Nikkei Electronics Asia

NEC Electronics has announced the µPD35502, a system-on-chip (SoC) for car audio systems. The SoC increases the processing of music data to realize playback of multiple songs, multiple sources, and multiple destinations, allowing the flexibility to play different songs in the front and rear seat.

To speed system development, a complete software package, including compressed audio decoding software (Codecs) for standards such as MP3, WMA and AAC, as well as other necessary system software, will be offered in production-ready form.

This device also allows field upgrades of key system characteristics, such as adding new human machine interface (HMI) features, new versions of existing audio Codecs, and adding new Codecs as they become popular in the market.

The product includes built-in USB and SD card interfaces to enable playback of music data via portable music players, USB memory devices and SD cards. Also included are several channels of I²S serial communication for inter-chip transfer of music data. An option for supporting Bluetooth wireless technology makes it easy to build systems with hands-free calling and wireless music-transfer functionality.

The µPD35502 is currently available for samples, and mass production is estimated to begin September 2009. The software package is also estimated for release in September.

SAN FRANCISCO–Google unveiled on Wednesday the latest addition to its iGoogle start page service: a collection of themes designed by video game publishers.

The search giant has partnered with nine publishers to come up about two dozen themes from recent games such as Electronic Arts’ Spore to arcade classics such as Galaga.

Like other themes produced through the iGoogle themes API, each one will change throughout the day, including with Easter eggs that some developers tucked inside their designs. Unlike gaming designs created by individuals, these can be used by anyone without stepping on copyright and intellectual property.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, announced the new set of themes at an event as part of this week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Mayer then hosted a panel of gaming personalities, including Capcom producer Yoshinori Ono, and Charles Huang, co-founder of RedOctane, maker of Guitar Hero.

Among the topics discussed was how the Web had changed gaming development. The general answer was that game developers and publishers alike are getting much more feedback during the development process, in part from increasingly simpler ways to aggregate information from blogs and message boards, as well as public beta programs.

Huang also noted that user-generated content created inside of games has been on a sharp rise, as witnessed by the number of user-designed tracks that have been created and downloaded in the latest Guitar Hero title–the figure now tops 10 million.

Notably missing from the announcement was any mention of iGoogle as a gaming platform itself. Mayer very quickly mentioned that there would be new things for OpenSocial developers, but that they were not being announced at this time. However, a handful of casual social-gaming services were announced as coming to iGoogle, including Chess.com, Zynga and PlayFish.

By Gary Welk

No one would doubt the challenge of successfully navigating the TV business these days.

For the custom integrator channel, surviving the recession means taking steps to help retailers merchandize TVs in such a way that small- and medium-sized businesses, homebuilders and homeowners will be motivated to buy.

The following advice is well proven and practical, promising benefits to the integrator, retailer and end customer.

Stick with Custom Brands

While it may appear self-serving, continue to rely on custom manufacturers.

Despite the fact that these companies are dwarfed by the mass-market brands, they are nimble and highly relationship-oriented. As a result, they have established some remarkably solid connections within the supply chain (panel-makers, in particular) that give them certain advantages on which they can capitalize during the production process.

They can leverage these connections into higher product quality, feature engineering and pricing premiums that speak directly to retailers’ bottom-line concerns.

Staying with a custom manufacturer brings added benefits. Custom companies are generally smaller in size, which tends to makes them more accessible when problems arise. Furthermore, if you call a custom company, you’re almost assured of connecting with a real person, who is personally vested in addressing your issue.

Let’s say you take delivery of an order and any number of units are either not what you ordered are damaged. Your revenue as an integrator depends on your ability to deliver what is expected.

Emphasize Tech Features

What makes for a better TV merchandising outcome? It’s mostly about technology benefits.

Here are some of the most notable:

Chipset Technology — In today’s best custom-manufactured TVs (but not all mass-market brands), the excellent picture quality comes from employed chipset technology. Companies, such as Faroudja-Genesis Microchip, base these great sets on the latest HD digital video processors. This technology produces cinema-caliber picture quality, acknowledged by Emmy wins and successful retailers playing it up on sales floors.

HD Tuners — Many digital televisions incorporate QAM tuners (quadrature amplitude modulation) with both ATSC and NTSC support. In the merchandising or selling situation, the important point about these tuners is they allow for direct reception of unscrambled digital programming — no set-top box needed.

Built-In Discrete Codes — These greatly speed up and simplify the remote control programming process. Customers are largely unaware of these codes. So, it’s important to point out that they are faster and more reliable than standard remotes.

They also make it simpler to integrate the TV into a complete system scenario, including TV, media players and lighting controls.

Highlight Mounting Solutions

With higher demand for larger and larger TVs, physical placement can become an issue. Most, if not all, mega-sized models are available as freestanding units, which suits many consumers. The installation trend, however, is to move TVs off the floor and onto the wall.

Integrators like TVs that are compatible with VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association) mounting systems because they make for quicker and highly reliable installations — no time-consuming call-backs. Call customers’ attention to this fact. Express the reliability factor inherent to this characteristic, but also its ability to be mounted closer to the wall. It’s a feature that is important in certain viewing-area situations.

Remind Customers of Service Offerings

Finally, it’s important to emphasize service. Don’t only express the value of your service plans, but also the available varying degrees.

Service value should be self-evident. The newer, bigger TVs are complex and expensive. So, remind customers to take advantage of service offerings.

In addition, make customers aware that not all service is the same. Many contracts won’t adequately support the newest flat screens, but others will. For example, sets from many quality custom manufacturers come with reliable telephone support, and the customers who purchase sets from these quality suppliers will also benefit from that service.

By DON CLARK

Intel Corp.’s next chip for server systems, expected to be formally introduced Monday, is arriving at a critical time for recession-wary technology companies.

The forthcoming microprocessor, which will join Intel’s Xeon line of server chips and is widely known by the code name Nehalem, has already been named as a key component in upcoming products by several big tech firms. Dell Inc. on Wednesday announced a new line of computers based on the chip. Cisco Systems Inc.’s much-discussed entry into the server market, kicked off last week, also relies on Nehalem.

Most of the other big server makers, including International Business Machines Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Sun Microsystems Inc., are expected to hold off on discussing their plans for Nehalem-based machines until Monday. Intel hasn’t disclosed such details as the pricing of the new chips, or benchmark test results of their performance, but the company is suggesting a substantial improvement over its current chips.

“This is the largest increase in performance in the history of the Xeon product line,” said Kirk Skaugen, an Intel vice president and general manager of its server platforms group, at a Dell press event Wednesday in San Francisco.

Claims about computing speed are nothing new for Intel, which plays a perpetual game of technology leapfrog with rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. But the new chip is arriving at an unusual time, as budgets for buying new server systems have been slashed. So Intel and its customers are stressing aspects of the new technology that could save customers money.

One selling point is greater support for virtualization software, which helps one server do the work of two or more machines by running multiple copies of operating systems and application programs. Servers running such software on two or four Nehalem chips — which each have four processor cores, or calculating engines — can replace a larger number of older servers with one or two simpler chips, Intel says. That could save customers money on electrical power, space and maintenance staff.

Mr. Skaugen estimated that about nine servers could be replaced with one Nehalem-powered system, allowing customers to recover the costs of buying the new hardware through operating cost savings in eight months. Steve Hassell, vice president and chief information officer of Emerson Electric Co., said it has been able to replace 18 systems with one of the new Dell servers.

One reason for the speed of Nehalem — a family that includes models for high-end PCs introduced in November — is that it connects directly to memory chips rather than going through an external component called a memory controller. AMD has offered that technology on its Opteron line since 2003. “It shouldn’t surprise anybody that Intel is going to reap the benefits” of using a similar design, said Pat Patla, general manager and vice president of AMD’s server business unit.

AMD recently introduced a more-powerful version of its four-processor Opterons, and Mr. Patla notes that a six-processor version is also coming soon. But there is little debate that many computer makers are eager to upgrade systems to Nehalem, in part because it helps push such systems further into high-end computing. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, for example, have said they expect to use the chip in a supercomputer there.

Another rival, SiCortex Inc., which makes high-performance servers based on internally designed chips, disputes the selling points of Nehalem. The Maynard, Mass., company claims its own systems are selling briskly, in part because of a design that draws much less power than systems using Intel or AMD chips. “If there is pent-up demand for Nehalem we don’t see it,” said Christopher Stone, SiCortex’s chief executive officer.

By Darren Waters

The multi-touch controls familiar to Apple iPhone users will be built-in to Microsoft’s Windows 7.

Windows Touch will be a “first class way to interact with your PC alongside mouse and keyboard,” said the firm.

Microsoft believes multi-touch PCs will become popular in retail, public spaces, on laptops and “kitchen PCs”.

Some Windows machines already feature rudimentary touch input and Apple is also reportedly adding touch for displays in its Snow Leopard OS update.

A small number of multi-touch PCs are already on the market, including the HP TouchSmart and the Dell Latitude XT, and Microsoft hopes Windows 7 will create a new ecosystem of devices that take advantage of touch.

The latest generation of Apple’s laptops also feature a glass trackpad that supports multi-touch gestures.

Microsoft has launched a Windows Touch Logo program, which will help consumers understand if a machine has been optimised for the new control system.

Windows Touch will features controls such as tap and double tap, drag, scroll, zoom, flick and rotate.

In a posting on the Windows 7 engineering blog, the team leading Touch developments said: “Quite a few folks have been a little sceptical of touch, often commenting about having fingerprints on their monitor or something along those lines.

Lessons learned

“We think touch will become broadly available as the hardware evolves.”

Windows Touch is incorporating many of the lessons learned from the development of Microsoft’s Surface table computer.

Microsoft user interface evangelist Chris Bernard told BBC News: “Windows 7 will help take touch into the mainstream.

“While Surface and machines running Windows 7 are different devices we have evolved a common vocabulary of touch.

“Gesture and touch are the two biggest changes to how we interact with our computers since the launch of the first Graphical User Interface, and the use of the keyboard and mouse.”

Microsoft says Windows Touch will be much more than just a “touch shell” for Windows.

“We made sure you are getting the full Windows 7 experience,” the blog post said.

While some applications will be optimised for touch, such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Centre, programs which are “touch unaware” will also have some level of touch control.

“For example, if someone tries touch scrolling over a window that is touch unaware, we can detect the presence of various types of scrollbars and scroll them,” the engineers said.

To help optimise the different ways of touching and gesturing Microsoft said it analysed data from “thousands of samples from hundreds of people”.

Windows 7 is expected to be released at the start of 2010. A “release candidate” for users to try out will be available at the end of May.

By Traian Teglet

One of the world’s leading storage vendors, Seagate, has announced two new Network Storage Devices (NAS) as part of its growing series of BlackArmor NAS servers. The new BlackArmor NAS 420 and 440 servers have been designed for small and medium business users, providing them with a choice for a secure and multi-featured NAS, which enables them to store and protect their critical data.

According to Seagate, both of their new BlackArmor NAS storage products ship as “fully-contained, out-of-box solutions with user-serviceable, [tool-less] hot-swappable drives that are RAID-configurable 0/1/5/10 arrays,” designed to support the storage requirements of up to 50 workstations. There’s a small difference between the two models, namely that the 420 comes with just two hard drives, installed in the four available hard drive bays, while the 440 has all of its four drive bays occupied.

For best performance, the BlackArmor NAS storage device has been featured with a 1.2GHz processor and 256MB of RAM memory. In addition, it boasts two Gigabit Ethernet ports and four USB 2.0 ports. According to Seagate, read speeds of up to 50MB/s are possible when the 7,200RPM SATA hard drives are connected in RAID 5 configurations. The NAS also comes with bundled backup software, which offers support for up to 10 Windows clients. This can be set to “continuous and automatic, incremental and full-system backup. In the event of PC hardware failure, you can utilize the bare metal restore feature to recover your entire system, including the operating system, programs and settings.”

The BlackArmor NAS supports CIFS, NFS, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, Bonjour, Microsoft Rally network and Microsoft Windows Server Active Directory. Price wise, the BlackArmor NAS 420 comes at a MSRP of US$799.99, offering 2TB of storage, while the higher model, the BlacArmor NAS 440, is slated for a MSRP of US$1,199.99, offering 6TB of storage. These versions are already available, with Seagate promising that an 8TB one will be released in May.