Blackmagic Computers

One of the common criticisms levied against Nintendo platforms is that they don’t get enough third-party support. Instead, the majority of the best-selling games on both the Wii and DS are made by Nintendo. The company is looking to change all of that, however, with its recently unveiled 3DS.

It has been a very busy day for the WiGig Alliance, which is attempting to develop a specification for next-generation wireless devices. Earlier today, the group announced the 1.0 version of its spec, which would use a chunk of spectrum at 60GHz, achieve data rates of up to 7Gbps, and retain backwards compatibility with current-generation WiFi devices. In an effort to show that support for the spec is building, WiGig also announced that it has forged a cooperation agreement with the WiFi Alliance, which promotes the current generation of wireless networking devices, and added networking giant Cisco to its board of directors.

Right now, the spec itself is only available to companies that have joined the WiGig Alliance, although there are details about it scattered through various pages on the group’s site. For one, compatible devices will be able to communicate on three frequencies: the 2.4GHz chunk of the spectrum used by 802.11b/g devices, the 5GHz region used by 802.11n, and the new, 60GHz area of the spectrum that is currently not in use. WiGig documentation indicates that there’s a lot of unlicensed space in that region, which gives it more options for avoiding interference when transmitting. That may be needed, as there is one HD video spec called Wireless HD that plans on broadcasting there as well (we covered Wireless HD briefly in our roundup of wireless tech).

But the bigger problem with the 60GHz region of the spectrum is simply that signals don’t travel as far and are more prone to being absorbed by intervening devices. WiGig plans on getting around that by using a technique called beamforming. This requires multiple transmitters; once a recipient’s position is known, the signal is sent from each transmitter with slight delays in timing needed to ensure that it causes a constructive interference pattern at the destination. Implement this properly, and WiGig promises decent signal out beyond 10 meters.

None of the previous wireless technologies have ever lived up to their promised throughputs, but, in general, a faster theoretical rate has turned out to provide better performance. With a potential throughput about 10 times that of 802.11n, WiGig seems likely to enable better speeds, provided that the beamforming technology adequately deals with any broadcast distance issues.

Existing WiFi tech, however, easily provides sufficient head room to handle the speed of incoming broadband connections, which primarily makes WiGig interesting from what it may enable within a home LAN. Home networks are becoming ever more sophisticated, with various file-serving and consuming devices, like NAS boxes, HDTVs, DVRs, and the like. Given that most of this hardware doesn’t move around much, it may be easier to arrange the devices so that throughput is a bit closer to the theoretical maximum.

As we noted above, however, there are a number of other wireless protocols in the works for transmitting HD material. WiGig has some significant advantages, in that it is both more general, and is backwards compatible with earlier devices. It’s also royalty-free, and the Alliance promises that it will be possible to create low-power implementations suitable for portable devices.

But the biggest advantage the group has may be in its backers. Although Cisco has just signed on, WiGig members also include Atheros and Broadcom, which make a lot of the current-generation hardware. Intel and AMD are both on board, as is Dell, a handful of cellular companies, and some consumer electronics makers. Overall, it seems like a broad base of support, and having a completed spec should allow some of them to start designing compatible gear.

Whether we’ll actually see any gear in the near future is a different question entirely, and one that’s tough to answer without detailed knowledge of the spec and what it would take to implement it. Even if the hardware appears soon, it may take a while to actually have an impact. Wireless-N devices were slow to take off as many companies waited for at least a draft form of an IEEE-sanctioned spec, and have only recently started displacing earlier generation hardware.

AMD and Intel are both taking to the stage at this week’s Computex to talk up their plans for the next major turn of Sutherland’s wheel of (graphics) reincarnation, a turn that happens at 32nm for both companies. At this point, graphics processing moves back onto the same die as the processor, although it still keeps most of the specialized hardware that characterizes its less-integrated incarnations. (A full turn of the wheel, when graphics hardware becomes more fully generalized and less distinguishable from general-purpose CPU hardware, is still a bit further off.)

AMD gave a demo of its upcoming Llano part, which will boast a fully DirectX 11-compatible GPU integrated onto a 32nm CPU die come early 2011. Llano will be part of AMD’s first wave of 32nm parts, and in this respect AMD lags Intel significantly, with the latter being on 32nm already. Llano represents the first real “Fusion” product for AMD, but it appears to be fusion in its crudest form—take one GPU and one CPU, and put them on the same piece of silicon, along with a memory controller and some I/O.

AMD’s Fusion slides, reproduced here at Engadget (I saw a similar presentation at the Netbook Summit last week), frame the GPU part as an example of heterogeneous multiprocessing—a large array of small vector cores alongside a small number of much larger general-purpose cores. But the fact that these vector cores are non-x86 and will look to the OS like an ATI GPU indicate that this really is a GPU that has been put on the same die. (Until the vector cores and the general-purpose cores can run the same code, all this heterogeneous chip multiprocessing stuff is fancy talk for “we put a CPU and a GPU on the same die.”)

(As an aside, what’s most remarkable to me about Fusion is how little the big picture has changed since 2006. Everything about what they’ve announced so far has been in the cards since shortly after the ATI acquisition, and while the dates have been pushed back on AMD’s roadmaps, my initial analysis of Fusion still stands.)

Intel is taking a similar approach with Sandy Bridge, which is its second-generation family of chips on 32nm (the “tick” in its tick-tock model). Also due out in early 2011, Sandy Bridge will combine Intel’s first native 32nm microarchitecture—supposedly a major advance vs. Nehalem—with a GPU and a northbridge. Architectural details are scarce for both the CPU and GPU sides of Sandy Bridge, but Intel is making big claims for performance boosts in both components.

A major repartition

For both AMD and Intel, GPUs will move on-die in budget and mobile clients first, because those segments are more cost-sensitive and less performance-sensitive. In other words, the market wants cheaper, not necessarily faster. But in the case of the transition to Sandy Bridge and Llano, the market will actually get both.

For the first time in the history of the mainstream x86 client, the CPU, GPU, and memory controller will all live on the same die. This is important, because it’s going drive up bandwidth and drive down latency, so that the CPU and GPU will both benefit from a closer coupling between both one another and main memory. This should give both Intel’s and AMD’s mobile platforms a real boost compared to the current generation.

Right now, Intel’s current 32nm client platform is a bit of a downgrade from the 45nm server platform in at least one respect, because the latter benefits from a superior system architecture—the memory controller is on the die with the CPU, and a discrete GPU can be tightly coupled as a coprocessor by virtue of the fact that it’s connected directly to the CPU socket. The mobile architecture, in contrast, is a standard CPU + Northbridge/IGP architecture of the kind that we’ve had years, but with both the CPU and Northbridge/IGP in the same package and socket. As a result, the Westemere client platform doesn’t get the same memory latency and bandwidth advantages as the Nehalem platform, because it doesn’t have an on-die memory controller.

But when the memory controller moves back onto the CPU die and takes the GPU with it, that’s going to give an instant, one-time boost to the overall platform’s performance and efficiency. In the case of both Intel and AMD, this boost should be large enough that, if you can hold off on your next laptop upgrade until next year, you should. These kinds of discontinuities, where a major, disruptive repartitioning of the standard system architecture drives a one-off performance boost, are quite rare. They’re worth holding out for if you can manage it.

Intel’s Mooley Eden has claimed that Sandy Bridge will bring greater than a 4x boost to performance, all at once. As with all claims about unreleased hardware, this is to be taken with a grain of salt, but the fact that Eden is even willing to put these claims out there is indicative of the impact that will come from having all of those components under one roof. (Some of that boost is also supposed to come from various unspecified yet allegedly dramatic microarchitectural tricks. More details on that when we get them, though.)

NVIDIA left out? Not quite.

When the music stops and the GPU and CPU land on the same die, you might think that there’s one company that will be left without a chair. I’m talking, of course, about NVIDIA. But interestingly enough, what technology taketh away, it can giveth back—and NVIDIA will probably get a new lease on life.

Sandy Bridge is rumored to have an on-die PCIe controller (2.0 in mobile, 3.0 in desktop), and this will be perfect for discrete graphics, both mobile and desktop. If it does turn out that there is on-die PCIe across segments with Sandy Bridge, then Intel has just rolled out the red carpet for NVIDIA to come in with a solid GPU-as-coprocessor that doesn’t need much in the way of Optimus-style trickery to provide a very efficient performance boost. Indeed, for my money, a Sandy Bridge + discrete NVIDIA combo will be the premium mobile platform to beat next year, and I personally can’t wait until it comes to the MacBook Air (my laptop of choice).

AMD could surprise us though, because the platform repartitioning will give AMD the chance to do some good system-level engineering and really integrate its CPU/GPU combo with its discrete GPU in ways that are only feasible when both the CPU and discrete GPU maker are one and the same.

Between Llano and Sandy Bridge, 2011 will be a great year for laptops, so if you can hold out until then, you’ll be rewarded with a major upgrade over whatever you’re carrying now.

As AT&T Wireless CEO Ralph de la Vega has hinted at for months, AT&T announced this morning a major overhaul to its smartphone data plans. AT&T will now offer two-tiered data plan pricing, with a top cap set at 2GB. Though most users should save money, according to AT&T’s research, users that relied on unlimited data will be paying more.

The company has also announced that a long-awaited tethering plan will for the first time be available to iPhone users, about a year after tethering functionality was enabled in last year’s iPhone OS 3.0 upgrade. iPhone tethering will become a reality “this summer” with the iPhone OS 4.0 upgrade; curiously, the new pricing plans go into effect the exact same day that Steve Jobs is expected to announce the next revision of the iPhone at WWDC. Along with the new smartphone plans, AT&T is also capping iPad 3G users at 2GB per month, effectively wiping out the “amazing” pricing that Steve Jobs announced back in January after only one month of iPad 3G availability.

“To give more people the opportunity to experience the benefits [of mobile broadband], we’re breaking free from the traditional ‘one-size-fits-all’ pricing model and making the mobile Internet more affordable to a greater number of people,” said de la Vega in a statement. De la Vega and other mobile CEOs have been suggesting for a while now that “unlimited” plans weren’t tenable with the growing tide of smartphones and other data devices. The good news is that these changes should offer some savings for a lot of users; the bad news is that some of the changes make AT&T’s data far more expensive compared to plans from other carriers.

Tiered pricing

AT&T will now offer a lower-end data plan, called DataPlus, for $15 per month. Users on this plan get 200MB to use for one month, and those that go over will be given an additional 200MB for another $15. According to AT&T’s analysis, 65 percent of its smartphone customers use less than 200MB on average. Checking around the Orbiting HQ, all but one of us with an iPhone on AT&T fall into this category.

The new high-end plan, called DataPro, gets you 2GB of data use for $25 per month. If you go over 2GB, you’ll pay $10 for each 1GB increment. For example, if you use 3.5GB, you’ll pay $25 + 10 + 10, or $45 for the month. AT&T is not offering an unlimited data tier at any price. The company says that 98 percent of its customers use less than 2GB of data, so among these two plans, all but the heaviest data users should theoretically save on their monthly bill…

…unless you are interested in the new smartphone tethering plan. AT&T will charge you an additional $20 to use your smartphone for wireless data use with a laptop or other device. However, tethering can only be combined with the 2GB DataPro plan, and the $20 per month charge doesn’t include any extra data allowance. There are no pay-as-you-go options for tethering; It’s $45 per month for 2GB total usage (with $10 per GB overage) or no tethering at all.

These pricing plans go into effect on June 7 for all new AT&T customers signing up for new contracts, and current users can switch to the new plans without a contract extension. Those that are currently on a two-year contract for a $30 per month unlimited data plan can continue to use it, and can even renew their contract and keep the same data plan as long as they continue to use the same device.

At first glance, it appears that heavy users could just stay with their old plan and keep on using up to 40 percent of the data traffic on AT&T’s network. If you want tethering on your iPhone or other smartphone, however, you’ll have to switch to a new plan. And once you switch, you can’t go back.

To help mitigate the sting somewhat, AT&T is offering free access for all smartphone users to its network of over 20,000 branded WiFi hotspots around the country. AT&T has offered this to iPhone users for some time, so this is nothing new for them.

iPad downside

iPad WiFi + 3G users, who were sold the promise of unlimited data for $30, might be in for the biggest shock by these pricing changes. Just a month after the iPad WiFi + 3G went on sale, AT&T is pulling the $29.99 unlimited data plan and replacing it with a $25, 2GB per month plan.

Those that are currently signed up for a $29.99 unlimited plan will continue to be renewed at that rate. However, if you cancel that plan for any reason, you will not be able to sign up for it again—2GB for $25 will be your only option.

“For $25, we’re providing customers with a large amount of data,” AT&T spokesperson Seth Bloom told Ars. “We believe that 2GB of data on the 3G network will be plenty for most customers, especially since based on the trends we’ve seen thus far, iPad customers tend to use WiFi a lot.”

Inexplicably, the company is keeping the $14.99, 250MB per month plan for the iPad. “We have a unique pricing model for iPad, as we do for other emerging devices that don’t require a contract term or commitment,” explained Bloom. However, it makes the low 200MB cap on the DataPlus smartphone plan seem questionable.

To be fair, prepaid data pricing from the likes of Verizon or Virgin Mobile is quite a bit more expensive (Verizon charges $30 for one week of 3G data access with a 300MB cap), so AT&T’s pricing with respect to the iPad isn’t that bad in comparison. However, there are no monthly contract options, nor are there options to share that data allowance with an existing data plan. And the one-month pricing switcharoo is, we expect, going to leave a very bad taste in a lot of users’ mouths.

Anti-consumer?

So far, it seems that most users could end up paying less. But not everyone thinks AT&T’s new plans are a good deal for consumers.

“While AT&T asserts that its high-end 2GB cap will only impact the heaviest users, the fact is that today’s heavy user is tomorrow’s average user,” Free Press policy counsel M. Chris Riley said in a statement. “Internet overcharging schemes like the one AT&T proposes will discourage innovative new uses and stifle healthy growth in the mobile broadband economy. It is price gouging for AT&T to charge the low-end users $15 per 200MB, and to charge $20 for tethering capability even if no additional capacity is used. This pricing system is clearly divorced from the actual underlying cost of service.”

Let’s consider the data plans further. The 200MB cap on the low-end DataPlus tier effectively makes the price per gigabyte $76.80. But users on that plan can only get an additional 200MB allotment for another $15; they can’t opt for an additional 1GB for $10 like users of the DataPro plan.

The Data Pro plan is effectively $12.50 per gigabyte, with $10 per gigabyte for each additional gigabyte. That’s far more reasonable than what AT&T is charging for the DataPlus plan, and accomplishes AT&T’s goal of curbing the abnormally high use of a small percentage of users. For comparison, however, smartphone data plans from Verizon are $29.99 with a 5GB cap, making the effective price per gigabyte just $6. So while AT&T may charge you less, you’re also getting far less than what the competition offers.

And comparing total monthly plan costs, Sprint offers a great deal as well. While AT&T smartphone users can have a bill as low as $54.99 with the new data options combined with the cheapest calling plan, Sprint customers can get unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling, unlimited SMS and MMS, and unlimited data for $69.99. “With the latest phones delivering capabilities never before offered on a wireless device, customers are using more data, not less,” Sprint spokesperson Emmy Anderson told Ars. “With Sprint Everything Data plans, there’s no need to get out a calculator to tally up prices for each feature or guess how much data you’ll use in a month.”

The tethering pricing is also a raw deal for consumers. US iPhone users that have been waiting for a year may gladly pay the extra $20 per month fee, even as users in other countries have been tethering for a while without issue—some for no additional charge. But that doesn’t make it a good deal, even though other carriers, like Verizon, also charge an additional fee for tethering. Verizon charges just $15 additional per month, it also includes a 5GB monthly allowance. And while AT&T effectively charges 1¢ for each extra MB over the 2GB cap, Verizon only charges 5¢ per MB—and you don’t have to buy extra data in 1GB chunks.

The tethering pricing seems even worse compared to Android phones, which can convert to a mini-WiFi hotspot for free using an application. Essentially, all smartphone users are effectively paying for a monthly allotment of data—why should it matter if those bits go directly to a smartphone app or to your laptop? If you ask us, it shouldn’t.

Wireless broadband capacity may arguably be a somewhat scarce commodity—the FCC and wireless carriers have been arguing that more spectrum is needed to serve the needs of an increasingly wireless population in the US. AT&T’s new pricing plans will definitely save money for a variety of users in the long run, and may help limit the network use of heavy users. But some users—those who need only occasional tethering, for instance—are definitely going to be paying more, and getting a lot less in return.

UPDATE: AT&T spokesperson Seth Bloom just informed us that iPhone users will have some additional tools to help keep track of data use beyond checking usage under Settings or looking it up online. Like the iPad, the iPhone will warn users when approaching data limits—at 60, 90, and 100 percent of your package allotment, and at 75 and 100 percent of your overage allotment. Other smartphone users can get text messages for these warnings, and if an e-mail address is on file, you can get e-mail warnings as well.

Furthermore, Bloom noted that you can go online and switch plans as needed, in some cases applying DataPro pricing proactively for the billing period to help you avoid overage fees. For those that need occasional high data use and/or tethering, the option is effectively there—it just requires some manual management on your part to switch plans back and forth.

Research scientist Jack Kassewitz has found that the iPad’s touch-based interface is so intuitive that even some nonhuman species can use it. In this case, that species happens to be dolphins. Kassewitz is using iPads with custom-developed software to help facilitate two-way communication between humans and dolphins.

Kassewitz has worked for years studying the behavior and communication patterns of dolphins. Numerous studies on dolphin language show signs of advanced intelligence, and it is believed that the high-frequency sounds dolphins make underwater are capable of communicating information that is holographic in nature. Since humans don’t communicate natively with holograms, Kassewitz is currently working on a project to build a symbolic language that dolphins and humans can use to communicate with one another.

Kassewitz searched for nearly two years to find a touchscreen device that dolphins could reliably activate with their rostrum (or beak), while still being powerful enough to record or play back the high frequency sounds associated with dolphin language and durable enough to work in underwater environments. He had originally settled on the Panasonic Toughbook, but recently began evaluating the iPad as an alternative.

The iPad is suited to Kassewitz’s research in a number of ways. “It’s small and lightweight,” Kassewitz told Ars. “It’s very forgiving. For example, if I turn it the ‘wrong’ way, it turns itself back the ‘right’ way. And the iPhone OS system is fast—more than fast enough for my use.”

Kassewitz is currently using a sealable bag that protects the iPad underwater to depths of a few feet, though he is also working with Otterbox to make something more robust and with better anti-glare capabilities to make it easier for the dolphins to see the screen. Bluetooth allows him to connect to speakers to “hear” the underwater dolphin speech, and he can view a spectrograph of the sounds on the iPad’s screen.

Kassewitz is also taking advantage of the undocumented USB audio capabilities of the iPad Camera Connection Kit to interface with some specialized audio recording equipment. He uses a series of underwater microphones (or hydrophones) to record the unique sound patterns of dolphin speech made while interacting with the iPad, to try and determine what patterns are associated with symbols displayed on the screen. “We think that once the dolphins get the hang of the touchscreen, we can let them choose from a wide assortment of symbols to represent objects, actions, and even emotions,” Kassewitz said. He believes that his team will then be able to develop a rudimentary symbolic language.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time, just trying to understand dolphins as a species,” Kassewitz told Ars. “One of the things I am convinced of is that dolphins are as frustrated with us as we are with them in terms of attempting to have some kind of cross-species communication.”

The first step in building that system of communication is a very simple game wherein a dolphin named Merlin is shown an object, such as a ball or a rubber duck. (Kassewitz told us that dolphins respond well to the color yellow.) Then Merlin has to point to an image of the object on the iPad’s screen, selecting it with his rostrum.

“Games are a relatively simple way to build an understanding between two animals—humans included,” Kassewitz told Ars. “Games require agreements to work, and agreements require some high-level thinking.” Ultimately, Kassewitz will build a library of symbols that dolphins can recognize that form the basis of “a complete language interface between humans and dolphins.”

Kassewitz’s research team will conduct more tests this July, pitting the Toughbook directly against the iPad to determine which platform will be used going forward. However, he believes that the iPad’s size and weight advantage may prove to be the deciding factor. “We could use two or three iPads showing different sets of images, and the dolphin would be able to choose among them,” he said

Four months ago, Windows 7 passed Windows Vista on Steam, the leader of the digital game distribution market, and we predicted that XP was in its crosshairs. Last month, Windows 7 passed Windows XP, making it the most popular operating system on Steam. Windows 7 is also the first version of Windows where gamers are adopting 64-bit faster than 32-bit. That said, there are still more 32-bit XP users than those on Windows 7 64-bit.

Despite Windows 7’s success, Windows share overall plummeted 8.43 percent from April 2010 due to all of the Mac OS users trying out Steam. XP dipped 4.81 percent, Vista use dropped 2.07 percent, and Windows 7 was down 1.55 percent.

Of the new Mac OS X users, 1.4 percent were on Leopard and 7.06 percent are using Snow Leopard. We’ll see over the next few months how many of these users stick around and how many convince their Mac friends to join in on the fun.

Each month, Steam collects and compiles data about the hardware and software its customers are using so that game developers can ensure they are making good decisions about what technology should take priority in their support plans. If you’re wondering, Intel is still beating AMD (72.54 percent to 27.46 percent) and NVIDIA is still beating ATI. To check out more details and the rest of the primarily hardware-based statistics, check out the link below.