New processor designs boost graphics to speed up Windows

New processors from AMD and Intel will provide the horsepower for next generation desktop applications, that could previously only run on specialist workstations.

Integrated chips used to be the poor cousins of dedicated systems. PC manufacturers offered low-cost PC hardware – with integrated sound and video chips – that were lower cost than machines equipped with dedicated audio and video hardware.

But these integrated devices balanced cost with performance, and it was the performance that often suffered as a result of design compromises.

The industry has moved on and the integrated chip design, now called System on a Chip (SoC), is set to provide processing, graphics and multimedia in the next generation of PC and hybrid PC/tablet devices.

Intel's approach is called IntelHD, which offers built in graphics, although its performance is inferior to dedicated graphics processors (GPU) according to industry benchmarks.

The company did attempt to develop its own GPU, code-named Larrabee, but this project has been dropped. However, the latest Atom SoC design, the z2760, which will power the new Dell, Fujitsu, HP Asus and Acer Windows 8 Pro tablets, uses the Imagination PowerVR graphics core chip to improve graphics.

In its market trends report for electronic equipment published in July 2012, analyst Gartner noted that graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs) and other specialised cores will take centre stage in future SoC designs.

“The importance of multimedia content to a broad variety of electronic equipment makes the ability to manage the presentation of the content critical. For most processor architectures, this is now handled by a graphics processing core that manages the resolution and the quality of the images rendered.”

Integrating the GPU onto a SoC design will enhance the performance in future application processor units, according to Gartner.

This is exactly what AMD has been developing since it acquired graphics card maker ATI, in 2006.

“We put a GPU right beside a CPU core," says Adam Kozak, AMD client desktop product marketing manager. "We are implementing AES encryption (256-bit), up to four processor cores,and HT7000 graphics, all on a single chip.”

According to Kozak, graphics processing is the chipmaker's strongest area. He says the design philosophy of the company is to concentrate on developing high-performance chips at a low cost.

The latest so-called APU chip provides 4.2GHz on the CPU, 8GHz on the GPU, which, according to AMD's data, is capable of delivering 736 GFlops.

But does a PC need all this processing power, just to run Windows 8?

Kozak believes so. Microsoft is using its DirectX graphics interfaces to speed-up rendering of the Windows 8 user interface and Office 12 also makes use of graphics acceleration. He says that in Windows 8, the AMD processor can display three monitors from a single chip, without the need for additional graphics cards.

As Computer Weekly has previously reported, there is growing interest in using the powerful GPU in a PC to run supercomputer-like applications. In fact, graphics card maker Nvidia has developed Cuda (Compute Unified Device Architecture), an architecture for running computationally intensive applications on the multiple cores in its high-performance graphics card family.

But Cuda is proprietary to Nvidia. Kozak says the new Microsoft  DirectCompute programming platform will enable application developers to target the CPU and the GPU in standard way, not just on Nvidia GPUs. This will mean applications can take advantage of the raw processing power available on the high performance GPU core that now resides in the AMD SoC designs.

As an alternative to Microsoft DirectCompute, applications can also use the OpenCL programming interfaces, which effectively does the same thing. Image-processing applications like Adobe Photoshop use OpenCL to boost performance of computationally intensive graphics rendering tasks. Kozak says the OpenCL architecture can also be used in more mainstream applications, like Winzip, for speeding up the compression and decompression of zip files.

ViewPoint 3D is a start-up taking advantage of the new SoC designs from AMD to power large multimedia displays with three-dimensional presentation graphics. Technical director, Robin Colclough says: “We have built a complete application in C++ to create 3D presentation with dynamic lighting and 3D effects. You can import PowerPoint slides and convert them to 3D.”

Einstein’s brain lives on in new iPad app

CHICAGO — While Albert Einstein’s genius isn’t included, an exclusive iPad application launched this week promises to make detailed images of his brain more accessible to scientists than ever before.

The application will allow researchers and novices to peer into the eccentric Nobel winner’s brain as if they were looking through a microscope. A medical museum under development in Chicago obtained funding to scan and digitize nearly 350 fragile and priceless slides made from slices of Einstein’s brain after his death in 1955.

“I can’t wait to find out what they’ll discover,” said Steve Landers, a consultant for the National Museum of Health and Medicine Chicago who designed the app. “I’d like to think Einstein would have been excited.”

After Einstein died, a pathologist named Thomas Harvey performed an autopsy, removing his brain in hopes that future researchers could discover the secrets behind his genius.

Harvey gave samples to researchers and collaborated on a 1999 study published in the Lancet. That study showed a region of Einstein’s brain — the parietal lobe — was 15 per cent wider than normal. The parietal lobe is important to the understanding of math, language and spatial relationships.

The new iPad app may allow researchers to dig even deeper by looking for brain regions where the neurons are more densely connected than normal, said Dr. Phillip Epstein, a Chicago-area neuroscientist and consultant for the museum.

But because the tissue was preserved before modern imaging technology, it may be difficult for scientists to figure out exactly where in Einstein’s brain each slide originated. Although the new app organizes the slides into general brain regions, it doesn’t map them with precision to an anatomical model.

“They didn’t have MRI. We don’t have a three-dimensional model of the brain of Einstein, so we don’t know where the samples were taken from,” said researcher Jacopo Annese of the Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego. What’s more, the slides on the app represent only a fraction of the entire brain, Annese said.

Annese has preserved and digitized another famous brain, that of Henry Molaison, who died in 2008 after living for decades with profound amnesia. Known as “H.M.” in scientific studies, Molaison participated during his life in research that revealed new insights on learning and memory.

A searchable website with images of more than 2,400 slides of Molaison’s entire brain will be available to the public in December, Annese said.

“There will be another Einstein and we’ll do it like H.M.,” Annese predicted. For now, he said, it’s exciting that the Einstein brain tissue has been preserved digitally before the slides deteriorate or become damaged.

Some may question whether Einstein would have wanted images of his remains sold to non-scientists for $9.99.

“There’s been a lot of debate over what Einstein’s intentions were,” museum board member Jim Paglia said. “We know he didn’t want a circus made of his remains. But he understood the value to research and science to study his brain, and we think we’ve addressed that in a respectful manner.”

Paglia said the app could “inspire a whole new generation of neuroscientists.”

Proceeds from sales will go to the U.S. Department of Defence’s National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland, and to the Chicago satellite museum, which is set to open in 2015 with interactive exhibits and the museum’s digital collections.

Harris introduces new public-safety LTE smartphone

Harris today announced the launch of the InTouch RPC-200, a ruggedized LTE smartphone that will be able to operate on commercial carrier networks and Band 14 public-safety LTE systems.

Unveiled and demonstrated at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) show in San Diego, the InTouch includes typical smartphone features such as the Android 4.1 operating system and a commercial LTE chipset. But the device also includes public-safety characteristics, such as a large push-to-talk button, waterproof speakers and noise-cancellation technology.

“It feels in your hand like a ruggedized tool, not necessarily a commercial device,” Paul May, senior product manager for Harris, said during an interview with Urgent Communications. “But it is still relatively light and relatively small—it’s very easy to stick in your pocket and carry around during the day.

“It has the types of features that users would associate with smart phones, in terms of being able to browse and being able to connect to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. But they would also recognize immediately the LMR heritage of the device, with the larger push-to-talk, the larger speaker and its general ruggedness.”

Because InTouch works on both public-safety Band 14 systems and commercial-carrier networks—including 2G and 3G networks, if LTE access is not available—the device should be valuable to agencies that want to leverage commercial LTE capabilities until the planned nationwide public-safety LTE network is deployed in their geographic jurisdictions, May said.

In addition, the device is designed to support the Harris BeOn technology, which enables encrypted, push-to-talk P25 voice communication via private LTE or commercial-network connectivity to an LMR network, May said.

“I would say that it is capable of delivering voice critical for a mission, but I think the users have to determine whether this is the right device for them to support them in their operation,” May said. “There are certain instances where you would want to have a direct-mode, talkaround capability—for example, a firefighter running into a burning building. In that case, this is probably the wrong device for them.

“However, for a battalion chief that is outside that building and needs to be able to access databases, wants to be able to able to track users and equipment with mapping capabilities, is interested in providing video back to a command center, this might be the right device for them.”

With the InTouch, Harris has announced both a smartphone and tablet device for public-safety LTE users. The company announced the BTC-100 public-safety LTE tablet during the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) show in August.

Harris will be securing certifications for the InTouch during the next several months and plans to make the device commercially available next summer, May said. A price point for the device has not been determined yet, but “we think it will be lower than you might typically see for high-end LMR devices—I would say somewhere over $1,000 would be the expectation,” May said.

By Donny Jackson 

10 smartphone habits you should avoid

Editor's note: Brenna Ehrlich and Andrea Bartz are the sarcastic brains behind humor blog and book "Stuff Hipsters Hate." Got a question about etiquette in the digital world? Contact them at netiquette@cnn.com.

We begin this week's column with a stunningly beautiful quote from Anais Nin (brought to our attention by the inimitable site Brainpickings). Read it slowly because it's that good.

(Yes, we're enculturating you in Netiquette. We can hear the shouty, complainy e-mails already.)

"The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. ... This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters, meetings, introductions, which might contain the seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked.

"This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision."

Nin wrote those words in 1946, but she might as well have been writing them today. She starts with a YOLO and ends with a contemporary-sounding rumination of just how horrible we've all become now that we hold the power to be in touch with millions of people in the palms of our hands.

That's right, we're talking about how annoying and rude and antisocial we've all become with our smartphones and tablets. As CNN investigates all the ways mobile devices are changing our lives, we'd like to peel our eyes off our glowing screens long enough to recount our top eight egregious handheld errors.

These are things you literally could not do before the www went mobile; now we're embarrassing ourselves all over the place. Please stop:

1. Drunk -tweeting, -texting, -Instagramming, etc.

Long gone are the days when the only witnesses to your inebriated ramblings were other bar patrons who also saw you stumble from your bar stool to the ground. Whether you're able to keep it together with spelling and syntax (in which case, you've just got the world going, "Wait, she wants to do WHAT to Paul Ryan?!"), or your typing skills erode quickly, alcohol and mobile devices don't mix.

2. Fooling around on your phone whenever you have a spare moment.

As writer Austin Kleon writes in his alarmingly cute book, "Steal Like an Artist," we need unstructured time for creativity to foster, down time in which we mess around and let our disconnected thoughts gel into cool ideas.

If you turn every spare moment (a red light, a line at the salad station, a ride in the elevator) into an excuse to check your Cinemagram feed, you just won't have those artistic a ha! moments. (And no, "Draw Something" doesn't count.)

3. Passive-aggressively whining for the whole world to see.

Look, we all have our personal stock of First World Problems, frustrated complaints with the minor injustices committed by a cruel, uncaring world. That's been true since the dawn of time. Now we just have myriad means of expressing them.

Nobody cares about your thinly veiled railings against your ex or roommate or employer, OK? Unless you've scribbled it on a notepad, in which case you should share it with the world on. So that we can laugh at you.

4. Being really, really scared to actually use the phone.

Phones and tablets have made it oh so easy to communicate without using our voiceboxes. This is bad for relationships for oh so many reasons. Anais Nin would just hate it. Hit "dial" and enjoy the time-honored pas de deux of two humans, you know, talking.

5. Missing your favorite band's concert because you're so busy taking crappy photos, letting your phone ring and fiddling with your phone during the set.

Your hard-of-hearing, reformed punk-rock uncle was right: Concerts really WERE better back in the day, not necessarily because music really meant something, man, but because the audience actually paid attention and sang along and danced instead of holding their phones in the air and spending 30-plus seconds trying to find the shutter button on the front of the screen.

Your punkle would be so disappointed if he still made it out to shows today.

6. Texting salacious pictures.

The ritual sharing of NC-17 photos used to be a complicated analog affair involving Polaroids and furtive looks. Nowadays, people just drop trou, snap and send. Analyze THAT, Anais Nin.

7. Turning your friends into enemies with videos of them.

Camcorders have become tiny and discreet and as user-friendly as checking your e-mail. This is potentially bad news for those people you hang out with, as you hold in your hands a recording device that can humiliate them forever.