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In the spring, Nvidia demonstrated its Tegra chip-based mobile phone prototype to me and pretty much anyone in the media who made a visit to its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters.

Additional comments on two points: One, correction on Moorestown. As a reader pointed out, Intel’s upcoming Moorestown is not a single-chip device. It is still at 2-chip solution. Two, about Tegra: another reader commented that Tegra is based on the ARM11 (shipping in products now), which is “older” than the Cortex-A8 class OMAP products from Texas Instruments.

Images shown on Nvidia Mobile Devices Web page.

And what does Nvidia bring to the table? The master of faster graphics processors wants to apply its chip know-how to juice up the mobile Internet device market and the Windows Mobile interface. After a decade of pumping up PC performance, Nvidia is betting a big part of its future on boosting graphics performance in fit-in-your-pocket mobile Internet devices, or MIDs.

The platform that Nvidia is demonstrating goes far beyond the staid, pin-striped Windows Mobile that is used today. Nvidia has been showing finger-flick-and-roll screens and accelerometer-based reorienting 720p video.

Though the prototype phone (actually a development platform) is quite a bit thicker than a real “thin” phone that a handset provider would bring out at some point, the prototype runs on top of Windows Mobile, as it would presumably in a commercial device.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Nvidia has made it clear that the chip platform was targeted at Windows Mobile–a point that an Nvidia representative reiterated Monday.

Nvidia prototype phone using Tegra APX chip

iPhone-style devices with Nvdia’s Tegra APX (or Tegra 600) incorporate most of the functionality of a PC. And Nvidia is building all of the core electronics that will run a mobile Internet device, not just the graphics component. (This Nvidia Mobile Device page shows the Tegra 600 series and Tegra APX.)

Devices–according to Nvidia’s thinking at least–will also be designed to run 720p HDTV video for 10 hours–one of the marquee features that Nvidia will be emphasizing. The company has demonstrated the prototype Tegra APX-based device plugged into a large screen TV–via a High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) connector–playing high-definition movies with the same fluidity and resolution as you get from a big HDTV box or bigger computer.

But to the user, the biggest difference will be Microsoft’s Mobile Windows interface and what can happen when there’s Nvidia GeForce graphics silicon pushing everything around.

(Credit:
Nvidia)

Updated on November 25 at 11:00 a.m. with correction about Intel Moorestown chip and additional comments at bottom.

Tegra is different from Intel’s Atom processor platform–which is offered as a processor and a separate chipset–because Nvidia integrates everything onto one piece of silicon. This makes it more akin to Texas Instruments’ OMAP processors or Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. (See “Additional Comments” below with corrected statement on Moorestown.)

Rumors of an
iPhone-style Microsoft phone running on Nvidia silicon add heft, in part, to what Nvidia has been talking about since early this year.

(See CNET Reviews video of the phone.)

Nvidia’s goal is to pack as much processing punch as possible into a few-hundred-milliwatt power envelope. Notebook PC processors typically operate in power envelopes between 10 and 35 watts.

Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine lets players square off in Kitchen Stadium and battle through a series of fast-paced and intense culinary challenges. Each victory advances players closer to a final showdown that will determine who will reign supreme as the next Iron Chef America.

I hope the bonus rounds let you battle it out with the real Iron Chefs. Give me Hiroyuki Sakai and Rokusaburo Michiba any day over these Iron Chef America guys. And don’t forget floor reporter Shinichiro Ohta shouting out “Fukui-san!” every few minutes.

Via EaterSF

I’ve written in the past about why the Wii is the ideal platform for video games that have more interaction than those console games that typically only require you to work out your thumbs.

And lest you think that I am all about Wii violence, I like the idea of cooking that lets all us Food Network junkies live out the chef fantasy without having to do any real work.

(Credit: Destineer)

Ready to battle Iron Chef Morimoto?

As a side note I ate at Iron Chef Chen Kenichi’s restaurant in Akasaka about five years ago and the food was unrecognizable (despite claiming to be Chinese), but just think of all the fun gameplay that entails.

Along with over five hundred other applications, Facebook’s
iPhone app made its debut today. The application gives you easy access to your friend’s updates and profiles, along with Facebook Chat and your inbox. Facebook’s app also lets you take and upload photos directly to Facebook.

Facebook has built an extremely slick iPhone application. My first impressions are extremely positive and Facebook has definitely earned a spot on my first page of icons. Its navigation is very fluid and the feature set is complete and easy to use. It was important for Facebook to have an application at launch for the iPhone App Store, with competition coming from a variety of other social networks, MySpace included, so it’s good to see them bring such a solid offering to the table.

Viewing Facebook photos is really great in this app. They have implemented the same “flick” style of navigation that the
iPhone uses and photos flip over to reveal comments. Overall, the UI is pretty intuitive and uses a lot of the same conventions that Apple does. Taking photos and uploading them to Facebook could not be simpler. Just tap the camera icon, take the picture, and tap to upload.

The installed application is a great improvement over the previously released web based version, which does not offer as high a level of functionality or as fluid of an interface. While I was initially skeptical as to the benefits to a standalone Facebook application, as opposed to just using the web based one, features like photo uploading and chat justify its existence.

Facebook's iPhone app gives you access to Facebook Chat.

With the Zypad device, which runs a Linux operating system, one can access a remote host system through integrated wired or wireless interfaces. The unit boasts a special fiberglass-reinforced nylon-magnesium alloy case for maximum durability and minimum weight.

The color VGA 640×480-pixel touch screen, which is resistant to water, dust, is clearly readable in direct sunlight, according to Parvus, the Salt Lake City-based engineering company that makes this marvel. The night vision-compliant feature is optional.

The onboard microphone and speaker are dialed for high noise environments. Diddy, you may need one of these.

Features include “802.11 and Bluetooth/Zigbee interfaces, a GPS receiver, electronic compass, biometric fingerprint sensor, and a tilt- and dead-reckoning system that detects the position of the user’s arm and sets the system to standby mode when the arm is hanging down beside the body.”

With the Zypad WR1100, we’re getting closer to “beam me up,” at least in looks, if not in actual transporter compatibility.

Battery packs and functions can be switched out or expanded with a modular hot- swap.

(Credit:
Parvus)

This bit of bling is a ruggerized wrist-worn personal computer designed for the bush. It contains a high performance CPU with 128MB of flash memory and 256MB of RAM.

Still, Illuminata analyst (and CNET contributor) Gordon Haff believes that Apple is unlikely to plunge back into the server market headlong after successfully pulling off the transition from a computer company to a consumer electronics company. Apple appeared to be serious about the server market when it launched the Xserve earlier this decade, but has spent less and less time extolling the product over the last two or three years, he said.

If Apple wants to continue its strategy of designing and building complete systems, hardware, software, and now chips for iPhone and iPod Touch, it’s going to need someone who can predict the future of chip design and advise Jobs and Apple’s executive team on how Apple can best take advantage of those trends. Papermaster, with a unique set of skills in the tech industry, might be just that guy. “They probably need somebody with an experience set that doesn’t exist at Apple today,” Haff said.

Mark Papermaster, until recently IBM’s vice president of microprocessor technology development, plans to join Apple in early November in a position that will see him working closely with Apple CEO Steve Jobs in what IBM believes is an attempt to expand Apple’s presence in the markets for servers and chips for handheld devices, according to the copy of a lawsuit filed by IBM against Papermaster. IBM is suing Papermaster to prevent him from joining Apple and divulging trade secrets related to IBM’s Power chips and server products, according to the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Apple’s Xserve servers haven’t exactly been a high priority over the last couple of years, as Apple has switched the
Mac to Intel’s processors and rolled out the
iPhone. But a spruced-up Xserve blade server could be a nice complement to the Mac if Apple ever gets serious about tackling the enterprise market.

Apple's decision to hire Mark Papermaster away from IBM could mean that its Xserve lineup is taking on a more prominent role.

Papermaster’s expertise lies with the Power architecture, of which Don Dobberpuhl’s P.A. Semi team is also well-acquainted. The primary role for the Power architecture these days is in gaming consoles–all three major gaming consoles use a chip based on the Power architecture–but that doesn’t necessarily mean Apple has that goal in mind, either.

Updated throughout at 4:55 p.m. PT with additional details and comment from IBM.

One of IBM’s top chip executives has agreed to join Apple as a senior executive, but he might have to fight off his former employer first.

(Credit:
Apple)

In the final reading, Papermaster’s hire might wind up as a partial solution to all those questions over what Apple should do with its pile of cash: give a chunk of it to IBM to make this case go away.

Papermaster’s hire could signal Apple’s intentions to build out a cloud-computing infrastructure to support things like MobileMe, or future services along those lines. Dense-but-powerful blade servers are being eyed by many companies as they build out the data centers of the future, and if Apple ever wants to be a major player in the future of Internet-delivered services, it’s going to need a lot of computing power at its disposal. Papermaster’s expertise in system design–putting together the entire package of processor, chipset, and the rest of the guts that form a computer–could serve him well at a company that prides itself on soup-to-nuts design.

An Apple representative declined to comment on the lawsuit or confirm Papermaster’s pending employment with the company. IBM issued this statement: “Mr. Papermaster’s employment by Apple is a violation of his agreement with IBM against working for a competitor should he leave IBM. We will vigorously pursue this case in court.”

Papermaster has authored several papers on chip development at IBM, which of course used to make PowerPC processors for Apple before the company switched to Intel’s processors in 2005. IBM called Papermaster “IBM’s top expert in Power architecture and technology,” and his most recent position involved managing IBM’s blade server division.

As an extremely well-respected figure in the clubby world of chip design, Papermaster might also be stepping in to lead Apple’s chip design efforts. Apple’s acquisition of P.A. Semi earlier this year showed the company is very serious about chip design. Jobs told The New York Times that P.A. Semi would be used to build chips for the iPhone and
iPod Touch.

It might take a fight in order to bring him on board, however. IBM’s decision to sue Papermaster hearkens back to the dispute between Google and Microsoft over Google’s decision to hire Kai-Fu Lee away from Microsoft to run Google’s research operation in China. The two parties eventually settled out of court.

Noncompete clauses are generally considered worth less than the paper they are printed on in California–Apple’s home state–but different states are more strict. Google and Microsoft fought much of their battle over whether the case would be tried in Washington state or California.

If Papermaster is able to successfully join Apple, he’ll be working closely with Apple CEO Steve Jobs “providing to Apple technical and strategic advice on a variety of issues,” according to IBM’s complaint. But which issues?

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

What makes Naubo interesting is that it uses this same spidering technology for blog chatter as it does for regular news, so like Techmeme you get big stories coupled together with other blogs that have chimed in. The listing of blogs is put together by humans, who maintain the collective. However that doesn’t mean they’re the ones to pick out the stories–that’s done entirely through an automated system.

To go along with these two news trackers is a user-maintained news service called Buzz (not to be confused with Yahoo’s Buzz), that lets users submit and vote stories up and down in an identical fashion to Reddit. The stories are seeded by users just like any other social news service, and the highest ranking stories get promoted to the top of the page and in each of their respective categories a little bit like social news service Mixx. Users of Digg won’t be too enamored with the submission process though, you have to fill in each field manually–including the image that goes with it. In comparison, submitting a story to Digg will crawl the story link you give it and fill in all that information for you.

Look familiar? It should if you've seen Google News. Naubo tracks Web news, blog news, and user-submitted stories in three different places. Seen here is the latest and hottest blog stories (click to enlarge)

I found a lot of overlap between Naubo, Google News, and Techmeme. The one thing that wasn’t getting a lot of play on Naubo is the buzz site. Most stories only had three or four votes before being promoted, so I’d be interested to see how its algorithm scales up with more users. I’m also a little worried about the service getting sued for its design choice, which I assume will get a new coat of paint at the first sign of Google’s legal department.

Web news aggregator Naubo might be one of the unholiest unions I’ve ever seen. It could also be one of the best places for news junkies to get their fix. The service is an unabashed visual copycat of Google News, serving up the latest stories from around the Web. The difference is that it has a technology slant, covering news on big companies like Apple and Microsoft, along with gadgets, Linux, and hardware.

Update: I got a ping from Paul Almeida who runs Naubo. Almeida says the site is getting a new look in two weeks based on user feedback.

One bright spot: Sales of CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) image sensors in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 increased slightly compared with the third quarter and represented 12 percent of the company’s total sales in the fourth quarter, Micron said.

Micron is also in a flash chip manufacturing joint venture with Intel–IM Flash Technologies–that fabricates chips for both Micron’s and Intel’s solid state drive lines, among other products.

Sales of memory products in the fourth quarter decreased 4 percent compared with the third quarter. Sales of DRAM products decreased slightly compared with the preceding quarter, the company said.

Amid the dire market conditions, Micron said it would “diligently work…to ensure the competitiveness and long-term success of the company.”

For NAND flash memory products, sales decreased 10 percent, compared with the prior quarter, due to a 20 percent drop in the average selling price. Micron is a major manufacturer of flash memory and recently launched a line of solid state drives that will reach 256GB in capacity this year.

Micron’s earnings pain will pass directly to executives. Micron Technology attributed a $344 million loss in the fourth quarter to a cratering memory market and said it would slash executives salaries as a result.

This was Micron’s seventh straight quarterly loss. The largest memory chip manufacturer in the U.S. reported a net loss for the entire 2008 fiscal year of $1.6 billion, or $2.10 per diluted share on net sales of $5.8 billion.

Executives will feel the pain. “We are implementing a 20 percent reduction in salary compensation for Micron senior executives,” Steve Appleton, Micron’s CEO, said in a statement. “The global memory market continues to experience severe oversupply and price degradation, and it remains a challenging period for all of us competing in the industry.”

Even with things where the science is today, having help–any help–with the tedious task of tagging photos is welcome. And iPhoto can certainly find plenty of matches in your library, even if it won’t spot them all.

Face time with iPhoto ‘09
CNET News reporter Ina Fried tells editor Leslie Katz how iPhoto ’09’s face recognition fared during a test run.
Download mp3 (2.35MB)

To be fair, iPhoto starts off with what seem like sure matches and then tries to loosen things up a bit to find more matches. Often as one gets to the bottom of the list of suggestions there are more misses than hits.

The software frequently suggested that my contemporary friends and family were actually my 80-something cousin, my 90-something great aunt, or both. iPhoto also confused Bill Gates with our friend’s 3-year-old. And among the suggestions for former CNET colleague Joris Evers was a shot of Wayne Gretzky that I had taken at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.

Memo to iPhoto: Former colleague Joris Evers may be a great guy, but he's not the Great One.

I think I would like the Faces feature better if it were more accurate, but I’m not sure. I certainly hope Apple never gets it too perfect. Then I’d have to find something else to harass my friends about.

Sure, the product does reasonably well at finding your friends and family in your photo collection. Tag a few photos by name and iPhoto comes up with other suggestions, often recognizing photos that are taken years apart and with vastly different looks. Heck, iPhoto even spotted me when I was a different gender.

Images: Fun with iPhoto’s face recognition

The process for tagging photos is somewhat addictive. After confirming a few photos, one can go back to the Faces index page and Apple will come up with more suggestions, seemingly refined by the latest tagging efforts.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News)

AUDIO

My favorite, though, was when iPhoto was trying to find other photos of my friend Rachel and included a picture of a lemur from a zoo in Sweden.

That’s certainly clear when using the “Faces” feature that is built into the recently released iPhoto ‘09.

But no matter how far off iPhoto is, it just takes two clicks to tell iPhoto it’s off base (and one to confirm the photo is indeed who iPhoto predicted).

But the real genius part is how Apple has made the process fun, even when the results aren’t perfect.

Early speech recognition was also hit or miss, but it was painful to have to scream at a computer while it constantly misunderstood what you were trying to say. With face recognition, at least as built into iPhoto, the goofs are what make it fun.

The science behind face recognition is complex and still evolving. In general, face recognition software looks for predictable patterns–characteristics and proportions that stay constant from one photograph to another, things like the distance between the eyes or from the eyes to the mouth.

Face recognition technology isn’t perfect yet.

Less seems to be known about the Nvidia GTX 260 and 280, though a Turkish site is claiming to have all the specifications.

AMD-ATI and Nvidia are preparing for the next graphics chip showdown. And there is already a good deal of information (and rumor) on the two chips due in June.

Tech site tg daily said “that card vendors will start printing their boxes next week, which means that the specifications are final at this time.”

The names of the two upcoming product families have been widely reported: The ATI line is branded as the Radeon HD 4800, while the Nvidia is dubbed the GeForce GTX 200.

VR-Zone has already gotten its hands on some preliminary performance numbers for the HD 4850 and 4870. German-language site Hardware-Infos has posted a table with specifications of the HD 4850 and 4870.

Advanced Micro Devices is expected to launch the HD 4850 (price estimates of graphics boards range between $189 and $219) and then follow with the 4870 (estimates range between $199 and $279). In the fourth quarter, AMD plans to add the dual-chip ATI Radeon 4870 X2.

Nvidia will respond with the high-end GeForce GTX 200 family. Initial products will be the GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280.

Apple may launch most aggressive Black Friday pricing yet–AppleInsider: On a day when the stock market tanked once again on news of shifting priorities in the government’s bailout plan, coupled with pessimistic forecasts from huge retailers like Best Buy, this notion doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. Last year, Apple offered $101 discounts on MacBooks and other discounts on iPods on Black Friday, and Ben Reitzes of UBS thinks similar discounts could be applied more broadly across Apple’s product line on that particular day.

Apple focusing on MobileMe improvements in latest 10.5.6 builds–MacRumors: Everyone’s favorite whipping-boy in the Apple universe–MobileMe–has received a great deal of work in the next update for
Mac OS X Leopard, according to MacRumors. The update will supposedly have improvements to how MobileMe syncs data between MacBooks and the online service, which lets you access contacts, calendars, and other data from any computer.

Apple’s iPhone faces off with the game champs–The Wall Street Journal: Is the “funnest iPod ever” something that should have Nintendo and Sony worried? Steve Jobs certainly thinks so, pointing out in this story (paid registration required) that a quarter of all the applications downloaded from the App Store have been games. The
iPhone and
iPod Touch may not yet be the choice of serious portable gamers, but Sega shared an interesting tidbit on how it views the iPhone: the 500,000 copies of Super Monkey Ball sold through the App Store would be considered a hit if it had sold that many copies of a game for the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP.

The genius behind Steve–Fortune: This actually came out earlier in the week, but Adam Lashinsky’s profile of Apple COO Tim Cook is worth a read if you haven’t checked it out already. There’s not a lot of new ground broken–Cook is the obvious short-term solution if Steve Jobs had to step down as Apple’s leader, since he’s a clear No. 2 and has already run the company once before–but the insights into Cook’s personality and working style make it worth your time if you were ever curious about Apple’s second-in-command.

Here’s a rundown of some of the Apple news making the rounds this Wednesday:

(Credit:
CNET)

Deep one-day discounts on products such as the new MacBook could be coming this Black Friday.