Intel's single chip cloud computer

Tilera, a startup building chips that contain anywhere from 16 to 100 cores, said today it’s raised $25 million in a third round of funding from investors including Broadcom. Chips made by Tilera, which we named as one of five multicore statups to watch two years ago, are aimed at boosting performance and energy efficiency for networking and cloud computing, which is likely why Broadcom invested. But as Tilera spends more time emphasizing the cloud and big players like Intel do the same, we have to ask: Do cloud computing and web-scale computing need their own chips?

Broadcom likely wants an edge should Tilera’s multiple RISC-based (rather than Intel’s x86) processors set fire to the cloud computing world as equipment companies attempt to develop power-efficient chips that can be adapted to specific workloads. For Broadcom, an investment in Tilera is a direct challenge to Intel’s dominance in the data center computing space, as well as a bet on faster networking chips.

Tilera has advantages in cloud computing because its chip architecture allows for a lot of lower-power processors to talk to one another using an interconnect technology that doesn’t cause bottlenecks. In plain English, Tilera has figured out a way to get a lot of cores to talk without having to pause to listen to one another, which slows things down as you add more cores. A Tilera executive told me last year that if just 10 percent of cloud computing or web-scale customers took a chance on the startup’s architecture, it could succeed.

But while Tilera, which started developing its chips in 2004, may have the lead when it comes to building massively multicore chips with a mesh-interconnect, Intel smells an opportunity as well and as such is building out what it calls a “single-chip cloud computer” with 48 cores for the cloud computing market. There are also systems vendors trying to solve similar problems for those needing energy-efficient web-scale computing, such as SeaMicro and Smooth-Stone.

A key problem in all of these endeavors is figuring out how to get the multiple chips or cores to function together in such a way that performance scales linearly with the addition of each new core rather than tapering off as the communications between the cores or chips becomes overloaded. Intel and Tilera are hoping to do this on the chip itself, while systems vendors are trying to do it with a better box.

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We Can Call It A Cloud, But It’s Still Hardware

For proof, see the Wi-Fi hype that will be on display at this week’s Consumer Electronics Trade Show; or better yet, take a peek at the chart below showing how Wall Street is valuing the companies that develop Wi-Fi chips. I included Intel and Qualcomm, both of which are benefiting from the mobile computing and mobile phone popularity as reference points. Clearly the belief in Wi-Fi goes beyond netbooks and handsets.

And the availability of personal hotspots such as the Mi-Fi and the rise of the Direct Wi-Fi standard make Atheros, Broadcom and Marvell big winners. Also keep an eye on Taiwanese Wi-Fi chip maker Ralink Technology, as well as a host of startups using Wi-Fi around the home, from Quantenna and Celeno to the likes of Sonos and Eye-Fi, which use Wi-Fi to wirelessly transport content.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Adventures in Librarianship.

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Basically Broadcom, a networking chip company, is buying a business whose silicon can handle the switching for a Google-scale server farm — because it’s betting that such deployments will become more common and mainstream. The Dune buy follows Broadcom’s failed Emulex bid, which was also aimed at the next-generation data center.

When it comes to data center networking, it’s no longer just about faster speeds on the pipe, such as the transition from 1 Gigabit Ethernet to 10 Gigabit Ethernet. It’s also about making sure that those faster pipes can benefit the many virtual machines sitting on a server, because just like a house full of teenagers with a single wireline phone, those VMs all want access to the network at once. Products that help share the networking pipe and make sure the servers get access to the network when they need it is a critical step for the virtualized data center of the future.

Dune has raised $53 million in venture funding from investors including Alta Berkeley Venture Partners, Aurum-SBC Ventures, Evergreen Venture Partners, Jerusalem Ventures Partners, Pitango Venture Capital and U.S. Ventures Partners.

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• Ubuntu One integration — Much like Dropbox and other online storage or sync solutions, Ubuntu One offers a place to stash your data. Every Ubuntu user gets a free 2GB account and the service is natively integrated within the Ubuntu file system, making it pretty seamless.
• Improved 3G connectivity — I’ll have to try this to better understand what exactly has been improved, but this is key for mobile folks.
• New Software Center — One-stop shopping for software is always nice, especially when there’s a button for Free Software as well. This takes the place of Add/Remove in the Applications menu.
• New Kernel Mode Setting — By default on Intel hardware, this “reduces boot-time flickering and dramatically speeds up suspend/resume.”

Has anyone installed this — or the new Netbook Remix Edition — and been wowed by any other new features?

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Of course, the easiest way to put a new spin on an old idea is to tailor it for a specific audience — which the the guys and gals from sketch comedy team Loading Ready Run nail with the Escapist News Network by focusing exclusively on video game news and culture. Hosted by Graham Stark and Kathleen DeVere, ENN‘s one-liners and punchlines can be a little dense for those outside the video game world, but even a casual gamer can appreciate a story on the gaming site Popcap that references the “enslavement of the human race via the highly addictive drug Bejeweled [Popcap's insanely popular puzzle game].”

In fairness, Escapist News Network‘s deadpan approach and dual anchor set-up is closer in style to Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update segment, which predates Stewart’s entire career by at least a decade. But by combining real news and actual jokes, as well as correspondent segments that emulate the Stephen Colbert school of interviewing, the show still manages to live up to the Daily Show legacy, and also do it proud with sharp production values and its own unique voice.

Closer to the Stewart model is the self-styled Walter Cronkite for YouTube, Bri Holt of Newsish. Closer to a vlog than a full newscast, Holt (who graduated from UCSD in 2008 with a degree in political science and film) uses his platform to discuss hard news issues like the economics of Medicare and deregulation, albeit with a frustrated, “why is the world so dumb” tone that’s easy to engage with.

While episodes could be more tightly edited and condensed, Newsish has slowly found its audience thanks to videos mocking, for example, a recent letter Rep. Michelle Bachmann read to the House of Representatives on the subject of alleged sex clinics in schools. The Newsish YouTube channel has close to 1,500 subscribers, and episodes average in the 1,000-10,000 range.

And these are only two recent examples of the format, which has also been explored by shows like Political Lunch, Your Geek News and The Young Turks. It’s a boom industry. Because what Stewart and The Daily Show have done is tear down the idea that because you sit at a news desk and stare into the camera, you’re supposed to give a quasi-impartial spin on the day’s events. It means that actual news programs anchored by impartial news anchors may become as archaic as cathode-ray tube TVs. But that’s just one of the side effects of the blogosphere, where opinion sometimes bears more weight than fact.

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LG's Bluetooth-enabled TV

Broadcom today said its Bluetooth radios are inside a new line of televisions from LG Electronics. Earlier this year, its Bluetooth radios made it into televisions from Sharp, while Samsung also has a Bluetooth-enabled TV. The movement to put Bluetooth — a radio technology popular in cell phones, cars and PCs — into television is gaining momentum, and for Bluetooth radio makers like Broadcom and CSR, it opens up a potentially valuable, new market. DisplaySearch, an analyst firm, expects 205.3 million TVs will sell worldwide in 2009.

Bluetooth on the TV gives consumers the ability to use their cell phones as a remote control, connect wireless headsets to the TV, and stream music from an iPod or other MP3 player to their television or speakers attached to their TV, all without a wire. A representative for the Bluetooth Special Interest Group expects to see more Bluetooth TVs coming to market later this year or early next year.

Bluetooth, which allows for small amounts of data to be transmitted wirelessly, is in 50 percent to 60 percent of cell phones. That could open up opportunities for companies that make both cell phones and televisions, such as LG and Samsung, to link the devices and use mobile phones as remote controls.  Companies like Rovi (formerly Macrovision) and NDS, which develop interactive on-screen guides for televisions, are exploring how to tie mobile phones into the TV-viewing experience.

A mobile phone tied to the TV would allow different users in the house to immediately bring up personalized profiles filled with content, recommendations and perhaps other social features when they watch television. Additionally, as search becomes more essential for wading through the massive video-verse, using a triple-tap keystroke input like that used for sending SMS messages would allow users to search for what they want to watch without requiring a full keyboard.

Consumers with Bluetooth-enabled PC keyboards (or full QWERTY keyboards on mobile phones) might use those to control the TV as well. Steve McIntyre, senior product line manager for wireless personal area networking products at Broadcom, said that Bluetooth radios are in a variety of existing equipment, so adding the radios to TVs allows consumers to add functionality to their television without buying a lot of new gear. Of course, one does have to purchase a new Bluetooth-capable TV.

Research firm In-Stat today released a report revealing that well over half of respondents in a survey owned a mobile phone with Bluetooth technology, with nearly 60 percent of them using it to connect a Bluetooth headset. As televisions get broadband connections, widgets and ever more content, figuring out ways to navigate TV 2.0 (GigaOMPro subscription required), while optimizing the traditional entertainment offered from the TV, makes Bluetooth a compelling technology to add to these 80-plus-year-old devices. It’s a good thing Bluetooth came back from the dead.

Additional reporting by Chris Albrecht.

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But so far wireless networks can’t deliver — at least not consistently throughout an entire house. Broadcom is conducting a trial to use Wi-Fi to send content around the home as part of AT&T’s U-verse product, but can’t disclose any results yet. Wireless would help carriers install home networks faster and would cut costs, but it’s still not something carriers trust to deliver quality video streams. If a customer is paying $100 a month for IPTV service on their 52-inch plasma TV, and the picture pixelates, or otherwise experiences problems, consumers aren’t going to be as accepting as when such things happen on their PCs. So far carriers are keeping to wires even if it makes installation of IPTV setups more of a pain.

Currently Broadcom is trying to build a Wi-Fi chip that would sit inside a residential gateway and deliver 20 Mbps streams inside a home, but that still wouldn’t be enough. In the meantime, there are other companies trying to offer alternate ways to boost wireless signals inside the home for a consistent network to deliver videos. Quantenna is using a series of repeaters to boost a home’s Wi-Fi signal throughout the home, while Amimon is trying to create a home wireless video network using the 5GHz spectrum and its own standard. And even if carriers don’t like wireless home networks, it may not be up to them if the PC wins out as the source of entertainment for consumers.

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Like any memorial service, this one was full of complicated but heartfelt emotion. There were moments that genuinely felt like the best sort of memorial, such as Berry Gordy’s speech, full of recollections about family baseball games and 10-year-old Michael out-Smokey-ing Smokey Robinson. “It was magic,” he said of seeing the Moonwalk for the first time. And Brooke Shields, who was actually a friend, made me tear up when she talked about Jackson laughing.

If you were wondering why this memorial was two hours long, that’s because everyone got a voice — Al Sharpton busted some rhymes before telling Jackson’s children that “there was nothing strange about your daddy; it was strange what your daddy had to deal with.” Queen Latifah acknowledged the 16,000 fans gathered in Staples Center, speaking to them as their representative and reflecting on her first Jackson 5 album purchase before reading an original poem for the occasion written by Maya Angelou. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee reminded us that just because Jackson dealt with many allegations of child abuse during his lifetime, he was innocent until proven guilty — then revealed House Resolution No. 166 to honor Jackson as an American hero. The feed cut to the Jackson brothers, who seemed genuinely moved. That was a nice moment.

The musical tributes were mixed in quality — Mariah Carey’s voice and limbs were all over the place; Usher’s dramatic removal of his sunglasses was a bit much; and John Mayer transformed Human Nature into elevator music. But Jennifer Hudson killed her rendition of Will You Be There; Jermaine Jackson’s version of Jackson’s favorite song, the Charlie Chaplin-composed Smile, was too sweet; and there were also many clips of Jackson himself singing, which were, of course, the best performances of the show.

Liz Gannes has the full report on how the live-streaming performed, but I only observed a little stuttering on Hulu’s part. And the pacing of the event was solid, with decent-sized pauses between segments. Given how many in the U.S. were watching online during their workdays, those pauses undoubtedly provided welcome gaps to attend to the day’s business.

Overall, though, the memorial veered wildly between the intensely personal and the openly public. We heard from the government, we heard from the fans, we heard from the world of sports and entertainment and music. But the service concluded with a family on a stage, mourning, and a little girl crying over her dead father.

Over the next few days, we’ll get numbers on the event’s performance, and it’ll be held up as a milestone for live events on the Internet. But as much as I acknowledge the value of this service for our planet of pop-culture addicts, I do hope its success is tempered with some discretion for future events. Because maybe, just maybe, your desk isn’t the best place to watch a funeral.

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Qualcomm's mirasol MEMS

Qualcomm today announced the opening of a factory to make its mirasol displays, and a Wi-Fi chip designed for home networking — both efforts to keep the company a top chipmaker even as carriers migrate from the CDMA technology that provides so much of its profits. CDMA royalties aren’t going to disappear anytime soon, but Qualcomm needs to find new markets for its chips that don’t ride the 3G wireless gravy train. Hence, its push into mobile television with MediaFLO, the creation of its Gobi platform, displays and now, home networking.

Qualcomm developed a chip technology known as a micro-electro-mechanical system, or MEMS, that is used to make its low-power mirasol displays, and today said it has opened its first production factory in partnership with Foxlink, a Taiwanese communications device maker, to make the color displays. The displays made at the factory will be aimed at mobile devices.

It is also moving into the home with a new wireless chip for home networking that it says can deliver data rates of 600 Mbps over an 802.11n Wi-Fi connection. Qualcomm’s N-Stream Wireless LAN WCN1320 chip uses  4×4 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology and works in both the 5GHz or 2.4GHz spectrum bands. It joins a portfolio of Wi-Fi chips that Qualcomm makes for cell phones and other mobile devices.

With both markets, Qualcomm will face some serious risks. It needs to prove it can make its mirasol displays in large quantities, and at prices that are comparable to LCD, the dominant display technology. Mirasol will also compete with organic light-emitting displays (OLEDS) and possibly e-ink technology used in portable readers. In the home, Qualcomm will be intruding on territory controlled by Broadcom, Atheros and Marvell. Because of its close ties to carriers, it may win business providing Wi-Fi chips inside residential gateways  and modems, but it will also need to get consumer device companies onboard as well as router makers.

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