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AMD isn’t going after the mobile Internet device market that Intel and other chip vendors are eying. AMD’s senior VP and chief marketing officer, Nigel Dessau, told eWeek, “What we are saying is that we are a smaller company and we have to focus on what we do well at this point. We are watching that segment rather than playing in it, but as it matures we’ll see where it goes.” Sounds like a good plan for AMD, which already has chips that might work for Netbooks and needs to focus on righting itself.

Yesterday afternoon, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini seemed a little hazy on the future home for Intel’s Atom processor during the chip maker’s quarterly earnings call — a fact I don’t find all that surprising since the netbooks or mobile Internet devices the chips are designed for exist only in a marketer’s imagination and failed product implementations.

Otellini was excited about Atom, calling demand for the chip” robust,” but analysts pressed Otellini about Atom’s end market and whether the chip would cannibalize Intel’s low-end Celeron processor. The Celeron ranges from speeds of 2.13 GHz to 3.6 GHz, and is faster than Atom’s 1.8 GHz or 1.6 GHz. Otellini’s responses were less than a ringing endorsement of the chip. “[Atom] is less than a third of the performance of our Centrino (high-end mobile processor),” said Otellini. “You’re dealing with something that most of us wouldn’t use.”

Wait a second. Just weeks ago before the Computex trade show in June, Otellini told the Financial Times he anticipated a $40 billion market opportunity for Atom chips over the next few years. If most of us aren’t using these low-end chips, then who is? Otellini envisions the Atom chip for small computers in emerging markets that happen to have IP-based voice, but in late 2009 Intel will launch an Atom chip for smartphones. In emerging countries, a lot of computing is already carried out on cell phones, begging the question of where Intel’s demand for Atom is coming from. Will those products actually succeed?

As for cannibalization, Otellini said, “We do not see [Atom] replacing Celeron. If you look at the netbook products being built around Atom, they’re all lower-priced, lower features, smaller screen size notebooks aimed at first-time buyers or the second, third or fourth machine in a household. We don’t see any cannibalization.”

So Atom chips are designed for slow web access on cheap, portable machines that will act as the backup computer in my home. Wait, I have one of those already. It’s called a smartphone and plenty of companies already make processors for that market.

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You wouldn’t think that next year’s DreamWorks movie, “Aliens vs. Monsters” and the search for more crude would be connected, but they are — in that they both take advantage of parallel programming for multicore chips. And when it comes to multicore chips, big bucks are on the line as the chip firm or software company that figures out how to write code to take advantage of them stands to make boatloads of money.

DreamWorks signed a deal with Intel this week aimed at parallelizing some of its code running on multicore chips to enable 3-D imaging for the 2009 animated movie. It’s not the first company to work with Intel to get more out of the multiple cores now embedded in servers, but it’s a nice example of how Intel is pushing its multicore efforts beyond simply throwing a bunch of chips at a computing bottleneck.

Like other chip firms, Intel knows that to keep compute power on the rise (and customers happy) it has to not only make the hardware more powerful with multicore chips, but also teach programmers how to use them. Otherwise, multicore chips don’t reach their full potential. James Reinders, director of marketing for Intel’s developer products division, pointed out that much of the work Intel was doing with regard to multicore, including investing in software research, selling tools to make parallel programming less cumbersome and participating in standards bodies, was done to deliver more computing power — something that can no longer be done efficiently by increasing clock speeds or adding even more cores.

“Every generation of hardware offers new capabilities, and we have rewritten our software to take advantage of it over time,” Reinders said. “Multicore will inspire us to do the same thing, but it won’t be overnight.”

It’s possible that the chip companies will be the vanguards of a new style of programming, much like programmers had to learn how to program for the web, graphical user interfaces or even e-commerce applications. Paula Richards, director of IBM’s Cell systems business thinks so. The Cell processor, designed for the Playstation 3, contains nine cores and also performs better if you adapt the code to take advantage of it.

So far IBM has focused on selling the Cell processor into financial firms, hospitals, and oil companies like Spain’s Reposal Repsol, which it inked a deal with last week. Richards said IBM doesn’t just dump that hardware and run — it spends time working with clients in each vertical to build software development kits the customer can use to get the most out of the processor. Those kits work with Intel and AMD multicore chips as well, although Richards says a user won’t see the same level of improvement they would using Cell processors.

“We knew multicore was a major inflection point in the industry,” Richards told me. “Everybody realized this and the company that addresses the [ease of programming] for this technology will win.” In some ways it’s not only about making it easy, it’s about attracting the hearts and minds of developers to a certain way of coding. That’s why IBM is offering SDKs to students who want to write parallel code on their PlayStations and Intel is pushing an undergraduate curriculum for parallel programming. This is a hardware battle fought using software.

image courtesy of DreamWorks

For a while there, covering the chip industry was like covering a race run by a rabbit and a cheetah. AMD was the rabbit, while Intel — with its much larger market cap and greater profits — was the cheetah. Evey now and then the rabbit would fool you into thinking he was going to pull ahead, but we all knew who was going to win. In the past few years, however, two things have brought more runners and more diversity to the course: a challenge to the x86 architecture, and the iPhone.

I could probably find a way to credit the iPhone for changing the furniture industry if I tried hard enough (it could be the new Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game for tech journalists.) But in this case the iPhone pushed the real Internet — as opposed to a carrier-defined portal — out to mobile consumers and showed them how compelling such access could be. That made clear to carriers that data usage, which was already on the rise, could become a huge revenue booster if consumers were given the right type of devices. Which prompted chip makers to see gold in the form of the 33.2 million high-end handsets sold around the world.

That pushed the chip world into viewing these devices as mini computers requiring their very own processors. Obviously these processors need to be small, use very little energy and still cycle fast enough to load and display web pages, pictures and other mobile computing tasks. Chip firms had been thinking about those functions for years, but the success of the iPhone showed how important the mobile computing experience could be. So Intel begat Atom, a chip designed not for a mobile phone but for a smaller laptop that Intel calls a mobile Internet device.

Other chips firms aren’t standing still, either. Via Technologies, which for a long time had the handheld computer market to itself, is refreshing its line of chips. Qualcomm now has Snapdragon, and Texas Instruments is offering OMAP chips. The dark horse in all of this frenzy comes from Nvidia’s Tegra offering, which is really compelling in demos. But Nvidia has an uneven record of supporting its products, so it remains to be seen if the real-life experience can meet the high expectations set by the demos.

Nvidia is also making my chip coverage fun with its efforts to knock out the x86 architecture. Intel and AMD dual-, triple- and quad-core chips will never go away, but both Nvidia and IBM are pushing credible alternatives for high-end processing. Nvidia’s dressing up its graphics processing chips (GPUs) to run scientific queries, visually intensive tasks and repetitive problems than can be done in parallel, such as video decoding and encoding. The influx of digital media is creating a need for such capabilities in an increasing number of data centers.

IBM, meanwhile, is pushing its Cell processor — which was designed with Sony and Toshiba eight years ago for the PlayStation 3 — for enterprise servers and high-performance computing. In many ways it’s attacking the same problems Nvidia’s GPUs are, with encoding and Monte Carlo simulations showing off the Cell’s specially designed, nine-core architecture. IBM may have an advantage over Nvidia because of its enterprise focus. It offers an enterprise-ready Cell-based blade server, while Nvidia sells its chips to firms such as Atrato and Rackable for corporate consumption.

So the two-company race that was never all that competitive has turned into several races with multiple players. Ironically AMD doesn’t have a mobile processor yet, and isn’t really pushing its GPUs into jobs other than running graphics. Perhaps it believes that if it stays the PC course it can pass the cheetah while Intel focuses on Atom and smaller devices.

Parallel processing isn’t just for supercomputers or GPUs anymore. Computer makers are throwing multiple cores at everything from servers to your printer. But the focus on horsepower misses a crucial problem associated with adding more processors. To really take advantage of them, you have to rewrite your code.As anyone who’s ever hosted a demolition party well knows, you can only throw so many workers at a problem before people start to linger at the edges, swill your alcohol and generally stop helping. You need not just manpower, but a good way to organize those workers so that someone, says, preps a drop cloth before your walls get taken out. And others prep for cleanup while the plaster is flying.

Silicon doesn’t tend toward drunken destruction, but if you’re putting the cores in place, it would be great to give them better instructions. Otherwise the promise of performance is just a promise, which is why Microsoft and Intel recently pledged $20 million to two universities trying to figure out an easy way to translate the billions of lines of code into an instruction set for multicore chips.

Others are pushing Erlang as a potential solution to parallel programming, while those in the supercomputing industry are warning of a performance drop caused by applications not keeping up with the cores. Software startup VirtualLogix is trying to use virtualization software to govern how multicore chips run applications by making the programs think they’re running on one processor.

Last week, during the launch of the iPhone, Steve Jobs told the New York Times that the next generation of the Apple OS will not focus on new features, but will instead solve the problem of writing software for multicore processors. Apple has code-named the technology Grand Central, and based it on a programming language called OpenCL. It will parallelize C programming languages for graphics processors.

Besides investing millions of research dollars into the search for a magic compiler or reviving an older language, chip vendors are coming up with stopgaps. Unfortunately these stopgaps are focused solely on their own silicon. Nvidia has released a tool called CUDA to help translate C languages into parallel instructions that can be used by Nvidia’s GPUs for scientific computing. (Apple’s OpenCL looks similar to CUDA.) And AMD also has its own effort, called Stream.

Freescale on Monday announced a set of multicore embedded processors that come with software support in the form of a simulator that ships before the chips do. As a result, users can start their development efforts and test their multicore code weeks ahead of time. “Customers are not looking for suppliers to offer them a chip and then leave them to program it themselves,” explained Steve Cole, a systems architect for Freescale. “There’s a certain amount of support and market knowledge that we need to have to help our customers.”

With all the work it takes to rewrite code, it’s no wonder everyone from startups to established companies are desperately searching for the programming equivalent of a Babel fish to solve the problem. The one that succeeds will be responsible for taking computing to its next jump in speed.

The Federal Trade Commission, after two years of looking into allegations that Intel has behaved anticompetitively in the microprocessor market, has decided to act, announcing a formal probe. At issue is whether Intel offered PC makers rebates to use its chips instead of AMD’s. Intel issued a statement in response.

The company believes its business practices are well within U.S. law. The evidence that this industry is fiercely competitive and working is compelling. For example, prices for microprocessors declined by 42.4 percent from 2000 to end of 2007. When competitors perform and execute the market rewards them. When they falter and under-perform the market responds accordingly.

In Austin, the Intel fund at Dell was an open secret, although Dell eventually opened the door to AMD. While AMD may be tempted to applaud this and the $25.4 million fine imposed on Intel by South Korea, the FTC probe won’t lead to action anytime soon. The government moves slowly and the coming change in administration won’t help speed it up.

Could Dell or HP offer the next iPhone? Nvidia Co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang certainly isn’t ruling them out. In fact, his firm has launched a low-power computing platform called Tegra that’s specifically aimed at bringing more competitors to the mobile handset market.

But that’s long-term thinking; mobile currently accounts for less than 10 percent of Nvidia’s business. In the meantime, the $4.1 billion-a-year graphics chip maker is battling Intel to bring more focus and computing jobs to the graphics processor that in the past may have been handled by a computer’s main processor, also known as CPU.

Indeed, media-enamored consumers have pushed Nvidia’s sales up by 34 percent from 2007 through 2008 (Nvidia’s fiscal year ends in January). The Tegra platform, based on the company’s sexy new application processor, is one-tenth the size of Intel’s rival attempts to make smaller mobile computers — and runs at less than one-tenth of the power.

GigaOM: On the GPU side, how will you compete against Intel and AMD, who both have platform strategies for the PC market?

Huang: It’s the same way we compete selling graphics cards. Our GeForce chipsets sales are up 50 percent even though the overall PC market is up only 7 percent. So people who care about visual interfaces are buying our chips. We see ourselves as CPU-agnostic. We look at the vertical market we want to go into and we let the market decide which CPU it wants and then we partner with that CPU provider.

GigaOM: Intel is a big partner for you but you recently threatened to “open a can of whoop-ass” on them at an analyst meeting. What is the competition between the two companies like?

Huang: I think the “open a can of whoop-ass” response was really to dispel myths that Intel was out telling everybody. They’ve told people that GPUs are dead and that integrated graphics have taken over the world. I think that’s just really bad sportsmanship, frankly.

Looking toward the future, Tegra is a really fabulous computer and will increase in performance two to three times every year. And if Intel and AMD don’t continue to make the desktop and laptop PCs more and more magical every year, before you know it, mobile computing devices will be disruptive to the PC the same way PCs were disruptive to the mainframe industry.

GigaOM: So tell us about Tegra and mobile computing.

Huang: Five years ago I saw the convergence of a couple of technologies — particularly wireless technology and rich LCD displays that were eventually going to bring to consumers mobile computing devices. It will have elements of entertainment, elements of communications and elements of computing.

You have to deliver these elements with almost no power. If you boil it down to where the CPU, the GPU, and all the individual processors dissipate almost no energy so you could wind it up like a wristwatch or recharge it with the temperatures of your skin, you could make a mobile computing device that fits in your pocket. So we started with a blank sheet of paper and five years later we have Tegra.

GigaOM: What will these devices look like?

The iPhone is the world’s first legitimate mobile Internet device. There are different design decisions that can be made for the iPhone and devices like the iPhone. Some will have Wi-Fi, some touch, and some will have a slide-out keyboard, but that speaks to the orientation where the suppliers want to point their device.

GigaOM: How important will processors be for this type of device?

Huang: Inside the iPhone is a custom chip designed by Apple. Apple has a really great computer chip in there. It has a good graphics core, actually. For the rest of the computer industry who don’t have an internal chip design organization, they’re going to have to rely on someone else to do it. But that is a multi-, multiyear project. So the notion that the rest of the computer industry can quickly catch up with the iPhone really, really depends on someone else designing a chip that’s really low power but also leapfrogs the iPhone. That’s where we come in.

GigaOM: What about competition from Intel, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, VIA and others also going after this mobile computing market?

Huang: I see the mobile computing space bifurcated in two basic categories where most of the suppliers will end up. There are people really good at communications and that’s where the baseband providers are. TI is really fabulous at communications and Qualcomm is really fabulous at communications.

What Nvidia and Intel are really good at is computing. The difference between us and Intel is we decided to start with a clean sheet of paper. The PC legacy is what causes the laptop to be so big. So we abandoned the PC legacy in favor of low power while retaining all the computing expertise.

GigaOM: So who are the end vendors for Tegra?

Huang: Anyone who wants an alternative like the iPhone.

GigaOm: Handset makers?

Huang: No. Every PC company in the world. I don’t think it’s unrealistic for Dell to offer a mobile computing device.

GigaOM: With a baseband processor?

Huang: Sure. And no, that’s not a product announcement for Dell. Handset and PC companies are becoming similar. So will Motorola be more successful at building a mobile computing device or will Dell be more successful at building a mobile computing device? It’s kind of hard to say.

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With its new line of Wi-Fi chipsets designed to plug into a variety of consumer electronics, Broadcom is banking on Wi-Fi beating out other wireless networks for multimedia streaming. It’s not alone in its love affair with Wi-Fi; fellow chip maker Intel, for example, is pushing the standard for personal area networks as well as local area networks. Armed with faster flavors of the technology, an established consumer familiarity as well as a ready source of power from outlets, why not use Wi-Fi for everything, from attaching your keyboard to your computer wirelessly to sending HD movies to your flat screen?

True AV geeks can argue about the merits of picture quality using Wi-Fi streaming, but as a Roku user I can tell you that when the only other choice for my husband and I is to huddle in our office chairs in front of Hulu after our daughter goes to bed, Wi-Fi streamed content via television is eminently watchable. Broadcom’s banking big on the market with its 65-nanometer production plans. By pushing its chips into dongles as well as TVs, DVD players, set-top boxes and speakers, it has the ability to hurt several startups pushing alternative wireless HD technologies such as ultra-wideband, WirelessHD; and the WHDI standard. High-definition purists will gravitate toward some of the HD standards, but the big market will be in Wi-Fi for a while.

The key will be finding both manufacturer support for getting Broadcom chips inside consumer electronics equipment and finding existing equipment that has USB slots so users can easily retrofit them with Wi-Fi dongles. Wi-Fi may have its drawbacks, but for most consumers who don’t want to think interoperability, it’s easy to use. They just want something that works.

Freescale should get ready for change. I visited the Austin-based chip maker yesterday to talk about wireless and networking chips as well as broad trends in the industry, and walked away realizing that the firm needs to split itself up in order to survive.

The company has some very cool technology — especially around its multicore processors for embedded systems such as printers, storage arrays and routers — and a huge base of users for its Power architecture. But it has too many areas of focus. In the next two years, it’s unlikely that the company will have the same combination of businesses it has today.

Specialization is key in the chip-making industry because it allows a company to allocate its R&D more effectively, optimize manufacturing processes and generally improve profits. Freescale, which makes chips for automobiles, RFID systems, cell phones, base stations, networking equipment and industrial applications, designs both high-volume chips at advanced process nodes and low-volume chips that require a lot of manufacturing tweaks.

It’s likely that Freescale’s private equity owners will divide the company along the lines the firm established late last year: networking and multimedia; microcontrollers; cellular; and RF, sensors and analog. Each of the divisions made more than $1 billion in 2007 and could be combined with similar divisions at other firms such as Infineon, Broadcom, STMicroelectronics or even Intersil. Earlier this year, Freescale got a new CEO (from Intersil) with M&A experience, so change is certainly in the air.

IBM has taken the storied Cell processor and amped up both the processing capacity and production. IBM says it will produce the Cell processor at 65 nanometers and start popping it into servers to create a “supercomputing experience for the masses.” That is, if the masses can afford the $10,000 price tag for an adapter card and have a need to perform high-end analytical functions or lots of video transcoding.

What’s cool for consumers (and a real death knell for startups) comes from IBM’s Jim Comfort, a VP in IBM’s systems and technology group, who told EETimes, “IBM plans to continue to use videogame consoles as the vehicle for driving the first iterations of new high-end chips in large volumes that later become available to high-end computing systems in lower volume uses.”

Like software, chips are now sneaking from consumer’s living rooms into the enterprise. Funny what you can learn from Web 2.0. But it also raises the barriers to entry for anyone with a chip startup. Consumers won’t pay the margins enterprise gear makers will, so the way to make profits is on volume — hard for a startup to hit without a lot of cash upfront.

No one knows exactly how big the market for mobile Internet devices will be, but the major chip makers are betting it will be huge (it’s one of the reasons they’re making chips for mobile devices at 45 nanometers.) We’ve covered efforts by Intel, Qualcomm, and Via Technologies to get their chips into devices sized somewhere between a smartphone and a PC, but Texas Instruments wants to play, too.

TI formalized its MID effort, based on its own OMAP architecture, last month. It’s entering this market with its third generation of OMAP multimedia processors, which were designed four years ago specifically to fit into smartphones. The second-generation chips are currently in the Nokia 800 and 770; the third-generation chips that underlie the formal MID group will be in an undisclosed number of products by the end of the year.

TI’s chips will compete directly with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset and Intel’s Atom chips. Comparatively speaking, TI’s chips show a greater flexibility for the end products. The power-sipping (at 500 mW-750 mW) 800 GHz MHz processor is slower than both Qualcomm’s and Intel’s efforts and requires less power than Intel’s Atom processors, which can require up to 2.4 watts. Ramesh Iyer, a MID product strategy manager with TI, says the lower clock speed is a conscious decision to reduce the power consumption; combining several types of cores with TI software allows for a higher utilization of existing megahertz, he notes.

As products containing chips from competing vendors hit the market, my hunch is that TI’s might be the best when it comes to general purpose use and battery power, followed by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, which will also be battery-friendly and perhaps perform better than TI’s in general purpose use. Device specs for MIDs based on Intel’s Atom processor are larger, but the x86 architecture might win converts because it’s familiar and plenty of applications are designed for it. And that raises the very legit question of what role the operating system will play in how MIDs are used. I’ll get back to that in a few posts.