Trillion-dollar Market for Gadgets!!

The Consumer Electronics Association predicted, just prior to opening of the CES, that the market of consumer Electronics devices would reach $964 billion and may even hit the magic number of a trillion dollars! That would be a rise of 10% in the sale of mobile phones, computers, television sets and other items.Smartphones, touchscreen tablet computers, electronic book readers and flat-panel liquid crystal display (LCD) television sets are likely to push this movement. The trends seen by them are as follows.


Smartphones, not mobile phone in general, will rise. tablets will double  in sales this year to 30 million units. eReaders like the Kindle will still be strong with shipments of 20 million worldwide.Mobile computers, including tablets, will reach $220 billion out of a PC sales volume of $316 billion. desktop share is going to be only $96 billion out of that.

Web-connected televisions are set to a continuous growth. By 2014 about 52% of all TVs sold will be web capable.It was only 9% last year, 2010. Apps are beginning to get anywhere, from smartphones to tablet computers to TV sets.Half the mobile device owners download and use apps covering areas like communications, weather, maps, music, news, games and social networking. we are in exciting times, alright!

AFP: Trillion-dollar forecast for gadget sales

Tablets Everywhere in CES

We have been discussing, for some time now, how everybody seems to have discovered tablets as the new computing devices segment. The latest CES show had something like 100 tablets on show. Can any market really take this much diversity! Not so, it is already being predicted that consolidation is already here and some of these exhibits may not even get manufactured and come into the market.That certainly is a very highly likely scenario.

What is really interesting though, computing has found another format. This is something people are going to use without abandoning the workhorses, the desktops and the laptops. Eventually the tablets may evolve into the only form of computation people prefer but that is going to be some time away!
With CES raining tablets, some will get flooded out - Computerworld

Freescale quad-core for CE space

Freescale is going to offer pretty sophisticated quad-core processors for high-end consumer electronic devices. And you thought consumer electronics were high end toys for grown ups!  Actually, the way these things have grown, particularly smartphones came on the scene, they need a lot of processing power. What with CE devices doing recording/playback of 3D video, augmented reality, mobile gaming and driver-information systems. HD video combined with 3D is a true heavy load on any processing system, considering you need real time MPEG compression/decompression (particularly the H.264), lightning speeds are called for here.  What is interesting is that the company's new i.MX6 series offers three price/performance points on the same ISA. Thus designers can design devices once and get higher performance versions simply by moving the design to the higher performance processor. These levels will be met by one, two and four core models.


Freescale aims quad-core at consumer apps

Intel Sandy Bridge Processor and Chipset Lineups

Intel released a range of processors and a set of chipsets to support them in building systems this week.This being called the second generation of the core micro-architecture.Features of this micro-architecture (known as the Sandy Bridge) include getting the memory controller, the PCI Express (PCIe) controller, and video functions all located within the processor die. These then can share data and power much more easily. The micro-architecture will scale from the smallest netbooks to the biggest servers. What these push performance will buy are a wide variety of actions while consuming less power. Media processing features have been polished up. Built-in DirectX 10.1 capabilities to new programming that Intel has promised will considerably improve video transcoding, photo editing, and other similar tasks (such as watching Blu-ray 3D content). A major revamping of Turbo Boost has been done to boost performance for short periods.New Advanced Vector Extensions will push floating point–intensive application performance.


Intel Sandy Bridge Processor and Chipset Lineups | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

Windows 7 Tablet PC in Early 2011

There's a rush for tablets. It was only a question of time before somebody was going to use Windows 7 on it. Android looks like a hands down winner in Tablets beside the Apple operating system. It will be interesting to see how it fares in this segment. Beyond the mainstream Wintel platforms Windows have not made much of a dent so far. Let's watch!

IN MEDIA Announces $399 Windows 7 Tablet PC, Shipping Early 2011

The Press Association: New ultra-fast processor unveiled

Dr Wim Vanderbauwhede, of the University of Glasgow, and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Lowell have created a processor that has 1000 execution units or cores. This would be the fastest processor as of now. Intel also has announced its plans to create a thousand core monster soon.


In a true MIMD fashion, they have sliced up a large FPGA into execution units which can handle thousand different instruction streams. Dr Vanderbauwhede justifies the use of FPGAs thus;  "FPGAs are not used within standard computers because they are fairly difficult to program but their processing power is huge while their energy consumption is very small because they are so much quicker - so they are also a greener option."


As a benchmark, the chip was used to run a MPEG movie algorithm and it achieved a throughput of 5 Gigabytes per second. That would be at least 20x faster than current desktop performance. the team is hoping to present the findings at the International Symposium on Applied Reconfigurable Computing in March this year. What would be interesting to find out would be how do they make it all work. Memory contention, system bus bandwidth, communication overheads, cache coherence etc. are some relevant problems.

New ultra-fast processor unveiled

E-Book Boom Changes Book Selling And Publishing

This holiday season electronic books sold more than printed books sales on-line. That eBooks have gained a momentum as it brings in the change in reading habits, is without a doubt. The referenced article below had a interesting take on why  things are really changing. Until the tablets came out, an argument offered for printed books was that parents would like to introduce kids with very well illustrated books. Now we have an equivalent to a living book, in almost the same format as a printed book. A tablet is handled much like a book yet can bring in higher value add in terms of living illustration! Illustrations that could be animated, cartoons, videos, movies and what have you! There's no doubt printed books would continue for some time, until a generation who started their reading with tablets/eReaders takes over and the age of the Gutenberg would be over!

E-Book Boom Changes Book Selling And Publishing : NPR