- The G-phone is cheaper to build than the iPhone.
- Why is IBM antsy over Apple taking one of its key people? Is Apple planning to design its own processor? Some think so.
- More and more stories appear about the headset magnets and pacemakers.
- Cray Supercomputer to hit 1.3 petaflops.
- 25 year anniversary of Windows.
- Nortel stock goes into the tank.
Right click here and select ‘Save Link As…’ to download the mp3 file.
It’s never a slow day when you’re around, John. 🙂
Actually, there is BIG news.
Bush has confessed he is a dumb ass and announced he will write a book to tell us all about it.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/11/bush.post.presidency/index.html
That is very significant considering he is known for never to regret anything. I suppose when he met Obama yesterday at the whitehouse, Obama showed him what a real leader looks like.
I think the odds are good that Apple wants to develop its own mobile chip set. Intel wants too much for the Atom, and what Apple can get out of existing ARM manufacturers is limited.
I highly doubt Apple wants to make their own desktop/laptop chip set, however, because they’ll never be able to get costs down against Intel’s volume.
#2 – Liberals still angry? Just because you have no faith in the Great Black Hope is no reason to get pissy.
Sigh, Family Guy never ceases to crack me up.
I agree with James. I’m also hearing that Apple wants to build their own iPhone/iPod chips and stick with Intel on the desktop/laptop.
The dry ice story was the most interesting story of the day. You should do more of those.
Sure Apple bought PASemi. A dual core PPC maker. That was a low power design. About 3 or so years ago, Apple jettisoned its in house chip group so by buying PASemi they got a twofer. A cynic might say they exited the in house chip biz too soon. Some of those chip guys are enjoying the pleasures of the Palm these days (Rubenstein).
We will see. Building chips is hard+expensive work. ARM today gets $0.25 license per core. They would also save on the cost of the ASIC typ $30asp’s for controllers, assuming a dual core PPC prob costs $5-10 to make, could be a good saving. So I think it makes business sense for AAPL but the PA guys need to execute really well. Last place you want to be is debugging power save issues on a dual core processor when Samsung et al figured that out a loooooong time ago. (potential for lost opportunity costs).
Yup morbo. You and JCD both think this is a rotten idea and you’re both right.
When did IBM ever design its own processor? I thought they only came up with the BIOS chip. And used all off-the-shelf components to make their early PCs. I mean, are we talking microcomputers or mainframes? What processor chip(s) does IBM make? Between AMD and Intel, I doubt that anyone else is going to do better. Motorola gave up a few years ago. What Apple should to is design a rom based Kernal of its OS. So it can’t be easily hacked as Windows can. And it would load like, INSTANTLY!
It seems to me history might be repeating itself in Cray’s supercomputer design. Way back when, the earliest computers had thousands of vacuum tubes wired into them. And some guy had to go around replacing the ones that burned out, with a shopping cart full of them, while it was running. So I wonder if Cray also has this thing designed to have hot swappable Opterons? How are they going to sink off that much heat?! Will it need to be immersed in non-conductive coolant? Imagine just replacing nuclear power plants with these mega-processor cores, that can spin turbines with their waste heat. You could get double duty from these things. And they have to do is marry fissionable elements with semiconductor materials, and it would be self-powered. And probably smart enough to keep itself from melting down.
Wait, im missing something. Does Nortel do something more than make expensive office phones?
It’s about time they tried the Cell processor.
Hell you can use it for the GPU stuff too.
The 25th anniversary of Windows? Gee, what was I using 25 years ago? It was in color, and generated stereo sound, and formatted a micro floppy at 880Kbytes. No, it wasn’t Microsoft Windows. It was Commodore Amiga’s DOS1.1, with a great little GUI. After Microsoft contracted with Commodore to do its BASIC for that platform. Microsoft too had a color, two button GUI. But as the names “Desktop” and “Workbench” were trademarked by Apple and Commodore. Microsoft had to call its product Windows. Which never really made any sense to me. Are you supposed to be looking at something in front of a window, or behind a window? Does the glass protect stuff, or get in the way? The metaphor just doesn’t work for me. But then many of Microsoft product names are that way. It was months before I understood that “Outlook” was for email. I thought it was some kind of mental health program. And then there was “Excel”, which doesn’t mean “Ex Cell”, as in erase cells of a spreadsheet. But make lots more cells. That makes about as much sense as the “Start” menu being where you go to shut down the PC.
the iPhone secret …
http://deontic-l.blogspot.com/2008/05/iphone-secret.html
#9 GregA
Yup, Nortel makes all kinds of telephone gear. Swithches (PBX’s) and other digital communications equipment.
At one point Nortel was the biggest outfit on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Belive it or not, it traded at over $240 !!
Lots of folks and pension funds lost a ton when Nortel’s shares tanked under the weight of an accounting scandal.
Ah, good times.
Cheers,
/T.