ARM takeover by Apple? Rubbish

The speculation about ARM being taken over by Apple is unfounded. ARM's business model runs contrary to everything Apple stands for. Apple are a closed, secretive, paranoid business intent on guarding every aspect of every product. ARM has an open, partner driven business of supplying intellectual property to the whole of the electronics industry. If Apple bought ARM and kept them entirely to themselves, they would be stripping the entire electronics industry of the only standardised supplier of IP, leaving the army of ARM partners and customers completely in the lurch, without any further prospect of plugging their roadmaps in future. This would have the consequence of leaving Intel as the only architecture left inside the marketplace. Other niche suppliers such as MIPS would then be the only companies left in the silicon IP business, each of whom do not have anywhere near the level of ecosystem that ARM has to fight off the insurgence of Intel. This takeover would devalue the price paid for ARM to such an extent that the acquisition alone would be suicidal for both Apple and ARM.

Pure rubbish, espoused by people in the city who don't have a clue about ARM, or what a poor fit it would be for Apple.

iPad - all the hall marks of hummingbird

Apple today announced the iPad - their slick looking tablet computer. It is based around an ARM architecture processor, but in a chip package designed by their semiconductor team from P.A. Semi. Their role has undoubtedly been vast in the creation of the chip (called the Apple A4 chip), taking on various technologies and combining them together into one SoC.

Their semiconductor manufacturing partner is Samsung, and a recent announcement from Samsung regarding a custom implementation of the Cortex-A8 processor using Intrinsity's Fast14 domino logic seems the prime target for the processor in the iPad.

With Apple's investment in Imagination Technologies, Apple will have one of the latest PowerVR SGX cores sitting nicely alongside the Cortex-A8. This pairing - alongside possible video engines, and other features like high performance memory controllers etc., make the SoC design undertaken by Apple thoughtful, but not mind-blowing. Their use of a domino logic implementation  for the A8 macrocell is the key to the speed uplift, and the low power usage even at just 1V. But there is no mystical P.A. Semi designed custom ARM CPU implementation in there right now. They've merely added the necessary tweaks to get what they already use in the iPhone running as fast as it can possibly go without burning a hole in your purse.

Where Apple seem to be best at differentiating themselves is in the software, though. That thing looks slick, and I can't wait to get a play around with it! The browser and maps look flawless, indicating a very good level of performance in the adapted iphone OS. And their graphics drivers will have to be a step up from what is required for iPhone, given the extra clarity in the display.

I didn't like the name, and I didn't originally like the concept, but Apple stuff is always so beautiful, and it always just works. I now look forward to its arrival here in the UK.

The fact that it doesn't have Intel anywhere near the thing also makes me glad.

Crisis Mapping - the power to help

The most inspiring stories of human fortitude and courage have been trickling out of the aftermath of Haiti's devastation, and I can't help the welling sense in my heart that I need to do something to help.I could give my money, but this just feels so pitiful. I know the DEC (Disasters Emergence Committee), and other groups like it, are undoubtedly the best-placed when it comes to the logistical nightmare of accumulating donations, and airlifting essential supplies to those in most desperate need of the most basic care. £50 could pay for a kit to help treat the wounds of 25 people. But it just seems like so little, when compared to wanting to save everyone, and restore their lives to how they were before this cataclysm.

So it is with great hope that I read about the efforts being put in by groups like the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) to provide communications equipment that can be deployed in a disaster to restore the essential links necessary to share information between agencies on the ground. I was also relieved to hear of the quirk of Haitian ISPs (Internet Service Providers), which sees the vast majority of them routing their internet service over robust - but slower - satellite links, rather than over the single - damaged - under-sea fibre optic cable that the country installed in the 90s.

As such, the little known activity - not quite discipline - of crisis mapping has been able to flourish, allowing for the visibility of many pieces of vital information related to everything from infrastructural damage, to the whereabouts of people - to be shared. When combined with the powerful routing capabilities of online mapping systems, great things start to happen. An agency can see where roads are impassible and route their convoys around those obstacles. They can query live information about hospital capacities in outlying cities, and find routes for ambulances to take the injured for treatment. A map of damaged buildings can help target temporary shelters at a particularly ruined area.

With this information being input by volunteers on the ground, the visibility of so many important parameters in the chaos of disaster relief increases in proportion to the number of volunteers there are to maintain that information. And so it shall be that I plan to "bone-up" on crisis mapping as a way to possibly help in future disasters. There's a great little site here about it.

in essence there are two types of information that maps (and other related information systems) will carry - static data, and dynamic data.

The static data relates to the status of infrastructural elements, such as the impassible roads. Once a road becomes impassible, it will remain that way until someone sorts out a clearance operation. It then enters the realm of dynamic information later on, for the recording of the atomic change in state from impassible to open, but then it settles back as static information.

The dynamic information is harder to track, and involves the semi-liquid movement of supplies, people  and relief workers. It involves the tracking of empty beds in hospitals, the location of vital assets such as earth moving equipment, and the list of living (and dead) residents of a particular encampment. Such systems are less accurate, and the ephemeral nature of their data often means these systems are under-developed, and are sometimes bespoke for that particular disaster. They tend to address local needs, and are often based on the pre-existing systems of the local infrastructure, and of the relief agencies themselves. A lot of the effort here is dedicated to integrating the various systems together, and providing shared portals to aggregate information from different sources.

This blog is about novel uses for technology. Although mapping is not that novel, the technology that can show where would be a good place to eat out is also the best at showing usthe way through the most destructive of crises.

Testing email posting

This is my first email post, and I just thought I should say happy Christmas to any readers out there!

Portable technology I didn't know existed

I am typing this on a Nokia N770 Tablet in my Kitchen. The device is connected by Wifi to my home network, and the keyboard I am using is an iGo Stowaway I bought on ebay for 39 pounds sterling. You'll notice I didn't use a pound sign - that's a flaw I currently have with my techno setup. However, I digress into the world of needing keyboard drivers another time.

This keyboard connects to the tablet via bluetooth, and provides me with a complete touch typing experience on a 4" handheld device.

Speedwise, the N770 has what would be considered a paltry 250MHz ARM926 processor. The thing that will amaze and shock all of you techno-petrol heads is that the experience of surfing the web and typing on this is comparable to doing the same on any other device I own with a keyboard. The experience is certainly superior in almost every way to that which I have typing on my Psion Series 5. It is a somewhat hunched experience, having to get in close to what is quite a high resolution screen for such a small size - proportionally, I think the pixels are smaller on this screen than on any computer monitor, making it harder to see what one is writing.

I have found that adding a 1GB RS-MMC card to the tablet affords me the luxury of doubling the amount of memmory the device has to 128MB. This means more applications can be opened and swapped onto the memory card.

Overall, I am able to do most of things I can on any other computer, and I can fit both keyboard and tablet into a coat pocket with room to spare.

Next time, I will talk about my experiences with the Samsung ST1000 GPS/Wifi/Bluetooth touch screen, gesture driven all singing all dancing camera.

some thoughts on the dual nature of the universe

For most of our waking times, we look at the world around us and see nothing but the usual “this and that”. To ask someone if they truly understood the world around them would be met with strange looks. But do we really know anything about this world? Do we know enough to really be able to say that the principles which govern its mechanics will truly be tied up in one neat formula?

The concept of duality – a paradigm particularly revered by the Egyptians – underpins our very existence to the extent that we cannot perceive it. It is a factor so deeply engrained in the fabric of the universe that, were we to actually be granted an understanding of it, we would not be able to handle its true power. I do not profess to understand duality or its depth. My writings here are a simple mind piece to exercise the brain.

Duality is the natural need for all things to have an opposite. It could be argued that, without an opposite, some things would be imperceptible, and others would run amok. It could also be argued that, were some things not to have an opposite, that our ability to perceive the world around us would indeed have evolved differently to compensate for the absence. Can it be said that the world around us presents the epitome of perfectly balanced opposition?

Take, as an example, the simple duality of night and day. If night were not to exist, and we were to live only in daytime, our ability to perceive time and to carry out our sleep cycles would be governed by very different processes to how they are today. All life would be affected, plants would suffer an over abundance of sunshine and people would be forced to spend half the day away from the blazing heat. The global environment would probably be different, where more sunshine would create more clouds, which in turn would block more sunshine, balancing out the temperatures somewhat. In this world governed completely by day, what if we were then told the concept of a night, and what it could mean for us, having never had an inkling of such a concept? Would we then be better off, at this later stage of evolution, to have night thrust upon us? Would we find it as hard to perceive night as we would today to perceive a world with either night or day missing?

In order for some things to come into being, they must first reside in space either in a state of opposition to itself or as a pre-formed consequence of opposite forces. Take the example of a book to be written by an author. In order for that book to come into being, the author must oppose the “force” willed upon him by the blank writing medium, and by his own writers block and gaps in his creativity. I know it may seem strange talking of a piece of paper as having a “force” opposing a writer, but this is true. Opposition, in all of its guises comes down to one thing – the need to expend energy and effort in changing a void into an act of creation. It’s a simple fact that I cannot get from here into town without opposing the separation of me from the town. It is a fact that I cannot go out with a girl if there is hatred getting in the way. A snooker player cannot win a match unless he knows how to play snooker.

Anything that requires practice and hard work lie within the realm of opposition forces. War does not happen without opposing sides. Reproduction doesn’t happen without a man and a woman.

An understanding of the force of opposition can be a very useful thing. It is a belief of mine that the Egyptians and other ancient cultures had an understanding of this force, and used that understanding to build temples and run their great civilisations. From a simple engineering point of view, there is no adequate explanation of how the Egyptians built the Valley Temple at the end of the Sphinx causeway – containing multi-hundred ton blocks of limestone, hewn very accurately and hoisted foot decades into the air. Slave labour is not an adequate means of explaining this feat. Where are the pulley systems strong enough to lift the blocks? How did they organise the thousands of men required, and how did they order and attach the ropes? The same goes for the fallacy of using ramps to build the pyramids. In order to build the limestone and granite pyramids with ramps, up which the blocks were dragged, the ramps themselves would have had to be made out of a material AT LEAST as strong as the blocks that were being dragged up it. The reality is, however, that the ramp would have been several times bigger than the pyramid they were building. For a pyramid of height ~800feet, with a light incline of 15 degrees on the stone ramp, this would necessitate a ramp of length 2985 feet. So what – wouldn’t they need a ramp to build the ramp? A sand ramp would be decimated by the stone blocks, whether carpeted on top with wood burgs or not. Yet somehow the Egyptians opposed this force hampering the creation of their legacy, and conquered it. How, I do not know. Since everything has an opposite, they obviously found it and used it to build their great structure.

When parallel worlds collide

As ARM and Intel continue to collide in the mobile computing industry, a very significant step forward has been made by the ARM camp.

ARM announced recently the availability of Osprey, which is a hard macrocell of a dual core Cortex-A9 processor customised for production on TSMCs 40G process. Furthermore, this is open for licensing today, and can be integrated into any System On Chip that a customer wishes to create.

This contrasts highly with the approach taken by Intel. For production of an Atom Soc, Intel has decided to create an archaic 2-chip package, whereby chip 1 (called Lincroft) will house all of the graphics, the CPU and an integrated memory controller and chip 2 (called Langwell) will house all of the IO capability (disk controllers, and however else that is defined). Finally, and if you want to build something with bluetooth, wifi or 3G connectivity then you need yet a third chip, which is called Evans Peak. The key thing here is to notice that as portability goes up, so too does the number of functional packages (Lincroft, Langwell and Evans Peak will be required to make a decent smartphone, only Lincroft and Langwell required to make a larger MID device). This, in the arena of any portability centric device industry, is absurd. The second thing to note is that a device manufacturer is not able to choose what graphics, or which CPU, they have from the intel line-up - whatever Intel says, goes. The only differentiation being given is in the IO Hub (Langwell) to a small degree.

However, the real difference that Intel now faces from the ARM camp is that ARM now have a high performance macrocell of a dual core CPU that outperforms any Atom in a lesser power envelope, that individual companies can take and integrate as they please with whatever IP they fancy, in whatever package they wish. The real trick up the customer's sleeve is that the place and route and floorplanning of the macrocell has already been done by ARM for the customer - all they have to do is take that box and integrate it into their system, and concentrate their efforts on everything else, without having to worry about hitting frequency goals in the processor as well.

Intel's arguement that the mobile industry is fragmented is the main one given for not allowing differentiation w.r.t. the Atom platform. They effectively want to do the same thing in the mobile industry that was done to the PC industry, and create an innovation-stifling set of standards so that system integrators can start differentiating on..... oh, wait, they can't differentiate. A standard foisted on the community that is so restrictive will lead business to only one door - Intel.

The mobile industry has operated under its own steam for years, and has been influenced by very different socio-economic factors to those that drove the standardisation of the PC Industry. Fashion, entertainment and most of all extreme portability are the key-factors driving the industry. And in parallel, standards that enable that to fluorish have emerged. Bluetooth addresses the issues surrounding sharing information in-situ with another person; Wifi addresses the need to connect to the internet in an unfamiliar setting where there may not be a cable that fits your device; 3G is the all encompassing protocol that carries both voice and broadband through the towers of the company that contracted out the device on a payment plan.

Each of the aforementioned standards don't relate in any way to a straight-jacket on how a system can be built nowadays. In fact, companies seek to innovate the way that these standards are integrated into their platforms. And companies have sprung up that create IP for each of these standards in licensable form, with tools that allow system integrators to integrate those standards seemlessly into their systems. A whole architecture of system integration components exists that become more optimal for portability with each passing generation, and introducing a standard integrated platform mastered by only one company will cripple the fantastic work undertaken in these areas by numbers of people across the industry that far exceed the numbers of people employed by any one company.

So it is two very different worlds colliding. One takes a hands off approach, leading to explosive levels of innovation that can only be achieved by such an open model; and the other is driven entirely by the mechanics of domination, to achieve a controlled mono-culture where only those admitted to the party can prosper.

We've seen what happens in the latter case before, and it leads to some decidedly megalomaniacal business practices in order to hang on to your precarious position.

My opinion is that the latter world cannot continue to prosper, and as ARM moves upwards into the higher performance computing envelopes, people will get sick and tired of the strangulation being caused by Intel, and no amount of strongARM (pun intended) tactics will be able to outweigh the power that open innovation models have in getting their foot in the door of new and exciting industries.