes. I don’t think it’s as robust or as easy to use, but it’s got some handy features like letting you sort blogs by post authors and bookmarking stories for sharing using a small drag-and-drop tray. For instances where the formatting is a bit off, there’s a built-in browser in case you want to view the post on its home site.

I’m not a heavy user of widget engines. Besides OS X’s Dashboard, I usually steer clear of having any more processes running on my machine and opt to go with a Web option instead. A new player called Sobees has piqued my interest though. Based out of Switzerland, Sobees is one of the neater ones I’ve seen, placing a heavy emphasis on style and first-party widgets over building out an open platform for people to develop on (which is coming later on).

See also reviews of Sobees on: DownloadSquad and CenterNetworks.

“With Google App Engine, you own all the data in your app. As stated in our terms, you always have the right to get your data out of Google App Engine at any point. We wouldn’t have it any other way,” Gibbs wrote.

O’Grady at RedMonk, too, argued that Google should open-source portions of its infrastructure or offer an API (application programming interface) to its data store that would ease portability to other databases.

Still, O’Reilly takes Google to task for the lack of application portability–at least in this first iteration of Google App Engine.

But Google? The search giant is hosting a Web development conference next month, not to sell more software stacks or subscriptions, but to encourage more apps–and people–to move to the Web, it says.

But it’s good to see these issues raised and for developers to push for more openness. After all, standards, portability, and interoperability have been good to the Web.

Within a few days of its release, programmer Chris Anderson wrote some open-source software, called AppDrop, that shows that you can conceivably run an instance written for Google App Engine on Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon’s hosted server platform.

Tim O’Reilly dissected whether Google’s App Engine is a lock-in play on Monday, and RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady hit the issue head-on with his excellent Q&A on what Google App Engine actually is.

Google appears to already be on the case of data portability. On the Google App Engine Blog, software engineer Kevin Gibbs said that one planned feature is large-scale data import and export.

It’s likely that Google will allow applications written with other languages, like JavaScript. But the nub of online-platform lock-in comes from the data store, Bosworth said.

Once again, Google gets tongues a-waggin’, even when it isn’t the first to a party.

But as more application development moves to hosted platforms, does data and application portability get lost in “the cloud”?

Updated at 8:45 a.m. PT with information from Google App Engine blog on planned data migration tools.

But it’s also possible that this is one more sign that one of the big guys is forgetting the principles–the Internet as a platform (not “my company as a platform”), harnessing the power of user contribution (which, as John Musser pointed out, means that you always “pay the user first”), small pieces loosely joined–that brought their success in the first place.

One thing both Amazon and Google could do to really show they are serious about their platforms is open up their data engines, which are really the core of most Web applications–open-source BigTable and SimpleDB. This would really reduce lock-in and make development easier, and it might even lead to some help improving their services.

Developers for years have been clamoring for more openness and standards. They are tenets of the open-source movement.

Given that we’re at an early point in platform-as-a-service offerings, I’d say lock-in, to some degree, is inevitable. Most people consider Salesforce.com’s Force.com closed, as it’s based on the company’s database and query language.

As people get their heads around Google App Engine, they see some things they may not like. Namely, the dreaded “lock-in.”

Think his concerns are overblown? He’s not the only one.

“Now, it may be that this is a temporary oversight, and that Google does intend, long-term, to make it easy for developers to export their applications. After all, Eric Schmidt says he reminds his employees all the time, “Don’t fight the Internet.”

commentary

The only way to become a player in the market is to participate in the market. This could prove to be a valuable experiment for Red Hat.

In recent months, Red Hat has received a growing number of inquiries from hosting and managed services partners, according to Mark Enzweiler, vice president of channel sales at Red Hat. Attune to the trend, Enzweiler created a new management position at Red Hat last year, in order to better serve hosting partners.

MSPmentor is reporting that Red Hat has quietly been adding positions that indicate increased attention to the hosting and managed services market. Red Hat, which does 54 percent of its business through its partner channel, looks to be trying to increase that ratio further.

Red Hat…has created two staff positions to serve hosting partners. Plus, Red Hat is evaluating a strategy to work more closely with managed service providers, MSPmentor has learned….

By now, Wallace should know his way around a courtroom.

If he did, he was wrong. MySpace has won a legal judgment against Wallace after he failed numerous times to turn over documents or even to show up for court, according to records obtained by CNET News.com.

In March of last year, MySpace filed suit against Wallace alleging he launched a phishing scam to fraudulently access MySpace profiles. Wallace was also accused of spamming thousands of MySpace users with unwanted advertisements and luring them to his Web sites.

Sanford Wallace, the so-called spam king, has often been accused of sending annoying messages that are typically ignored by the recipient. Perhaps he considered a series of court orders as something he could blow off.

CNET News.com’s Declan McCullagh contributed to this report.

To say Wallace, who could not be reached for comment, failed to mount a vigorous defense would be an understatement.

Each time, MySpace waited and each time Wallace failed to comply. Early on, Wallace informed MySpace he was having a hard time finding legal counsel. Soon after, he said he couldn’t comply because he was unaware of his court dates; he wasn’t accepting mail or signing for packages and that’s why he missed receiving notifications.

“It is…a defendant’s responsibility to respond to discovery, obey court orders, and avoid dilatory tactics,” the court wrote in its order. “Taking all of the above factors into account, a default is appropriate. The court finds that Wallace’s noncompliance is due to willfulness, fault, or bad faith…Wallace has had every opportunity to avoid the sanction of default. (He) has never provided any explanation for his behavior to the court.”

The court did not accept his reasons as a valid excuse, but continued to give him chances to comply. Nothing worked. After Wallace continuously failed to appear or respond to filing deadlines, the court issued a default judgment against Wallace.

According to records filed on April 15 with U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, Wallace was ordered numerous times to turn over documents requested by MySpace and provide a deposition. A MySpace representative did not respond to an interview request.

But the reality is that Rebel XSi (also called the 450D and Kiss X2 in various parts of the world) customers are more likely to be upgrading from a compact camera, a market where SD dominates. And from a technical perspective, SD performs fine, takes up less critical room in the camera, and in the newer SDHC incarnation can match CompactFlash’s 32GB capacity.

(Credit:
Canon)

CompactFlash memory has been a mainstay in the SLR (single-lens reflex) camera market, but SD has gained a foothold. Nikon’s entry-level SLRs use SD cards, as do all from Pentax, Panasonic, and Samsung. And Canon’s top-end 1Ds Mark III accepts both SD and CompactFlash.

Now if we could just get rid of xD Picture Card from Olympus and Fujifilm and Memory Stick from Sony, we’d all be better off. Fujifilm wisely has started selling compact cameras with a dual-use adapter that can accept SD as well as xD, and I’m hoping that’s a harbinger of things to come.

It’s a drag for consumers that there’s such a profusion of flash card formats. Customers often must pay extra when moving from one camera maker to another just to replace flash cards. And indeed, owners of Canon’s existing Rebel, Rebel XT, or XTi cameras will find their CompactFlash cards useless if they upgraded to an XSi.

Canon faced some modest compatibility risks when it chose to design its new EOS Rebel XSi camera with SD flash-memory cards rather than the CompactFlash cards it’s used for all its SLR cameras until this point, but I think the move is smart overall.

At Alfresco, we’ve stumbled upon an ingenious way to keep the company together. We’re highly distributed, with no US offices. With everyone working remotely, people can feel a bit isolated at times.

Basically, this means that we have group chat rooms that are always open. People come and go, participating or not. In so doing, the team has been knit together as we socialize over Skype and work over Skype.

Being a company with employees spread across the United States and Europe, Alfresco has long used Skype to cut phone costs and as our common instant messaging platform. But with a recent update from Skype, “public chats” have been enabled, giving us one more tool.

I suspect that it could help even in office environments where everyone sits near each other. I’d be interested to find out if it works as well for you as it has for us.

We now have group chats for the management team, for the solutions engineering team, for support, and so on. Often these chats will rest silent, but when a good conversation gets moving, it’s invaluable to team cohesion and productivity.

commentary (Credit:
Matt Asay)

Samsung's new Series 9 LCD HDTVs use LED backlights to improve contrast and color quality

At the event, I got my hands on the Samsung Instinct cellphone for the first time. Although the user interface looks a little primitive next to the
iPhone, the Instinct has more features, and it’s significantly smaller. I plunked my own iPhone 3G down next to the Instinct, and they were almost the same thickness. The Instinct is a little taller, and the iPhone is a lot wider.

Samsung also makes combination PC monitor+TV LCD displays. I was surprised to learn that Samsung sells both a 24″ LCD and a 25.5″ LCD with exactly the same features (1,920 x 1,200 pixels, etc.), list-priced at $549 and $599 respectively. It seems to me that there’s really no good reason for anyone to bother with the 24″ model unless they’re trying to fit the display into an existing piece of computer furniture or something like that. Very strange.

Samsung also offers an innovative plasma set (the Series 4, I think; Samsung’s press kit didn’t identify it, and I didn’t write it down when I was there) that supports 3D imaging. For an extra $149, buyers can get a pair of LCD-shutter glasses that work with the set to present slightly different images to each eye.

(Credit:
Samsung Electronics)

In this new series, Samsung has added local dimming– the LEDs backlighting a dark section of the picture can be turned down, boosting the contrast of the display. Although Samsung claims a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, which is impossible to realize in practice, local dimming does make a visible difference.

I’d been looking for an excuse to go up to the city, so off I went– taking Caltrain rather than driving. Conveniently, the Samsung event was just a few blocks from the train station in San Francisco.

I also saw some of Samsung’s well-regarded multifunction printers, a whole kitchen worth of Samsung appliances, some good-looking camcorders, and various other products that ought to sell pretty well. You can see more about all of the company’s product lines on its website.

After the showcase I went over to the Westfield Metreon mall and took in a showing of The Dark Knight in the AMC Loews IMAX theater. Mmm. Never has $15 for a movie seemed like such a great deal.

Samsung covers all the major varieties of high-end HDTVs– LCD, plasma, and DLP– and all were on exhibit at the event. One Samsung exec I chatted with informally lamented the fact that the company’s excellent DLP TVs– based on Texas Instruments’ micromirror rear-projection display technology– have suffered in comparison with true flat panels. DLP HDTVs look great and can cost less than otherwise comparable LCD or plasma sets, but they just don’t have the sex appeal of the thinner sets.

I didn’t get to see everything I was interested in; the folks representing Samsung Semiconductor were nowhere to be found. But I did get briefed on Samsung’s wide range of consumer products. Forthwith, some observations.

Samsung Electronics, an arm of the giant Korean company (second only to General Electric in annual revenue among conglomerates), held a press event in San Francisco last week to show off its products for the coming holiday season.

The glasses work with many PC games, and ordinary DVD movies can be processed to add a sort of 3D effect, but I wouldn’t buy this set just for the 3D capability. If you’re going to buy this set anyway, sure, add the glasses– but understand this technology is really just a novelty at this point.

This technology comes with a slightly higher price– the Series 9 is $3,199, and Samsung’s next-best flourescent-backlit LCD HDTV is about $500 cheaper. But to me, the quality improvements are well worth the 19% premium.

But I think the best-looking HDTV picture in Samsung’s lineup comes from the new Series 9 LCD TV, which uses LED backlight technology. LEDs can deliver deeper, more saturated colors, and outlast older flourescent backlights.

Here’s what Jobs said in 2003: “The PowerPC G5 changes all the rules. This 64-bit race
car is the heart of our new Power
Mac G5, now the world’s fastest desktop computer,” Jobs said in a statement. “IBM offers the most advanced processor design and manufacturing expertise on earth, and this is just the beginning of a long and productive relationship.” (Sounds suspiciously similar to what Jobs said about Intel after Apple made the switch.)

For IBM, the business with Apple was a financial sinkhole because the company had to invest a lot of money in chipsets, compilers, and other supporting technologies but could only take a small percentage of the overall PC processor market, he said. So, in the end, it was impossible to make money.

Apple laptop using the PowerPC G3 processor

Why only a small piece of the processor market? Apple insisted on double sourcing (IBM and Motorola). So, from the start, this left IBM with about half the market it could have had. This, he said, was an enormous financial burden. Paraphrasing the ex-IBMer: Intel was a single company with the lion’s share of the market. While two companies–IBM and Motorola–had to divvy up a much smaller share of the market, while still investing, individually, tremendous amounts of money. And Apple played one against the other, according to this person.

Specifications for the Apple Power Mac G5 tower design (discontinued in August 2006)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

One oft-cited reason was that Apple didn’t believe it could get the requisite performance per watt from processors being supplied by IBM and Freescale–formerly Motorola’s chipmaking arm. Translation: Apple was worried about IBM’s and Motorola’s ability to deliver competitive processors for laptops. (Update: Another reason often put forward is that Apple simply wanted to be able to run Windows.)

Updated on Monday, June 15 at 2:20 p.m. PDT: adding multi-core discussion to earlier Windows update.

Apple was paying a premium for IBM silicon, he said, creating a Catch-22. IBM had to charge more because it didn’t have the economies of scale of Intel, but Apple didn’t want to pay more, even though it supposedly derived more from an inherently superior RISC design as manifested in the PowerPC architecture.

IBM had been concentrating on delivering high-performance, single-core PowerPC processors, this person said. (Presumably by ratcheting up the gigahertz rating on single processors. The goal was to exceed 3GHz.) But when Intel, as part of the discussions with Apple, showed a dual-core (multi-core) processor roadmap, Apple reconsidered this strategy, according to this person. (Though IBM did deliver multi-core PowerPC designs for the Mac as shown in the graphic, these were not the same kind of multi-core designs that Intel was proposing. )

When Apple made the watershed announcement in June 2005 ending its longstanding relationship with IBM and Motorola, Apple CEO Steve Jobs attributed the switch to a superior Intel roadmap.

“Looking ahead Intel has the strongest processor roadmap by far,” Jobs said in a statement at the time. “It’s been ten years since our transition to the PowerPC, and we think Intel’s technology will help us create the best personal computers for the next ten years.”

Can parallels be drawn with Advanced Micro Devices and its struggles to compete with Intel over the last few years? Possibly. Very few chipmakers have the multibillion dollar coffers to fund the R&D and manufacturing necessary to be a leader in a major chip market, let alone stay competitive. Witness AMD last year going to the brink and then saving itself by spinning off its manufacturing operations.

Despite the praise heaped on IBM’s technology in 2003, Apple believed, by 2005, that it couldn’t compete on cost, according to this person.

And Apple chose Intel in 2005, not AMD, and has stayed with this single source for its Mac line since.

(Credit:
Apple)

A former IBM executive, who worked at IBM at the time and was involved in discussions with Apple, offered his perspective in a conversation we had during dinner at a recent technology conference. Let me emphasize that this is one person’s opinion, not necessarily the gospel truth. I will not publish his name or title.

Interestingly, IBM had hoped to amortize the cost of PowerPC on Cell, the PowerPC-based chip design now used in the
Sony PlayStation, some IBM severs, and IBM Roadrunner supercomputers. Big Blue was hoping to move Apple to Cell and then get the economies of scale there, according to this person.

While he acknowledged the public reasons put forward by Apple, there was more to it–not surprisingly–than that. The upshot: Apple wanted better pricing, according to this person.