Custom PC, Issue 113

Custom PC, Issue 113This month’s Mobile Tech Watch column for Dennis Publishing’s Custom PC Magazine reveals a new direction for my regular two-page slot: rather than a look at mobile technologies, the column will in future focus on interviews with luminaries from the computer industry – and not just the mobile side of things. As a result, the Mobile Tech Watch moniker is going, with this issue marking the last time you’ll see the name appear in the magazine.

As a transition piece, the final Mobile Tech Watch column uses the interview format but looking at a mobile technology: specifically, Intel’s work on many-core processors for mobile devices. While the company’s efforts in exascale computing, with its Many Integrated Cores (MIC) architecture and Xeon Phi co-processor board, are well known, the effect the research is likely to have on future mobile devices is less so – hence my desire to shine a light on proceedings.

My subject for the interview was Jim Held, Intel Fellow and Labs Director for Microprocessor and Programming Research. Leading the team responsible for the Terascale Research Processor and Single-Chip Cloud Computer, both of which would feed directly into the development of the now-shipping Xeon Phi 50-core PCI Express board, Held certainly knows his stuff and was an absolute pleasure to talk to.

During the interview, Held touched on how his team’s research will lead to extremely efficient smartphone processors, with new power management features allowing applications greater control over processor states than ever before. The result, in theory, should be smartphones, tablets and laptops with significantly improved battery life – something that is already being implemented in Intel’s current-generation products.

“There’s a lag between when we begin doing research and when things appear in the marketplace,” Held told me. “You’re seeing the benefit – and you will in the Core line as well as the Atom line – the results of our research into how to improve the efficiency of the microarchitecture, and to improve the fine-grained management of the use of power on the die.”

What else does Held have in store for Intel’s future? Pick up the magazine and find out.

Custom PC Issue 113 is available in newsagents, supermarkets, delivered via subscription, and digitally through the Zinio service, so you’ve really no excuse not to read it.

Custom PC, Issue 112

Custom PC, Issue 112This month, my regular Mobile Tech Watch column takes a look at a name from the dim and distant past that is looking to take on ARM and Intel at their own game: MIPS Technologies.

Back in the mists of time, MIPS was a popular RISC architecture, and its low-power chips compete with ARM in the burgeoning palmtop market. I remember having a Philips Nino, a compact little Windows CE device with a greyscale liquid-crystal display and about 8MB of RAM, which was based on a MIPS-architecture chip. Lovely little thing, it was. Had a blue backlight, like a wristwatch.

But I digress.

In this month’s column, I take a look at how MIPS is trying to get back into the mobile market after a hiatus that saw it relegated to niche high-performance computing products. It’s having a certain amount of success, too: its latest chips already have design wins to rival those of Intel, although clearly aren’t making much of an impact against the giant that is ARM and its multitudinous licensees.

Incidentally, this column was originally due to be published in Issue 111, but an interview with Adapteva about the Parallella highly-parallel development platform took precedence. The piece is still germane, despite a month’s delay, although it is lacking one piece of information which only came to light after the issue had gone to press: MIPS is being acquired by low-power graphics specialist Imagination Technology, possibly as a play to produce its own system-on-chip designs with in-house CPU and GPU components.

Custom PC Issue 112 is available from pretty much any supermarket or newsagent, most corner shops, some libraries, and wherever dead-tree magazines are normally found, or can be downloaded as a string of zeroes and ones from the Zinio website.