It seems that Intel will be implementing the new Penryn 45 nm CPUs using a HighK material + Metal Gate manufacturing process. While this has been in the air for some time (I’ve reported on this back in 2005 and I believe I’ve heard it even before), it seems that they have resolved issues that would make these materials suitable for mass production and be reliable enough as market devices. The material that will replace the silicon dioxide is called hafnium and the article speculates it could increase the K factor from 3.9 to something between 15 and 40. This is important as processors get fabricated at smaller and smaller dimensions the distance between the silicon substrate and the gate diminishes as well and up to now this was the primary leakage that was holding out processor evolution. With Penryn coming up in the second half of this year, it’ll give Intel a significant boost, allowing for more energy savings, an expanded instruction set with SSE4 and perhaps a clock increase as well. What are AMD and IBM cooking in their foundries and labs is also interesting but it seems Intel has beaten them to the clock but they are a close behind. This is great for the consumer as Intel knows it has to capitalize on this research as soon as possible in order to get the money invested in it as soon as possible and before other manufacturers get to do the same. Even if this is not a revolution in what a transistor is or how it executes its logic, it gives a breath of fresh air and additional period of exploitation as the classical performance race drives the industry.
I think I’ll wait for this Penryn beast, in the mean time check out the new SSE4 instruction set.

Dopo Yoghi anch’io ho fatto il test, avreì preferito essere Silver Surfer ma anche Hulk non scherza
Your results:
You are Hulk

Hulk 95% Green Lantern 90% The Flash 80% Robin 75% Supergirl 60% Spider-Man 55% Superman 50% Iron Man 50% Batman 40% Wonder Woman 30% Catwoman 30%

You are a wanderer with amazing strength.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Sigmalab stands behind the petition to open up iPhone to third party applications. We realize that there is no concrete news yet but we feel a strong signal to Apple is in order.

I have seen the movies. I have seen the keynote. Like always Jobs gives a stunning show, a great comeback after the one where people felt he didn’t give his best. He’s back.
It’s THE most interesting piece of mobile device I have seen, ever.

I as a geek, phone user, mp3 wannabe, net-a-holic anonymous, want this baby (last time I was almost as interested was for the Sony Ericsson K750.)

I do have some technical issues with it like the fact that I didn’t notice support for playing radio but I would guess you could get an external one, like for the iPod’s. I haven’t noticed if it can act as a recording device. No, it’s not UMTS nor it has a self looking camera but I don’t feel the need for those features. Battery could be an issue. No apparent external memory slots but where did you see a mobile phone with 4/8 GB, even with memory sticks?
I don’t know what the hardware inside is but it seems to be able to cope with this mobile version of OSX. My guess is XScale (Intel) (link) but it might as well be something coming from Freescale (former Motorola, Apple has known to have had some experience with this company in the past ) or it could be a whole new design by PortalPlayer. My guess also is that they have a (awesome) graphic accelerator and it looks like nVidia is involved as it seems they want to acquire PortalPlayer. I somehow would have thought that ATI might provide as they too have graphic accelerators for mobile devices but it seems Apple has gone the other way (non AMD).

I now put my developers hat on and ask some questions. Will average Joe’s be able to develop applications for this baby, there was no mention of installing apps? Will Apple force us to use Objective C (which starts to feature some nice stuff like garbage collection in version 2.0, can’t wait to check it out) or will we be able to use more traditional methods as well, namely Java and embedded C/C++? Will the SDK’s be free? Will there be any SDK’s?
I really (really, really, really) hope for a positive reply on the Java side and expect a full CDC implementation with all the niceties that the SavaJe Jasper S20 had, including the JSR-209 spec. Who knows, maybe even full Java would be possible? As JavaMe (or phoneMe ) went GPL I guess Apple will probably license it from Sun or some other vendor in order to keep the iPhone software as closed as possible and keep the competitive edge. I also believe users should be able to upgrade their Java VM (unlike on the Windows Mobile platform where generally devices ship with a limited java implementation and you need to get a license from IBM a decent Java for Windows Mobile – J9) which begs again the question, why didn’t Jobs mention if application can be installed on iPhone?

My guess is that the SDK’s are simply not quite ready or in-house only so he decided to wait to deliver yet another great presentation dedicated to developers. It would have been difficult to keep iPhone a top secret project if SDK’s were flying around before it got announced. In the end I think Jobs knows very well how third party apps are essential to make a computing platform many times more appealing that anything Apple can cook by itself. But… there is a chance (slim) that Apple will want to keep this system closed. In the end, is the iPhone a computing platform, a Smartphone or a (not quite the average) consumer device?
A risk that might prevent an Open iPhone (as in “open to develop for”)? Putting too many apps might slow down the device so that it might start performing poorly which would be a big problem for real time device like a phone – but I doubt this. (this also begs the question, is the Mach kernel (is it really Mach?) really that fine tuned to be a real time os?). Or, and this is more scary, what if Apple intends to completely control and lock the device? This is essential in their copy protection scheme of things and it works really great in their music business.
To me the binomial iPod+iTunes sucks (because of DRM and application lock in) this might prove to be THE excuse not to buy one (the same that makes me NOT want to buy an iPod, there I’ve said it).

Jobs said they want to sell 10 Million devices, he probably thinks (and he’s right) this is conservative and the factories are most likely already working full steam to meet the avalanche of orders that are likely to pour so they can meet demand.

Are these devices fairly priced? To me, as a consumer, it sounds an excellent price-value offer (and Foletto agrees on his blog) but are we really sure Apple wants to get rich from selling the iPhone alone? I don’t think so. My suspect even is that it’s either below production cost or with margins of profit that are way below other hi-tech phones.
My guess is that Apple counts on the profits that sales from iTunes might bring back, even cingular is probably subsidizing the device but gaining a 2 year subscription, and it’s another question how much would an iPhone cost without operator contract (for me, a preferable way to get a phone).

If so I’m starting to get a serious itch on how much access will developers get to these devices.

All of these are only speculations.

Anyhow, I would still want one. My extra wishes would be (in this order) to be able to voice record, to have radio integrated with recording capabilities (recording in MP3 a must, all others optional), perhaps a second frontal camera for video conferencing, 3MP camera, video capture, GPS, and a Carbon Nanotube Super Capacitor battery!

If you looked the keynote AND had the patience to read this way too long and speculative blog entry you are in as bad condition as we are

Get a nice long sleep, it was a long day.

After having talked about it I have finally decided to kick start jspart. There’s nothing too functional there yet but the model is there and the DAO layer should be almost ready and the first implementation is based on JPA. The project is published on Google Code and you can visit the project page here. I’ve also opened a newsgroup on Google Groups and I hope to see interesting discussion that may bring the project design forward. The project builds with maven 2 so some experience with it is necessary and if you have any problems please use the newsgroup and I’ll try to address any issues. Any good discussion will finish in the Wiki and if you have a bug to report please use the issue tracker. So if you’re interested:

svn checkout http://jspart.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ jspart

This is a nice roundup of 10 Web 2.0 services. What I like about this is that it’s not about sizzling graphical interface but about delivering services, mashups and altogether a better user experience which is what Web 2.0 is all about.

I’ve finally uninstalled Windows Vista RC1. I’ve had fears not to ruin my MBR and to be left without my normal Windows partition but all went ok following these instructions. All in all I haven’t used Vista too much but what I saw was nice.

Surfing on web, I found this interesting article, it describes the Garbage Collection on the JVM:

The Garbage Collector deallocates all objects with zero references when it wants!!

I always believed this was true and now I have evidence; Thanks Riccardo Pietrucci.

Sounds like a very nice idea. Instead of starting a css design from scratch include this css file and have the rendering between different browsers behave more alike.

The foundational YUI Reset CSS file creates a level playing field across A-grade browsers and provides a sound foundation upon which you can explicitly declare your intentions. It normalizes the default rendering of all HTML elements, for example it sets margin, padding, and border to 0, font sizes to YUI Font’s default, italic and bold styles to normal, and list-style to none.