TechEye |  |
- Iwatch goes to manufacturing
- The world celebrates 50 years of BASIC
- Stanford bioengineers develop superfast energy efficient chips
- RF Micro predicts growth
- Microsoft losing millions on Surface
| Posted: 30 Apr 2014 04:18 AM PDT The fruity cargo cult Apple has apparently taken its much hyped watch vapourware to manufacturing. For years people have been saying that Apple was going to make a smartwatch and while rivals have already gone to market with their versions, the Jobs' Mob version has been nowhere to be seen. According to a report emanating from the China Times, Apple's Chinese supply chain has begun churning out iWatch units in what is being termed as small quantities. The article claims that this is in preparation for a launch some time in the second half of 2014. It says that up to three million devices will ship in the second quarter of the year, with production ramping up to 14 or 15 million by the end of the third quarter. The report points to earlier rumours of 65 million units to be shipped in 2014. If that is the case then this is going to be Apple's biggest lemon in history. Smartwatches are retro technology which has only found a use among exercise nuts who use it to measure their heart rates. Apple will have to come up with something that is completely new for it to break that mould and at the moment game changing tech is not out there yet. The report said that the iWatch will be built using system-in-package modules (SiPs) rather than the usual printed circuit boards (PCBs). This means that its various chips will be built into a single module, which will in turn let Apple cram in multiple sensors for things like its expected fitness and biometric-tracking capabilities. This will save a lot of space, but it is still not going to mean any ground-breaking tech. A recently revealed patent for an Apple wristwatch also suggests that the iWatch will feature a camera and a curved display, as well as mobile network connectivity. The word on the street is that queues of fanboys who buy everything Apple makes regardless if it is good or not will be forming for the iWatch in September. This will fit in with the new iPhone 6 which will have the same size screen as every other flagship smartphone out there. The thought is that Apple's smartwatch should link up with the phone and then... well nothing really it will just link up to the phone. Microsoft may say that its future lies in devices and services, but at the moment it's losing big in the devices market: $300 million and counting for the Surface in the last nine months. And the more Surfaces it sells, the more money it loses. Is this any way to turn around a company's mobile strategy? |
| The world celebrates 50 years of BASIC Posted: 30 Apr 2014 03:41 AM PDT It is now more than 50 years since John Kemeny and a student programmer both typed RUN and started their Basic programs at the same time. They had created what became known as Dartmouth Basic - or Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Computers were not really available at the time, Kemeny and Dartmouth maths professor Thomas Kurtz had already formed the view that "knowledge about computers and computing must become an essential part of a liberal education". At the time programs were delivered on stacks of punch cards that computer operators loaded one after another in a system known as "batch processing". Basic was developed from codes such as Darsimco (Dartmouth Simplified Code) and DOPE (Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment) and John Backus's Fortran (Formula Translator). However, Basic made it much easier to enter programs in the days before computers even had screens. Basic took off after the invention of the microprocessor in 1971 and the price of computers fell. Basic became the standard language for home users and hobbyist programmers. There wasn't much packaged software, so people expected to write some of their own. Computer magazines published program listings for people to type in, then save to cassette tape. In 1982, the boom in home computing led to the UK's first attempt to teach everybody to code: the BBC's Computer Literacy Project. This was based on BBC Basic - written by Richard Russell - running on Acorn BBC microcomputers. The editor, Mike Magee, still has an Acorn Atom in his yard. It was Basic that most computer geeks started on. Bill Gates wrote a version of Basic for the MITS Altair microcomputer and dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft with his programming partner, Paul Allen. Microsoft Basic hasn't changed much over the years, but in the 1990s, Microsoft created Visual Basic, which could handle graphical user interfaces. This became popular for developing business and even commercial software. But Vole kept changing the rules between versions which caused a certain amount of frustration for Mike Magee. Programmers that were more serious moved to other languages, such as Pascal and C but Basic did help a generation of people understand the basic principles of algorithms and the various ways to store and access data. |
| Stanford bioengineers develop superfast energy efficient chips Posted: 30 Apr 2014 03:38 AM PDT Stanford bioengineers have developed a chip which is 9,000 times faster and uses significantly less power than a typical PC. The Neurogrid circuit board can simulate more neurons and synapses than other brain mimics on the power it takes to run a tablet. Kwabena Boahen, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford, in an article for the Proceedings of the IEEE, said that the brain was a better model for computing. Boahen and his team have developed Neurogrid, a circuit board consisting of 16 custom-designed "Neurocore" chips. Together these 16 chips can simulate one million neurons and billions of synaptic connections. The team designed these chips with power efficiency in mind. Their strategy was to enable certain synapses to share hardware circuits. The Neurogrid is the size of a tablet and will probably end up controlling a humanoid robot. The downside is that you have to know how the brain works to program Neurocore, and the next stage is to create a neurocompiler so that you would not need to know anything about synapses and neurons to able to use one of these. Million-neuron Neurogrid circuit boards cost about $40,000. Boahen believes dramatic cost reductions are possible. Neurogrid is based on 16 Neurocores, each of which supports 65,536 neurons. Those chips were made using 15-year-old fabrication technologies. By switching to modern manufacturing processes and fabricating the chips in large volumes, he could cut a Neurocore's cost 100-fold – which means you could have a million-neuron board for $400 a throw. |
| Posted: 30 Apr 2014 03:37 AM PDT Chipmaker RF Micro Devices has forecast quarterly revenue above what the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street had predicted and say it expects rising smartphone sales to fuel growth in the second half of the year. RF Micro has customers which include Apple and Samsung who have all reported slowing smartphone sales and yet its share price rose about 7.5 percent in extended trading after the chipmaker also posted a better-than-expected profit for the fourth quarter. Chief Executive Robert Bruggeworth said his company was beginning to support the volume ramps of many of this year's most popular devices and expected this to accelerate into the September quarter. RF Micro is also positioned to benefit from the "internet of thongs," Bruggeworth claimed. The company has been expanding and announced in February that it would buy rival Triquint Semiconductor for about $1.6 billion to boost its offering in both phone and wireless network markets. RF Micro's chips are also used in radar equipment, and forecast adjusted earnings of $305 million for the first quarter ending June. RF Micro's net loss narrowed to $1 million in the fourth quarter ended March 29 from $16 million a year earlier. Revenue fell 8.8 percent to $256 million. |
| Microsoft losing millions on Surface Posted: 30 Apr 2014 03:36 AM PDT Software giant Microsoft is losing a fortune on its Surface line of tablets. Computerworld has been looking into Vole's filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and found that Microsoft reported $494 million in revenue from the Surface line in the latest quarter. That sounds good but the actual cost of revenue was $539 million, which means that it lost $45 million in the quarter from Surface. It should be doing better after being in the market for a while, but the loses are $6 million more than the previous quarter. In the last nine months, Microsoft spent $2.1 billion on the Surface, and gained $1.8 billion in revenue, meaning a total loss of $300 million. The biggest loss came in the September 2013 quarter, some $216 million. It is not clear how Microsoft is able to lose so much on the Surface. We would understand if it was cheap, but the fact it is so pricey that it makes the iPad look cheap. The Surface 2 Pro starts at $899, and the RT-based Surface 2 at $499. The cheapest iPad Air sells for $499. Vole might say that the Surface will bring in additional revenue because it uses Microsoft services such as Bing, Bing Maps, OneDrive, and Outlook.com email. Yep they are not great money spinners either. The question then is what is Microsoft going to do? It needs the Surface for its mobile strategy, our guess is that it will have to work out a way to make them for less. It might take a leaf out of Google's book. |
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