Another year, another Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. This year we saw new OLED TV's, Ultrabooks and Windows tablets. Also Microsoft gave their final (slightly odd) keynote presentation, where they (like normal) reviewed the previous years momentum and outlined the "exciting" year ahead.
Being a one man blog it is impossible for me to highlight all the amazing announcements at CES, however thankfully the guys over at The Verge have us covered. I suggest you check out their CES Hub, which includes all the latest news, exclusive interviews and videos from the show floor.
It looks like it was a great event, maybe one day I'll have the opportunity to join in person!
Earlier this month the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) took place in Las Vegas. This event is one of the highlights of the technology year, where all the major players (except Apple) show off their latest and greatest tech. Being a one man blog it's difficult for me to cover all the announcements at CES, so instead I've picked a few of my favourites.
Google Android 3.0 Honeycomb
Since the release of the iPad, the tech industry has been waiting for Google to put their cards on the table. Finally at CES they released a sneak peak of their new "tablet friendly" Android operating system, codenamed Honeycomb.
The video looks great and Google have emphasised that Android 3.0 has been designed from the ground up for devices with larger screens, such as tablets. The main focus seems to have been refining the user experience, specifically with the new "3D styled" user interface, improved multi-tasking and notifications, as well as a dramatically redesigned widget system.
Having spent some decent time with the Samsung Galaxy Tab (running Android 2.2) it is clear to me that Honeycomb can't come too soon. The Tab has proven to me that taking a smartphone operating system and simply blowing it up for a tablet results in a poor user experience, especially when compared to the iPad. Unfortunately Google have been as cryptic as always with their Android release schedule, although the current rumours suggest that Honeycomb might launch in the next few months. This is great news as we have already seen a number of big players (Samsung and Motorola) express their interest in releasing Honeycomb specific hardware.
Microsoft Windows - ARM Edition
Since the launch of the modern day smartphone the British technology company ARM Holdings has become a major player in processor marketplace. The ARM architecture is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) and it's the relative simplicity of ARM processor design, that makes it the perfect choice for low power applications (such as mobile devices).
Another key strength of the ARM architecture is that it is licensable, which means that other hardware manufacturers can use ARM technology in their chip designs. This has resulted in ARM processors being used in the majority of the world's best selling and most powerful mobile devices, such as the Apple iPhone and iPad, Google Nexus One and Nexus S, Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Palm Pre.
So with the recent boom in ARM products and the continued focus on mobile devices within IT, it's no wonder that Microsoft feel under threat. Their flagship product Windows is based on the x86 architecture provided by Intel and AMD, however neither of these companies have been able to produce a mobile chip that matches the performance to power consumption ratio of ARM. For example there are many ARM based mobile products available that have a day's worth of battery life and can easily drive true 1080p video, while Intel's Atom chips struggle to achieve even 720p playback for more then a couple of hours. As a result Microsoft have found themselves in a difficult position when trying to complete in the mobile space and have had only marginal success with Windows based tablets.
Therefore it came as no surprise to me that Steve Ballmer announced during the Microsoft CES keynote that future versions of Windows (presumably Windows 8) will have support for both the x86 and ARM architecture. They even demonstrated a version of Windows 7 and Office 2010 running on an ARM processor. This is actually a very big deal, as porting any software to a new platform is a massive task, especially something as complex as Windows. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft engage the developer community, as they don't intend to deliver any form of emulation layer between x86 and ARM, which means developers will need to port all their applications to run on the new platform.
The final thing worth mentioning here is that although the ARM architecture has historically been used in the mobile space, there is no reason why it can't be used for standard desktop computing as well. In fact RISC CPU design is being used by IBM for their supercomputer tasks and other big hardware manufacturers have hinted that they will release a desktop variant of the ARM processor (see NVIDIA "Project Denver" below), which could offer real competition to Intel and AMD.
Personally I can't wait to see the outcome of this approaching battle and it is interesting to watch the big software vendors, such as Microsoft, attempt to position their products so that they end up on the winning team.
NVIDIA - Return of the King
At CES NVIDIA came back in force. Firstly the ongoing litigation regarding a series of patent infringements between Intel and NVIDIA finally reached a long-term cross-license agreement, with Intel paying NVIDIA $1.5 billion over five years. On the surface both companies seem pleased with the outcome as the agreement allows the two companies to share specific technologies, such as NVIDIA GPU's for use by Intel. Intel's senior vice president Doug Melamed had the following to say on the matter "It enables the companies to focus their efforts on innovation and the development of new, innovative products."
The second major success for NVIDIA was the number of Tegra 2 powered devices that were on show. I have spoken in depth about the strength of the Tegra 2 architecture in the past, however it has taken a long time for them to reach the market. It looks like this is about to change, with the majority of next generation Android (Honeycomb) tablets being based on the platform, with demonstrations from Motorola, Dell, T-Mobile, Acer, ASUS and Toshiba. The video below shows the new Tegra 2 Motorola Xoom in action:
The final and arguably most exciting news announced at CES is "Project Denver". As hinted about above, this initiative features an NVIDIA CPU running the ARM instruction set, which will be fully integrated on the same chip as an NVIDIA GPU. The hope is that combining a high-performance ARM based CPU with a standard instruction set will run the serial parts of applications, while a highly-parallel, highly-efficient GPU will run the parallel portions of programs. NVIDIA believes this will result in a highly capable processor, that will offer developers an alternative to the inefficiency of the x86 architecture.
This is clearly a bold claim from NVIDIA, especially considering the desktop processor market has historically been dominated by the x86 architecture, used by Intel and AMD. However competition is always a good thing and a new architecture which has strengths in different areas could be the radical shake up the market needs, pushing Intel and AMD to continue rapid innovation.
One thing is for sure, with the announcement from Microsoft regarding an ARM version of Windows and "Project Denver" from NVIDIA, it has certainly been an interesting CES, one that I think could be setting the stage for the future of personal computing.
Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 10:00PM | 
Another year, another Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. This year we saw new OLED TV's, Ultrabooks and Windows tablets. Also Microsoft gave their final (slightly odd) keynote presentation, where they (like normal) reviewed the previous years momentum and outlined the "exciting" year ahead.