Power of Thought

Nokia wants some of Apple’s rhythm. On July 1 the Finnish mobile-phone maker said that Warner Music Group has agreed to participate in Nokia’s fledgling music service, making Warner the third of the major record labels to join in the effort. The move is one more step in Nokia’s effort to compete against Apple for the people who want to carry around music libraries in their pockets.

Nokia’s service, which will officially launch in the second half of this year, is called Comes With Music. It will be built into certain Nokia handsets and will allow customers to download unlimited amounts of music from participating labels. The downloaded music can be kept on a PC or mobile-phone forever. In theory, a consumer could download every single song from the labels’ catalogs; they’d simply need a very big hard drive on which to store the files. Nokia and its partners have not disclosed pricing for the service, but they believe it has plenty of potential. “We believe this will be a significant contributor of revenue over a long-term basis for Nokia,” says Liz Schimel, global head of music for Nokia.

(Almost) All Aboard
The record labels seem to be buying that argument. Universal Music Group in December signed up with Nokia, and Sony BMG Music Entertainment partnered with the service in April. A spokesperson for EMI Group, the sole major label yet to join, says the company is talking with Nokia, although no deal has been reached. Nokia says it is in talks with independent labels as well.

For the music industry, the Nokia venture represents a departure from the old ways of doing business. Susan Kevorkian, program director of consumer markets at research firm IDC, says there is “broader experimentation” as CD sales decline and music revenues slide overall. For record companies, it may make sense to look for new ways to sell the work of their artists. Ringtones, for example, have become a multibillion-dollar business in only a few years. “We have a long-term sustainable business for Nokia, the music industry, and the artists,” says Schimel.

It’s hard to evaluate the service before pricing and other specifics are known. Nokia remained tight-lipped about the details of Comes With Music as it unveiled the Warner Music partnership. But Apple has said that it makes little money on music sales through its iTunes store, instead generating profits from sales of iPods and other hardware. Will the music business for Nokia and its partners also be of marginal financial benefit? Schimel says such comparisons are off-base. “We feel it is apples and oranges,” she says. “We are offering a structure that will attract new customers and new revenues.”

Will It Pay?
Some analysts are skeptical that Comes With Music will help Nokia attract new customers for its mobile phones. James McQuivey, a principle analyst at Forrester Research says, “There won’t be the same rush to buy Nokia phones” as there is for iPhones. Apple is expected to sell 10 million iPhones by yearend. McQuivey guesses that at most Nokia could sell between 2 million and 4 million handsets in the year following Comes With Music’s launch. The amount of revenue the company earns from downloads will depend on how much Nokia intends to charge consumers. But it is sure to be insignificant at a company that made $10.6 billion last year on sales of $75 billion.

IDC’s Kevorkian sees this as part of a bigger move by Nokia and the music industry. “It is a slim revenue margin, but it makes sense as part of a volume play for Nokia, who is in the midst of transition,” she says. Kevorkian sees Comes With Music as fitting into Nokia’s Ovi service, a broad effort to sell services to mobile-phone users.

Still, McQuivey thinks Nokia and its partners may find few takers for the new music service. He argues that music enthusiasts won’t be satisfied with a phone that’s merely adequate for listening to tunes, while other people won’t be willing to pay money for such music services. He says it’s a lot like digital cameras. Some people use their phone as a digital camera, but people taking lots of photos will generally purchase a separate, higher-quality digital camera. “It’s a mismatch in market opportunity,” says McQuivey.

Read more »

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.

By running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time — compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers — petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter science and engineering, supercomputer experts say. Researchers can ask questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can perform experiments that would previously have been impractical.

“This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who for several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest computers.

Each new supercomputing generation has brought scientists a step closer to faithfully simulating physical reality. It has also produced software and hardware technologies that have rapidly spilled out into the rest of the computer industry for consumer and business products.

Technology is flowing in the opposite direction as well. Consumer-oriented computing began dominating research and development spending on technology shortly after the cold war ended in the late 1980s, and that trend is evident in the design of the world’s fastest computers.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.

“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.”

The innovations flowing from this generation of high-speed computers will most likely result from the way computer scientists manage the complexity of the system’s hardware.

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.

“We’ve proved some skeptics wrong,” said Michael R. Anastasio, a physicist who is director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “This gives us a window into a whole new way of computing. We can look at phenomena we have never seen before.”

Solving that programming problem is important because in just a few years personal computers will have microprocessor chips with dozens or even hundreds of processor cores. The industry is now hunting for new techniques for making use of the new computing power. Some experts, however, are skeptical that the most powerful supercomputers will provide useful examples.

“If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try to convince you the Chevy Malibu you’re driving will benefit from this,” said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is chief scientist of Convey Computer, a start-up firm based in Richardson, Tex.

Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video gamers of the world, he suggested.

Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.

Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception in the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly claimed the title of the world’s fastest by executing more than 35 trillion mathematical calculations per second. Two years later, a supercomputer created by I.B.M. reclaimed the speed record for the United States. The Japanese challenge, however, led Congress and the Bush administration to reinvest in high-performance computing.

“It’s a sign that we are maintaining our position,“ said Peter J. Ungaro, chief executive of Cray, a maker of supercomputers. He noted, however, that “the real competitiveness is based on the discoveries that are based on the machines.”

Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, I.B.M. is already looking toward the next generation of supercomputing. “You do these record-setting things because you know that in the end we will push on to the next generation and the one who is there first will be the leader,” said Nicholas M. Donofrio, an I.B.M. executive vice president.

By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States’ supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.

Read more »

Steve Jobs’ new iPhone, expected to be unveiled Monday, is headed to Japan by the end of the year. But the device’s famed ease of use may actually be a put off in Japan, where consumers want features, not simplicity.

 Indeed, Japanese handsets have become prime examples of feature creep gone mad. In many cases, phones in Japan are far too complex for users to master.

“There are tons of buttons, and different combinations or lengths of time yield different results,’” says Koh Aoki, an engineer who lives in Tokyo.

Experimenting with different key combinations in search of new features is “good for killing time during a long commute,” Aoki says, “but it’s definitely not elegant.”

Japan has long been famous for its advanced cellphones with sci-fi features like location tracking, mobile credit card payment and live TV. These handsets have been the envy of consumers in the United States, where cell technology has trailed an estimated five years or more. But while many phones would do Captain Kirk proud, most of the features are hard to use or not used at all.

“Some people care about quality, but first and foremost it’s about the features,” says Nobi Hayashi, a journalist and author of Steve Jobs: The Greatest Creative Director. He estimates that the average person only uses 5 to 10 percent of the functions available on their handsets.

Japan is a culture of spec sheets. When consumers go to electronics stores to buy a cellphone, they frequently line up the specifications side by side to compare them before deciding which one to buy.

Hayashi owns a Panasonic P905i, a fancy cellphone that doubles as a miniature but crisp 3-inch TV. In addition to 3G and GPS, the device has a 5.1-megapixel camera and motion sensors that enable Wii-style games to be played sitting on the train.

“When I show this to visitors from the U.S, they’re amazed,” Hayashi says. “They think there’s no way anybody would want an iPhone in Japan. But that’s only because I’m setting it up for them so that they can see the cool features.”

In actuality, Hayashi says, the P905i is fatally flawed. The motion sensors are painfully slow, and the novelty of using them is quickly replaced with frustration. And while being able to watch TV anywhere is a spectacular idea, there’s no signal in the subways, and even above ground, the sound cuts out every few seconds.

“There’s nothing more annoying than choppy TV noises,” Hayashi says.

Aoki, who carries two phones, a Sony W44S and an iPhone for accessing the web, has only a vague idea of all the things the Sony cellphone is capable of doing. “Every once in a while, you find an incredible function via the complicated menu,” he says.

The manufacturers, who realize the absurdity of piling on features that don’t work well, are caught in a vicious cycle of materialistic consumers who always want the newest high-tech handsets, and carriers that have complete control over what products and services are provided to their customers.

“The most important thing for us is to provide our end users with a unique user experience through our products,” says Toshi Kawamura, a spokesman for Sony Ericsson Japan.

They’re also at the mercy of the all-powerful carriers, like NTT DoCoMo — the company that created the localized 3G network that makes Japanese handsets virtually obsolete in the rest of the world — who get to decide what applications and functions are compatible with their networks.

“The flashy little functions are cool, but they’re carrier-specific,” Hayashi says. “Once you take this out of Japan, it’s just a piece of metal.” Japanese companies only make 5 percent of global mobile phone sales, and all of those sales are domestic.

Neat-looking gadgets are also a core aspect of one’s identity. Daiji Hirata, chief financial officer of News2u Corporation and creator of Japan’s first wireless LAN, admits to changing handsets more often than is probably necessary.

“Cellphones are always part of any conversation,” he says. “People are always using them and holding them, even in the middle of a meal, so they might not think you’re hip if you’re carrying an old one.”

However, it’s unclear whether Japanese consumers will ditch their complicated cellphones for Apple’s easy-to-use iPhone, which will be sold in Japan by SoftBank by the end of the year.

A survey conducted by Japan Railways showed that just more than half of those polled were interested in buying the iPhone, but that less than one-fifth really knew what the iPhone was.

“It doesn’t have 3G, the camera is only 2 megapixels, and it lacks fun little features like mobile wallet functions and an LED flashlight,” Hayashi says. “It may sell modestly as a smart phone or as an upgraded iPod, but it’s not quite cutting it as a competitor in our mobile-based culture.”

Read more »

“Hold the line!” That’s the new rallying cry for the core Windows development team. Add new features. Tweak existing ones. But whatever you do, don’t make Windows 7 any slower or fatter than Vista.

I have little doubt those are the marching orders for Windows 7, given the tight release timeframe of 18 to 24 months plus various reports of early Milestone builds. More ambitious changes would risk another — and potentially fatal — Longhorn-style delay. Windows 7 will be exactly what the internal Microsoft working title conveys: the seventh (actually fifth) generation of the Windows NT code base — the same code base that forms the basis of Windows XP and Vista today.

Shocking? Only if you’re one of the deluded Save XP die-hards who bought into the whole Windows 7 uber alles mystique. For these lost souls, the next Windows is more than just another version. It’s a true panacea, a conduit through which they can pour all of their anti-Vista angst. Don’t like UAC? Windows 7 will fix that. Frustrated by Vista’s sluggish performance? Windows 7 will run circles around it.

Reality check: Windows 7 will be a lot like Vista. In fact, it’ll be more like an extensive Service Pack (think Windows XP SP2 and/or the various NT Option Packs of yore) than a major new release. Big ideas and big new features are what got Microsoft into the whole “Longhorn reset” mess in the first place.

This is actually a good thing. Despite the criticisms leveled against it (including more than one heated diatribe by yours truly), Vista isn’t really flawed in any fundamental way. Yes, it’s slower than XP — but that was to be expected given its more complex code paths. Likewise, the “girth” issues were somewhat inevitable. Meanwhile, the hardware base is slowly catching up to where it needs to be to support a more complex Windows OS.

I’d even go so far as to say that, if Vista were launched today –- with the SP1 tweaks and improved device driver ecosystem in place -– it would fare a lot better than it did. But hindsight is 20/20. The future, in the form of Windows 7, is all about shipping an incremental follow-on to Vista that shores up the NT code base once and for all.

The good news is that this also makes speculating about the next version’s runtime behavior a lot easier. After all, if Windows 7 is just Windows Vista with some performance and usability tweaks, it means we can deduce a lot about the product’s system requirements and compatibility with the installed base by examining performance and usage data collected from systems running its immediate predecessors, Windows “5″ (also known as XP) and “6″ (also known as Vista).

Peering into the future with Windows Sentinel
Enter the Windows Sentinel project. With nearly 2,000 contributing systems, the exo.repository –- which is the heart of Windows Sentinel –- provides us with a representative sample of Windows-based systems running a mixture of versions (XP, 2003, 2008, Vista) and workloads (business productivity, analytics, home/personal).

Basically, we have our finger on the pulse of the Windows landscape. And by measuring that pulse, plus a few other metrics (and some educated guessing), we can tell a lot about how Windows 7 will be received when it ships.

For example, we can tell right now that roughly 29 percent of current systems will be able to run Windows 7, although not always with adequate performance.

This conclusion is based on an analysis of system disclosure data (CPU type/count/speed, memory size) as well as performance indices calculated from runtime data collected over a one-month period. Of the remaining systems, 60 percent have too little memory (less than 2GB) to reasonably host a Vista successor, while 29 percent don’t have the CPU horsepower (less than 2GHz).

We can further break down the “survivors” by analyzing their current workloads. A full 36 percent of them are already CPU bound, with 27 percent of them heavily overloaded. This is per the exo.repository’s Peak CPU Saturation Index, which is a compound index derived from 4 contributing factors: Processor Queue Length; Per-process Instant Delay (a custom CPU metric derived from the Processor Queue value); Per-Process Cumulative Delay (another custom metric); and Event Duration.

Interestingly, of the systems that are most heavily burdened, only 31 percent are running Vista (which is not really surprising since Vista makes up just 16 percent of the overall sample set). The rest are running a mixture of XP and Server 2003/XP-64-bit.

Needless to say, a heavily loaded (in terms of CPU saturation) XP box doesn’t bode well for Vista’s successor. Like Vista, Windows 7 will introduce a much higher CPU burden in the form of additional background services and their corresponding execution threads. Currently, this ratio runs approximately two to one in favor of Vista: A Vista-based PC must juggle roughly twice as many concurrent execution threads as an XP PC while running the identical office productivity workload.

Chances are good that Windows 7 will, at minimum, maintain the status quo in terms of resource requirements. This, in turn, means that customers who were hoping for some relief with Windows 7 will be sorely disappointed. It’s simply not realistic to expect Microsoft to produce a “leaner” OS and yet still add enough functionality to make it worth upgrading. At best, we might see a new version with a resource footprint similar to Windows Vista, which still places it out of reach of more than three-quarters of the systems in our sample set.

Bottom line: Less than 20 percent of the installed base is ready to migrate to Windows 7 today based on all of the factors detailed above. By far, the biggest (60 percent of the base) inhibitor is limited RAM: Like Vista, Windows 7 will have a voracious appetite for memory. Today, 2GB is the bare minimum for reasonable Vista performance. Expect 4GB to be the norm by the time Windows 7 ships. Likewise, the days of the single-core CPU are over. Dual cores are a must, while quad cores are rapidly transitioning from luxury to mainstream necessity.

Fortunately for Microsoft, it has time –- and Moore’s indefatigable Law –- on its side. Assuming Microsoft does indeed “hold the line” on code path expansion and keep Windows 7’s requirements within striking distance of Windows Vista, it can launch virtually anything and still have a winner. Just don’t expect to boot it on that old Pentium III box you stumbled across in your basement.

Read more »

It’s no secret that Apple Inc. has been on a hardware tear. In the last year alone, there has been a flurry of developments: The company branched into the mobile phone arena with the iPhone. It reinvented the mp3 player with the introduction of the iPod Touch. It worked its way into living rooms with an updated Apple TV.

But Apple is now exploring another hardware technology that has the potential to realign a multibillion dollar industry.

Apple has once again got an itch for gaming.

This isn’t necessarily a new frontier. Fans of the Cupertino-based company may recall how a Steve Jobs-less Apple entered the console gaming fray in 1996 with the troubled Pippin. At best, the Pippin ended up being a costly lesson. At worst, it served as a stinging footnote to the company’s strained relationship with gamers.

Fast forward to the present — the company has enjoyed a string of hardware and software hits and has disrupted the music and mobile phone industries soon after entering them. Today’s Apple certainly has the means to release another console, but let’s face it — a rehashed Pippin would be a huge gamble, considering the established relationships and competition represented by Sony’s PlayStation3, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and the Nintendo Wii.

This doesn’t mean that Apple has abandoned ways to break into the gaming market with its desktop hardware. A beefed-up iMac offers an interesting possibility. Adding horsepower to the iMac line isn’t exactly new for Cupertino, but with an overclocked Intel CPU and an nVIDIA 8800M GTS under the hood, the new iMac could easily pass for a leading gaming rig — at least, if there were more developers creating games designed to run on it and OS X.

It seems much more likely that Jobs and Co. may be following a different path to gaming success — domination of the mobile gaming market.

A trademark extension filed last February with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is one of the strategy’s biggest tells. The filing extends Apple’s trademark in regards to:

“Toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games.”

Skeptics could easily dismiss this as Apple casting a wide net for future expansion, but a swift call to action seems more likely. Not only are executives well aware of the strong interest in gaming among Mac users (and vendors), but also new conditions exist for gaming to be pushed to the forefront in the Apple hardware and software ecosystem. The faltering company behind the Pippin now dominates several hardware segments, which makes a huge difference in launching a new (and potentially related) product. The problems that the Pippin faced – such as the development and marketing costs associated with an unproven device – would be negated by a gaming platform tied into Apple’s market-dominating and innovative mobile devices.

And here’s the really sneaky part – the iPod Touch and the iPhone are already fully capable of playing games. Apple highlighted this home-court advantage with the recent release of the SDK for the iPhone/iPod Touch. By doing so, Apple let a community of eager third-party developers tackle designing games like “Spore” as well as casual games for its devices that utilize innovative features such as the multitouch screen and motion-sensing accelerometer. Along with all of the development tools necessary for building applications, developers will have the ability to upload and sell their creations through the iPhone App store (naturally, Apple will take a cut).

Consumers are already ga-ga over Apple’s mobile devices to begin with, so whether they should be re-imagined as gaming gadgets is more of a marketing issue. But with the developer community in a tizzy to create the next great Apple-friendly game, it’s only a matter of time before Cupertino announces that it’s ready to connect the dots. Don’t be too surprised if it ends up being Steve’s “one more thing” at next year’s Macworld.

Read more »