“Otellini has been subtly remaking the company: aligning with Apple, in a step away from the company's PC-only heritage; pushing the Atom mobile chip, in a dogleg pivot from Moore's Law, the founding axiom behind Intel, that chips get exponentially faster; and embracing new territory, new markets, and new ways of playing with others. The goal is to better compete in a world in which computing is everywhere, from laptops to tractors.”
Photo Credit for Atom chip
MIT Technology Review has a gallery on how the integrated circuit has evolved over the last 50 years.
Photo of the 1974 vintage Intel 8080. With roughly 5,000 transistors, it was the heart of the Altair personal computer.
The other photo is of the AMD Phenom II, scheduled for release in early 2009, has four cores
(flanking the rightmost yellow blocks), a large shared cache, and
around 758 million transistors.
Steve Hamm at BusinessWeek has written a new book: The Race for Perfect. As he says on his blog "It’s a
popular history of portable computing and also a narrative of a single,
contemporary product (Lenovo’s X300) as it travels from conception to
the marketplace."
Books that track innovation always get mentioned on this blog.
But here's what else is innovative:
"One of my purposes was to get young people interested in being engineers, designers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. With that goal in mind, I convinced my editors to allow me to publish an unusual excerpt in BusinessWeek magazine: We adapted one of the story lines, the tale of Alan Kay’s seminal role in portable computing, into the manga form. Here’s the manga. I understand that this is the first time a magazine has adapted a book excerpt into a cartoon. So it’s fresh. Help me out with viral distribution and send the link along to friends and colleagues—especially to young people who are just starting out on their careers or still in school."
"If you want a super-light laptop, you have to pay for it, and you have to use Windows. That’s been the (frustrating) conventional wisdom—at least until late last year, when the Taiwanese company Asus rolled out the Eee PC (pronounced as though it were a single long “e”), a two-pound, seven-inch laptop starting at a mere $300. The tradeoff: It comes with just two to eight gigabytes of flash memory instead of a conventional, larger hard drive, and a simplified Linux operating system that essentially is usable only for e-mail, Web browsing and typing.
But then the hackers got hold of it. Within days of the Eee’s release, forums on a fan site, eeeuser.com, were buzzing with homebrew upgrades to remedy its shortcomings—users discovered ways to solder extra memory inside, attach additional gadgets, and install other operating systems. If you’re willing to do a little tinkering, you’ll find that big things will come from its small package."
"The existence of the memristor, short for 'memory resistor', was first suggested in 1971, but only now have researchers succeeded in creating a real, working example. They hope that the new components could revolutionize computing, promising an end to frustrating waits for your computer to boot up."
Photo credit - HP via USAToday
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