Items by Bryan Gardiner
Wired: Top Stories
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13-Inch Notebook That's Easy on Thin, Light Wallets
Posted: February 4th, 2009, 1:10pm EST by Bryan Gardiner
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Gateway's first 13-inch notebook is cheap, fast, and more powerful than any puny netbook. But you get what you pay for and Gateway has cut some serious corners when it came to the PC's aesthetics. -
Kodak's Little Black Box Spreads Media-Streaming Love
Posted: February 3rd, 2009, 9:00pm EST by Bryan Gardiner
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Hey. you like streaming HD content around your home, right? But you just don't have a solution that works simply and effectively. Try Kodak's Theater HD. Any medium: pictures, film, music will be transferred from your PC to your TV. Hands-free! -
Desktop-Speaker Gems Issue a Sonic Boom to Your Bank Account
Posted: December 9th, 2008, 1:45pm EST by Bryan Gardiner
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Crystal-clear speakers that cost 1,000 dollars? Yes! Harman Kardon is hoping these other-worldly desktop giants find a home in the office of a serious audiophile. Just don't crank 'em up too loud, mmmkay?
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NIN Dazzles With Lasers, LEDs and Stealth Screens
Posted: September 13th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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A vast wall of swirling static dances on a giant screen as Trent Reznor and his band launch into their song, "Only." Initially obscured by this sea of visual white noise, the Nine Inch Nails front man intermittently appears to push through the particles of snow with his hands and body, popping in and out of view and opening up random tunnels in the chaos.
"Sometimes, I think I can see right through myself," he sings.
Nine Inch Nails fans are accustomed to such sonic and visual feasts whenever Reznor and company go out on tour. But this time around, NIN has pulled out all the stops, creating a groundbreaking, fully interactive visual display that is as much a part of the show as the band's instruments.
"I'm not really a purist," admits Reznor. "If I'm in the studio working on an album, I try to only please myself. But when it's a tour, it feels a bit more like I have a responsibility to some degree to entertain people."
Reznor and other band members use Lemurs during the "electronic set." The touchscreen devices can be used to control a range of audio and visual aspects of the show on the fly.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comFor the band's current Lights in the Sky tour, Reznor has not only raised the bar for what's possible in an arena tour, but has also produced what could arguably be one of the most technologically ambitious rock productions ever conceived. Unlike most rock shows, the visuals for about 40 percent of the show (including "Only") aren't pre-rendered. There's no staging, no pantomiming by band members: It's all interactive, live and rendered on the fly.
With more than 40 tons of lighting and stage rigging, hundreds of LED lights, a daunting array of professional and custom-built machinery running both archaic and standard commercial VJ software, three different video systems and an array of sensors and cameras, the tour is nothing if not a lavish display of techno wizardry.
According to Reznor, it all started with a relatively simple idea.
"I wanted to see how I could use video as an instrument," he says, "and try to really make the stage feel like it's organic -- like it's part of the overall set."
Judging from initial reactions to the show, the band has done just that.
Reviews have called LiTS everything from a "vision of splendor" to "the pinnacle of video art," and nowhere is Reznor's showmanship and willingness to tinker with new technologies more apparent than in the band's current tour.
NIN programmer and keyboardist Alessandro Cortini stands in back of the giant stealth screen during sound check.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Transparent Screens
The core of the show is a sophisticated trio of transparent "stealth" screens, which are raised and lowered during the performance.
Using one high-resolution (1024 x 288) Barco D7 screen -- basically, an opaque, computer-controlled screen comprised of a tiny LED system on modular panels -- and two lower-resolution semitransparent screens up front, Reznor and other band members are able to trigger and control various video loops and effects directly from the stage. The musicians can also interact directly with those visuals onscreen during the show, thanks to a sophisticated array of sensors and cameras.
For the most part, those visuals come from Reznor and Rob Sheridan, Reznor's creative partner and the art director for NIN. But the two had considerable help from a few outside parties in putting together the production.
Roy Bennet, a veteran lighting designer who worked with Reznor on the Downward Spiral and Fragile tours, designed and put together the LiTS set according to Trent's initial specs.
It was also Bennet who suggested bringing in the other key part to the show, a company called Moment Factory.
Responsible for the technology driving most of the interactive tech elements, Moment Factory is a boutique Canadian outfit that's worked on a number of Cirque du Soleil shows and has produced other industrial visual installations.
For the interactive portions of the show, all the onscreen video is rendered by Moment Factory's custom rig, a trio of Linux-based devices collectively known as "the brain."
"They build what they call games," Reznor explains. "Each [interactive] song might have two or three settings ... or games. It's basically particle-based animation."
Those particles can interact with any of the various inputs Reznor and the band have selected.
Known simply as "the brain," this rig is Moment Factory's custom-built Linux machine that runs all of the interactive visuals audience members see during the show.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Interactive Lasers
With the song "Only," for instance, the front, convex screen starts out as solid static. On Reznor's side of the display, a laser above him detects whenever he crosses a vertical plane paralleling the screen. On the floor, a piece of tape and two tiny LED lights let him know exactly where that plane is.
As Reznor intersects that plane with his hand or body, the laser tracks his X and Y coordinates. The "brain" box then tells the particles to spread out to a predetermined dispersal pattern. Reznor says: "Then it follows me around. If I leave the plane, it fills back in. If I push through, it comes back out."
The band uses the same tech for another song later in the show called "Echoplex," from The Slip album.
Like many other NIN songs, it's based around a drum machine beat. After rehearsing live a few times with real drums, Reznor realized it sounded better sounded with a machine.
"We recreated a grid drum sequencer," he says. "[Drummer Josh Freese] is actually touching and turning them on and off. But he's not really touching the screen. He's crossing the same laser on the back screen, which gets calibrated at sound check."
The end effect is so seamless, most people assume the band is simply pantomiming to a pre-rendered video, or has actually somehow installed a gigantic touchscreen sequencer on a backstage wall.
"We went through so much effort to make this stuff interactive and people still think it's all staged," jokes Sheridan.
Reznor pushes through a cloud of static onscreen during the band's performance of "Only."
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Problems With the Hippotizer
As with any production of this magnitude, there are also the inevitable glitches and hiccups. According to Reznor and Sheridan, many of those can be traced back to an archaic Windows machine known as the Hippotizer, as well as an antiquated lightning console that it interacts with called the Grand Ma.
At one point, during the band's recent Red Rocks, Colorado, performance the Hippotizer choked and spit out some text from the machine's video-labeling system. NIN fans immediately began dissecting still shots from a video someone had taken, and a three-page discussion ensued on NIN forums trying to decipher what the secret text meant.
"It was all just that stupid fucking Hippotizer getting the wrong trigger ... something from the lighting desk just misfired," Sheridan says.
But Reznor, who is an unabashed Mac fan, is also playful about having to partially rely on Windows boxes for some of the show's visuals.
"We purposefully put one frame of the Blue Screen of Death in this collage of static that comes up at the end of 'Great Destroyer,' and right away people caught it," he says.
For the next leg of the tour, Sheridan is working to permanently move the entire lighting and visual system over to a Mac rig running ArKaos VJ software.
Moment Factory's world of cameras. During a performance of "Terrible Lie," one camera directly records the stage and then runs that video through a special effect. That video is then re-projected back onto one of the screens, producing a cool real-time ghosting effect of the band members.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Tying Everything Together
While work on the arena show didn't officially begin until last fall, Reznor says the bones of the tour date back to his 2005 With Teeth tour.
"A trap I realized with NIN was that I could go out and play aggressive music where everyone jumps up and down. But if I wanted to try to bring in some of the other stuff I've been doing -- whether it be electronic or something ambient sounding -- it's tough to take an audience that's been trained to bang their heads to then sit back and think for a minute," he says.
So with the help of Sheridan, Reznor stumbled on the idea of using transparent screens. That system allowed him to augment his wide-ranging portfolio of music with visuals he and Sheridan created. In turn, those visuals helped tie everything together -- or at least kept people from whipping out their cellphones or walking off to grab a beer during the "slow songs."
Reznor appears backstage before the Oakland show.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Currently, Reznor and the band are on a brief two-week hiatus, before taking the Lights in the Sky tour down to South America and then weaving back up through the States, where they'll finish up the American portion in mid-December.
There are also talks between NIN and director James Cameron to film the show in 3-D ("to at least have proof when U2 rips us off next year that we did it first," Reznor says), and the band also has been in ongoing discussions with HBO for a Year Zero miniseries which would launch in conjunction with a second album and an alternate-reality game.
When asked about his future plans for touring, after the Lights in the Sky wraps up, Reznor says the next series of shows may be a different beast altogether.
"Next time might just be white lights in a club and it's about the music," he says. "Because I'll be broke and that's all I'll have."
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Jeff Han: We're Just Scratching the Surface of Multitouch
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 1:30pm EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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SAN JOSE, California -- Jeff Han has some simple advice for companies thinking about how to integrate the latest interface technology into their products: Start over.
"It's like Yoda said, you must unlearn what you've learned," he says, referring to the 40 years that the mouse and keyboard have dictated how we interact with computers.
Admittedly, that's no easy task, so the multitouch pioneer and his company, Perceptive Pixel, have devoted the better part of two years to building an entirely new multitouch framework from the ground up. Instead of simply mapping multitouch technology to familiar interfaces and devices, Han's goal is far more sweeping: To use the technology as a foundation for an entirely new operating system.
That would be an ambitious goal for anyone, but it might be within reach for Han, who until two years ago was virtually unknown outside of academia. His demonstration of a multitouch display, which was sensitive not just to one finger (or a stylus) but to each of a user's ten digits, wowed the crowd at TED in 2006 and put multitouch on the map. Since then, Han's company has put multitouch screens on CNN and the Democratic National Convention, among other places. Microsoft's multitouch-enabled table, the Surface, has been showing up in Las Vegas casinos. And Apple's iPhone has shown that multitouch can be wildly popular, leading many other companies to try adding multitouch and other innovative interfaces to their own products.
Wired.com caught up with Han shortly after he joined Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang onstage at the inaugural Nvision visual-computing conference on Monday.
Wired.com: You mentioned it in your TED talk two years ago and you brought it up again today: We've been tethered to the keyboard and mouse for close to 40 years. So how far has multitouch technology really come over the past couple years? And is it any closer to freeing us from the tyranny of the mouse and keyboard?
Jeff Han: Well, the reason why multitouch is really exciting is because … we realized immediately it's really an undiscovered country. We knew there was a lot of mileage to be had by entering this field. So, really, on a high level, I can honestly tell you we're just scratching the surface with multitouch.
The progress we've been making, and the progress other research groups and companies out there have been making, that's still seminal stuff. There's a lot more we have to figure out. Some of the really trivial things -- like taking two fingers and zooming into a picture -- that's done. But the kind of stuff we really think will unlock this technology is not just simple extensions to the keyboard and mouse stuff.
I see companies out there starting to do some multitouch stuff -- and all they do is remap to the standard way we interact with computers.
Wired.com: Yeah, it seems like today multitouch is really more of a technology that's just slapped on top of the normal interfaces we're all accustomed to.
Han: Well, there are two reasons for that. One, it's really hard to unlearn the mouse. When you've grown up and have been living and breathing the GUI and the WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing) interface, it's actually really hard to think differently. Two -- and this is why our company has been spending a lot of time and energy on the software side of things -- it turns out that no operating system right now really understands multitouch at a fundamental level.
What we've been really spending our energy on is this framework. We even have to throw away the traditional event model … and dispense with some of that lower-level machinery and pull it out. Right now, no operating system will work that way except in a graft-on format.
What we've done is essentially rebuilt that entire stack. We did it because there was enough stuff to actually pull out. We didn't want to. Frankly, nobody really wants to rebuild something like that, but we knew there would be some payoffs. It took a lot of time, but since the TED 2006 talk, that's what we've been doing -- just the fundamental behind-the-scenes stuff, the foundational work.
Wired.com: During your demos, you tend to use pretty beefy screens. You also talk a lot about how multitouch is also fundamentally about being multi-user. For the types of interfaces and user experiences you envision, are these bigger screens going to be a necessity?
Han: The thing to keep in mind with all of our work is that we're not really advocating replacements. Multitouch is natural and useful for different modes [of computing] that may be inappropriate for the keyboard and the mouse. But there's always going to be things that the keyboard and mouse excel at.
That said, we really see multitouch's potential being unlocked when you make it large. When you think of multitouch as "ubiquitous" or "pervasive" computing -- words that have been thrown around a lot in the past ten years -- ironically, there are really two ways to do such computing: Giant wall displays and personal ones that you carry with you all the time. [They are] totally different spectrums though.
Wired.com: At the time of your 2006 TED talk, you said there was very little investment flowing into multitouch. We now have a hugely successful product that has captured the attention of consumers and the tech industry alike. How does the multitouch landscape evolve from here?
Han: I think there's going to be an ecosystem out there. I don't think there's going to be one dominant player.
There's a danger, however, in that it's a bit of a gold rush land grab at the moment. It took a long time to make a GUI out of the elements of a mouse: The dropdown menus, the buttons, the dialogue box and everything else associated with it. It's going to be dangerous having multiple parties all doing this with multitouch on their own, saying we think this three-point gesture should be interpreted this way, and so on.
Wired.com: We've actually already explored whether there could be a coming patent battle over multitouch gestures as the technology gets more pervasive. So, based on those dangers you just highlighted, do you yourself patent your own gestures?
Han: A lot of our research is coming up with gestures or manipulation metaphors. We have a general framework that a lot of the stuff shakes out of, actually. In terms of patents, as a small company, it's very important for us to protect our IP. So we do actively file patents both on hardware and software sides.
Wired.com: But for the technology to become truly pervasive isn't it important to have, say, a universal series of gestures that everyone can agree on?
Han: That's a great question. In order for this ecosystem to survive, there's going to have to be some standards bodies that say even though we're competitors, let's agree on some terminology, let's agree on some sub-gestures that none of us technically own.
The problem is, multitouch is such a hyped field right now, it's very, very tempting for companies to start saying: Oh, we have multitouch, too. Now multitouch is starting to have all these different meanings that all of us don't necessarily agree on.
Our definition of multitouch -- and we're starting to use the term true multitouch -- means an arbitrary number of finger points at the same time, or styluses, or any other object really. But there are other companies that take a more constrained view. Multi means more than one in English, right? So there's a two-touch system that is out there. And they're calling it multitouch. That's terrible because those are the kind of unsynchronized efforts by different players that can really cause a lot of harm for the rest of the industry.
Wired.com: So if we're just scratching the surface with multitouch, where do you see things going? Obviously we have one very popular multitouch device: the iPhone. But the technology is also migrating to the desktop, although multitouch capable PCs seem like awkward hybrid devices. They seem sort of gimmicky.
Han: One of the things that makes us a little different from the other players out there is that we're not trying to go right to the home. Because there's still so much unknown stuff in the multitouch space, we're trying to figure out how this technology is useful for things like productivity first -- how is it useful in specialized markets. And then we hopefully learn a lot there and see how it's applicable to the rest of the consumer market.
I actually think it's very important to start using these systems not as gimmicks or for doing things like, say, ordering drinks at a restaurant. Instead, let's see how useful this will be for helping collaboration in a creative company or for info visualization or presentation.
Wired.com: Like the "Magic Wall" you built for CNN.
Han: Right. But stuff where the technology really impacts a lot of people. Honestly, those are the application areas that we're learning the most from. How does a CAD designer manipulate multiple parts of a building or engine with only his hands? Those are the tough questions. That's why we chose to go after those markets for now. Plus, by the time we get to the consumer, we won't be experimenting anymore. We'll know that this is the way to do things.
Wired.com So, aside from building a new multitouch OS from the ground up, what else have you been working on? And long term, will multitouch simply give way to multi-gesture, as in Minority Report?
Han: One of the things we're working on that we're really excited about is the fact that our devices use pressure information. They actually know how hard you're pressing on them with each of your fingers. So there's a neat thing we're going to show off in a couple months where we're using the pressure information to actually help you manage those 2D objects on the screen. You'll be able to push things and slip things underneath each other. It's extremely elegant and it actually works on single touch too.
The answer to the second question is: I hate Minority Report. I hate pure gestural interfaces because they actually work very poorly. It's been proven. The human body really needs that kind of tactile feedback. However, combining it with touch, I do believe that for a future far out there, integrating the two together may actually be more successful that each one on its own.
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Asus' Mini-Invasion Continues With Pint-Size Eee Box
Posted: August 4th, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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Asus' newest diminutive PC is out and it's awesome. The Eee Box is just a little larger than a paperback book but is undeniably cuter, with a powerful Atom processor and a price hovering right at three Benjamins.
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Photographer Documents Secret Satellites -- All 189 of Them
Posted: June 21st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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BERKELEY, California -- For most people, photographing something that isn't there might be tough. Not so for Trevor Paglen.
His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit -- despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don't exist. The Other Night Sky, on display at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum through September 14, is only a small selection from the 1,500 astrophotographs Paglen has taken thus far.
In taking these photos, Paglen is trying to draw a metaphorical connection between modern government secrecy and the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time.
"What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn't exist in orbit around Jupiter?" Paglen says.
Satellites are just the latest in Paglen's photography of supposedly nonexistent subjects. To date, he's snapped haunting images of various military sites in the Nevada deserts, "torture taxis" (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs.
The nearly vertical streak in this image shows a satellite called Keyhole 12-3 crossing the sky near the constellation of Scorpio.
Photo: Trevor PaglenWhile all of Paglen's projects are the result of meticulous research, he's also the first to admit that his photos aren't necessarily revelatory. That's by design. Like the blurry abstractions of his super-telephoto images showing secret military installations in Nevada, the tiny blips of satellites streaking across the night sky in his new series of photos are meant more as reminders rather than as documentation.
"I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy," Paglen explains. "You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons."
More significant than the discovery itself, Paglen says, was the idea that anyone with a telescope could verify it and see the same exact thing that Galileo saw -- an idea Paglen is trying to re-create in his own photographs.
"It really was analogous to a certain kind of promise of democracy," says Paglen, who sees a similar anti-authoritarian premise running through his own work.
Paglen says his most recent project is the culmination of close to two years of trial-and-error experimentation with astrophotography, untold hours of fieldwork and analysis, an ongoing collaboration with amateur astronomers, and many nights in his Berkeley backyard and at California's Mono Lake.
"Lacrosse/Onyx II Passing Through Draco (USA 69)" shows the transit of another surveillance satellite.
Photo: Trevor PaglenTo capture his images, the researcher and "experimental geographer" employs a motorized mount with various combinations of telescopes and digital and large-format film cameras. Paglen uses spy-satellite data compiled by Ted Molczan -- a renowned amateur astronomer profiled by Wired magazine in 2006 -- to predict where a given "black satellite" will be in the sky. Then he decides how he wants to compose the image.
"I'll find where a star will be in the compositional plane," he says. "Then I'll use one telescope, which is attached to a webcam, to focus on that star."
With the help of a computer program that controls the mount of the telescope and keeps it focused on the heavenly body, Paglen says he can get the telescope to swivel with the Earth's rotation.
He then uses another telescope attached to a high-end digital camera for his deep-sky shots, similar to the rig he used for his desert shots.
"I'll see the satellite in the sky, kind of know where it's going to be in the frame, then I'll open the shutter and take a long exposure of the satellite passing through."
Paglen's initial interest in the government's so-called "black projects" took shape while combing through U.S. Geological Survey archives of satellite prison photos in 2002. He noticed that many of the photo frames of prison sites were missing or, in some cases, heavily edited.
"I thought: What the hell is this? We still have blank spots on maps? We've mapped the whole structure of the cosmos and the human genome, so what's this all about?" Paglen said.
Eventually, those blank spots led Paglen to other covert subjects and turned a hobby into a full-time job -- one with a decidedly political stance.
"For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge," Paglen notes. "So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it -- something that was very aggressive and dangerous -- and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence."
Ultimately, the satellite photos are an attempt to critique that attitude. While the budget for black military operations has more than doubled in the last 10 years and the government continues to espouse the virtues of secrecy, it can't prevent interested amateur astronomers from calculating the orbital paths of spy satellites.
"The National Reconnaissance Office cannot classify Kepler's laws of planetary motion," Paglen says. "They just work ... and they're unbelievably accurate."
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Supercomputing Power Hits the Desktop, Minus the Software
Posted: June 20th, 2008, 2:50pm EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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The PC industry's two largest graphics companies released new top-of-the-line models this week. The new graphics processors will bring not just better videogame performance, but will also turn ordinary desktop PCs into the equivalent of supercomputers -- if programmers can figure out how to take advantage of the chips' massively parallel architectures.
"We're talking about every man, woman and child basically having a supercomputer on their desk," says Jon Peddie, a graphics-industry veteran and president of Jon Peddie Research.
AMD, which acquired graphics maker ATI in 2006, released two new chips, the Radeon HD 4850 and the Radeon HD 4870. Nvidia, the other dominant player in the space, unveiled its new GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 280 processors.
According to both companies, the new series of chips feature performance measured in teraflops (that's a trillion floating point operations per second), billions of transistors, hundreds of cores and new architectures that, according to industry analysts, could have a staggering effect on not only Crysis frame rates, but also how and what we use our computers for.
Indeed, cheap access to such formidable computing power could mean that, over the next few years, we will see an explosion of new independent research along with profound new discoveries, analysts say. Additionally, new consumer applications will be able to draw on the graphics processing unit (GPU) for even more eye-watering special effects and even occasionally useful visual information.
"We'll start to get things like real-time mapping from Google that incorporates all manner of real world information," says Bob O'Donnell, an analyst at IDC. "All of this is going to bubble up more and more."
As Peddie observes, it was only 11 years ago that the U.S. government spent approximately $33 million to build ASCI Red, one of the first supercomputers to achieve 1 teraflop. The new graphics chips offer similar power to the 1997-era supercomputer for a fraction of the cost.
"Now we can go down to Fry's or Best Buy and buy a graphics board that has 1 teraflop of processing power for $600 or less," says Peddie.
Getting that processing power to work for the average computer user, however, remains a challenge.
With the exception of a few games, most applications still aren't made to take advantage of the GPU's power. That's because GPUs are made for parallel processing (crunching lots of bits of data at the same time, then assembling the results all at once), whereas most current software programs are written to be executed serially (operating on one piece of data at a time, then proceeding to the next step).
That is starting change, albeit slowly, thanks to new initiatives designed to spur parallel processing.
Just last week, Khronos, the industry consortium behind the OpenGL standard, announced what it calls Open Computing Language, or OpenCL. With this new heterogeneous computing initiative, the group hopes to come up with a standardized (and universal) way of programming parallel computing tasks.
In many ways, it's the Holy Grail developers have been waiting for: a hardware-agnostic standard that unleashes the power of multi-core CPUs and GPUs using a familiar language.
Apple is throwing its weight behind parallel processing too, and last week committed to using the OpenCL specification as part of its next operating system release, Snow Leopard.
Other companies, including AMD, Nvidia, ARM, Freescale, IBM, Imagination, Nokia, Motorola, Qualcomm, Samsung and Texas Instruments have joined the OpenCL working group.
If initiatives like OpenCL gain momentum, the days of researchers applying for grants and traveling across the country to use a given university or research facility's super computer may well be at an end. Similarly, distributed computing projects like Folding@Home and Seti@Home may see an huge boost in performance by using hundreds of thousand of computers equipped with these new powerful processors.
Of course, if curing cancer or looking for aliens isn't your thing, we can also be fairly certain that Crysis will really scream on any system equipped with these new GPUs.
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Graphics Chips Gun for Supremacy in Silicon Showdown
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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Like a wisecracking sidekick who winds up stealing the movie from a too-bland lead actor, graphics processing units are edging more general-purpose central processing units out of the limelight.
"There's this conventional wisdom [that the] GPU equals games, and a fast PC is a fast CPU," says Rob Csonger, Nvidia's vice president of corporate marketing. "The truth today is the GPU is accelerating everything because everything is rendered now."
Over the past several years, graphics processing units have evolved from highly specialized components coveted by Mountain Dew-swilling Unreal Tournament devotees to high-performance computing engines used by academic researchers. The latest shift has seen yet another transformation of the GPU into a fully programmable, open-architecture chip, in some cases just as flexible as -- and packing far more parallel-processing power than -- today's general-purpose central processing units.
The evolution of the GPU has prompted changes throughout the computer industry, from PC manufacturers who are modifying systems to better take advantage of GPUs, to software makers who are adding features designed to exploit the now-ubiquitous graphics chips.
Recent demos by Adobe showing how Photoshop and Flash might make use of GPU acceleration are merely the latest in a parade of software and hardware vendors copping to the power of the GPU.
While much of the GPU market these days is still anchored to the videogame market, graphics rendering has become increasingly important to a wide range of ordinary computing tasks. On the mobile front, the iPhone and iPod Touch, both of which use a version of Imagination Technologies' PowerVR MBX mobile graphics processor core, have cemented the notion that whizzy graphics capabilities can add exponentially to user experiences -- especially on touchscreen devices. Other handset manufacturers, such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson, have also started incorporating robust 3-D graphic acceleration chips into their high-end phones. And modern operating systems, like Microsoft's Vista and Apple's Leopard, can barely open a text file without making heavy use of the GPU, thanks to their 3-D interfaces and slick visual effects.
What's more, the GPU's parallel architecture makes it well suited to a variety of modern computing tasks.
"When you look at the GPU what you're basically looking at is a highly parallel processing engine," explains Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron. While today's top-end CPUs boast four cores, GPUs have anywhere between 80 and 128 cores. That makes them particularly adept at doing tasks that require a lot of simultaneous number crunching, such as 2-D and 3-D graphics, but also cryptography, scientific modeling, transcoding HD video streams and even running financial market simulations.
Many high-end GPUs also include a video unit for faster encoding and decoding of video data, which companies like Elemental Technologies are already taking advantage of with new GPU-accelerated video-processing software.
"Ultimately, everything you now see on your computer now touches the GPU in some way or another," notes McCarron.
The GPU's increasing clout is also starting to have a profound effect on how manufacturers and chipmakers build computers.
For instance, Gateway recently introduced a budget gaming laptop, the P-6831 FX, that makes use of a mid-range GPU (the Nvidia GeForce 8800M) to compensate for a relatively anemic CPU (a 1.6-GHz Intel Core Duo) -- a strategy that gives the laptop decent performance with a budget $1,200 price tag. The laptop has been more or less sold out at Best Buy since its introduction early this year.
On the software side, consumer-oriented companies are also increasingly relying on the GPU.
Adobe recently announced that the forthcoming version of its Flash Player would start using GPU acceleration to support 3-D effects, video card acceleration and large bitmap images of up to 8,191 pixels per side.
"When you boil it down, the GPU is really just a type of CPU that is used for calculating floating point operations," says Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager for Adobe's Flash Player. "With that, you get high bandwidth, you get additional memory, and you get what's basically a really versatile processor."
Cooliris is another company that figured out how to harness the GPU, in this case for a better web-browsing experience. Working with Nvidia, the company recently debuted an application called Piclens.
Instead of relying on the 2-D interface you get when hunting down pictures and videos on YouTube, Flickr or Google, Piclens renders all of those results as a glowing tower of images that you can scroll through and zoom in and out of effortlessly.
"People get caught up in the 3-D element of [Piclens] -- the flashy element -- but I think there is also a fundamental navigation problem we're solving," says co-founder Josh Schwarzapel. That is: How do we make a dauntingly large volume of content easily searchable?
As more and more of our personal content finds its way into digital form, graphics-intensive interfaces to that data, like Piclens and Delicious Library, will look less like visual frippery and will become essential tools for navigation.
In the end, the display may not be the computer, as Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang declared in a 2002 Wired Magazine profile. But in today's computing environment, the pixel is definitely king. And that can only mean good things for the GPU's future.
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With Wireless Carriers, Breaking Up Is Still Hard to Do
Posted: May 28th, 2008, 3:40pm EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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Breaking up with your wireless provider just got a bit easier -- but as with the termination of any bad relationship, timing is everything.
Following a spate of announcements from Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile earlier this year, AT&T officially began pro-rating its early termination fees on Sunday. According to the company, instead of paying one single flat fee of $175 to jump ship, you'll now be able to shave off $5 from that amount for every month completed of your one- or two-year contract.
"We have not yet provided specifics on our new approach," an AT&T spokesperson said on Tuesday, "but we remain committed to the idea that wireless customers who leave their contract early should not pay a flat early-termination fee."
Unfortunately, this new policy does not extend to those who signed up for a contract prior to May 25, 2008.
So why the sudden change of heart? According to most wireless analysts, this newfound flexibility on the part of AT&T and the rest of the industry is largely the result of a number of pending class action lawsuits, in several states, by customers who claim they were either misled or charged excessive penalty fees.
"If you take a look at what AT&T did, they basically matched Verizon's current policy," says Current Analysis analyst William Ho. "You can argue that this is carriers being proactive against pending legislative penalties and the coming open access environment, but to me, this is really about staying competitive. With everyone else agreeing to pro-rate their termination fees, AT&T didn't want to be seen as the bad guy."
Verizon, which currently faces a $1 billion suit related to its early termination fee policy, is actually in the midst of proposing two separate remedies to the FCC, Congress and various other consumer groups.
The first is similar to what all major U.S. carriers are already planning on doing: pro-rating their ETFs over the course of a given contract. The alternate option would have carriers agreeing not to charge any termination fee during the first month of a contract; after that, all bets would be off.
Theoretically, these half-measures would give carriers some degree of wiggle room when it comes to any pending and future ETF-related lawsuits.
For years, U.S. carriers didn't seem to mind the "bad guy" label and justified early cancellation fees based on the fact that the majority of customers still purchased subsidized handsets.
Many customers rightly assume the cheap phone they get in the deal is a part of entering into a one- or two-year contract with a given carrier, but subsequently forget that breaking that contract can mean parting with a significant chunk of change.
"In essence, it's the carrot-and-stick approach," says Ho, "where the carrot is the subsidy and the stick is the early termination fee."
Things are starting to change, albeit very slowly. Currently, the ongoing ETF legal battles are being waged at the state level, but the FCC announced last week it will be holding its own hearing in mid-June to decide whether the government should in fact take over jurisdiction of the fees -- the theory being that one national policy applicable to all wireless carriers would eliminate much of the confusion and lawsuits.
In the foreseeable future, you can bet on one thing: If there's a contract or a subsidy involved when you sign up with a new carrier, expect to get whacked with some manner of ETF should you decide to walk away early. The only difference is it might not hurt as much as it used to.
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Forget the Courts — Apple May Fight Mac Clones With Tech
Posted: April 15th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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Patent experts, including an ex-Apple patent attorney, think the Cupertino company may have trouble shutting down a rival computer company selling a low-cost Mac clone.
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Programmers, DIY Types Embrace Soft, Hackable Chumby
Posted: April 15th, 2008, 6:15pm EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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The Chumby -- a soft, leather-covered internet device -- attracts many people interested in modifying its software as well as its hardware.
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High-Tech Olympic Torch Carries 5,000 Years of History
Posted: April 9th, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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The controversial Olympic torch was designed by Chinese computer-maker Lenovo, which shows off its design decisions in this gallery.
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Trademark Dispute Pits Apple vs. The Big Apple
Posted: April 2nd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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The apple logo for a New York environmental-awareness campaign provokes the ire of Apple, which says it infringes on the iPod maker's trademarks.
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Industry Giants Face Off Amid Interference Claims
Posted: March 25th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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Starved for more wireless bandwidth, a cadre of tech giants including Google, Microsoft, Motorola, Dell and HP are lobbying the FCC to deregulate more of the radio spectrum.
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Engineers Test Highly Accurate Face Recognition
Posted: March 24th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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UC Berkeley engineers are testing a new approach to face recognition that, they say, provides 90-95 percent accuracy even when part of the face is obscured.
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Intel Prepares a Quad-Core Notebook Chip
Posted: March 17th, 2008, 7:30pm EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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It will be expensive, power-hungry and overkill for most applications -- but a quad-core processor for notebooks is coming from Intel this fall.
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Apple Set to Reveal Road to Third-Party iPhone Apps
Posted: March 5th, 2008, 8:30pm EST by Bryan Gardiner
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Apple is set to release details about the widely-anticipated software development kit, or SDK, for the iPhone on Thursday.
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Will New Blu-ray Drives Suck Your Laptop Battery Dry?
Posted: February 28th, 2008, 7:30pm EST by Bryan Gardiner
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One reason Blu-ray drives haven't shown up in many notebook PCs may be that early versions of the drives are power hogs, eating up so much battery life that you might only get halfway through a movie before needing to plug in.
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Can Apple Patent the Pinch? Experts Say It's Possible
Posted: February 22nd, 2008, 9:00pm EST by Bryan Gardiner
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Apple has filed many patent applications relating to multitouch interfaces like that found on the iPhone -- including patents on the "pinch" gesture used to zoom in and out. As other manufacturers bring multitouch devices to market, Apple's patent applications could prove a major stumbling block.
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Want iPhone Apps? Get Ready to Shop in iTunes
Posted: February 15th, 2008, 12:00am EST by Bryan Gardiner
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When it releases the iPhone software development kit later this month, Apple will likely use iTunes as the means of distributing third-party software. That has programmers excited, because of iTunes' massive audience -- but also nervous about the amount of control Apple will have.
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FCC Auction Ensures Open Access — If in Name Only
Posted: February 1st, 2008, 8:00pm EST by Bryan Gardiner
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An anonymous bidder has met the reserve price for the so-called C-block of 700 MHz in the FCC's ongoing auction, virtually guaranteeing that the FCC's open-access conditions will be met. Open-access advocates greeted the news with mixed reactions.
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Consumers Not Splurging on HDTVs for the Super Bowl
Posted: January 31st, 2008, 6:40pm EST by Bryan Gardiner
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The week leading up to the Super Bowl is often a banner week for TV sales, but recent data suggest that sales of high-definition TVs may be leveling off.
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Apple Prohibits iTunes Movie Rentals on Fifth-Generation and Older iPods
Posted: January 29th, 2008, 3:00pm EST by Bryan Gardiner
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Apple's new video-rental service requires a late-model iPod or iPhone, customers have discovered. Video rentals from iTunes won't play on iPods that predate the latest models, released in September 2007.
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Solid-State Drives May Be Trendy, But Consumers Aren't Buying It
Posted: January 25th, 2008, 8:15pm EST by Bryan Gardiner
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Solid-state drives are increasingly an option for laptop purchasers -- but while manufacturers are pushing the option, few consumers are taking the bait.
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FAQ: Inside the FCC's High-Stakes 700-MHz Spectrum Auction
Posted: January 24th, 2008, 6:00pm EST by Bryan Gardiner
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The FCC auction of 700-MHz spectrum, which started January 24, is one of the biggest sell-offs of radio spectrum in years, and it's expected to raise at least $10 billion. Wired News explains what's at stake with this list of questions and answers.
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Learning From Failure: Apple's Most Notorious Flops
Posted: January 23rd, 2008, 9:00pm EST by Bryan Gardiner
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The Apple Macintosh, 24 years old as of Jan. 24, is one of the great computer success stories of all time. But Apple has had its share of duds and flops, as this gallery of failed Apple products shows.
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Apple's 'Green' Notebook Doesn't Impress Environmentalists
Posted: January 16th, 2008, 7:20pm EST by Bryan Gardiner
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When Steve Jobs announced the MacBook Air at Macworld, he touted its environmentally friendly construction. Greenpeace welcomed the new eco-talk, but said Apple could still be doing more. -
CES 2008: Wrapping Up Another Year of Gadget Glut
Posted: January 11th, 2008, 11:30am EST by Bryan Gardiner
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From a humongous HDTV to Bill Gates' date with Slash, the annual orgy of consumer electronics delivers plenty of surprises. Enjoy a roundup of the biggest hits and misses. -
Apple MacWorld Highlights to Include Mac Upgrades, iPhone Apps
Posted: January 8th, 2008, 9:00pm EST by Bryan Gardiner
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Apple is playing its usual, tight-lipped corporate self, but ultraslim MacBook tablets, movie rentals, an Apple TV renewal of some sort, HD content and ditching plastic cases for aluminum also look to be on the docket.