Nov 6 2009 10:19AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (2) |
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Much discourse is regularly made in the tech press regarding the single-chip integration effects of Moore's Law, and the associated extinction of companies and their products whose functions are now absorbed into competitors' hardware and software. Less commonly discussed, however, for reasons I frankly don't understand, is the effect this silicon consolidation has on the systems comprised of the ICs. Perhaps the most common all-in-one tech devices are smartphones and PCs (including low-cost netbook variants), and last week's news clearly demonstrated their 'black hole' effects on technologies in their orbit that sooner or later get sucked in. Check out this graph...Read More

Nov 5 2009 10:30AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (13) |
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One of my meal meetings at the Intel Developer Forum back in late September was with Steve Roux, Senior Strategic Business Development Manager for USB technologies at NEC Electronics. As any of you who've followed Ron Wilson's extensive technology, circuit design, IP and product coverage of recent months already knows, 'SuperSpeed' version 3 of the USB specification is looming on the horizon. And judging from both company announcements and ...Read More

Nov 4 2009 9:07PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (4) |
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Plenty of companies pitch me on new products, armed with nothing but a pile of PowerPoint foils. Inevitably, many of the promised chips never appear, which is why I make it a rule to not bother telling all of you about any IC that doesn't have accompanying pricing and sample-and-production availability statistics. And that's why I didn't write up Zenverge's ZN100 and ZN200 audio-plus-video-plus-DRM transcoders last November, when the company first gave me an over-dinner presentation on them.

Many of the other promised chips arrive late, accompanied by performance, power consumption and other specifications that drastically undershoot the supplier's preliminary promises. And that's why I was so pleasantly surprised when Zenverge invited me to meet with them again a month ago, this time at their Cupertino facilities. Here's a ...Read More

Nov 3 2009 10:14PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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A week ago, I shared with you my experiences two nights earlier watching the live stream of a U2 concert on YouTube. Although the band's performance at the Rose Bowl broke records with a sellout crowd of 97,014, the Akamai-aided attendance was even more mpressive...an estimated 10 million streams served.

Friday night, as a follow-up, I tuned in to a Livestream-served and Facebook-sponsored Foo Fighters live jam session. At 7PM, there were around 13,000 folks online; by 7:30PM when...Read More

Oct 29 2009 9:52AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (9) |
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Following up on yesterday's disappointing re-test of Gigle Semiconductor's HomePlug AV-plus powerline networking adapters, today's evaluation focuses on NETGEAR's XAV1004 HomePlug AV unit. Whereas the XAV101s I'm currently using are based on Intellon's (now Atheros') second-generation INT6300 chipset, the XAV1004 employs the third-generation INT6400. According to Chris Geiser, NETGEAR's powerline product line manager: