Intel's New Embedded Strategy

In 2006 Intel sold the mobile XScale processor business to Marvell "to focus its investments on its core businesses." Now they are re-entering the embedded market by acquiring embedded software company Wind River as "part of Intel's strategy to grow its processor and software presence outside the traditional PC and server market segments into embedded systems and mobile handheld devices." Links are to Intel press releases.

There is a lot of speculation about this acquisition and Intel's next embedded move, such as Intel looking to buy Marvell to re-aquire the mobile XScale, or an Android Linux smartphone that outperforms Google's.

One area that may be affected by the acquisition is the newly available embedded OS virtualization technology, Wind River Hypervisor. It is currently only available on Intel and Power-PC processors, but support for other non-Intel processors is planned. This article at LinuxDevices.com claims that might change and gives an overview of the technology. Hypervisor currently only supports Linux and VxWorks, both Wind River supported OSes.

New Embedded Processor Benchmark

CoreMark is a new free benchmark for embedded processors from EEMBC. EEMBC is using this to promote its other benchmarks and to compete with free benchmarks like Dhrystone.

ARM TechCon3 2009

The former ARM Developer's Conference is now billed as an engineering-oriented technical event and will focus on three areas

• Energy Efficiency
• MCU & Tools
• Internet Everywhere

ARM TechCon³ is still being held in October in the Santa Clara Convention center. The deadline for paper submissions is July 14, with the conference on October 21-23, 2009.

Game Developers Compete to Give Mario Intelligence

As part of the IEEE Games Innovation Conference, there is a competition to build the best AI to play the classic Nintendo Super Mario Bros. game. You don't need to attend to enter the contest, just join the Mario competition google group and you can download source code to create your AI (called a controller or agent) that plays the game. The organizers want to use the competition to compare different methodologies so be creative. They are calling for submissions based on

• artificial evolution
• evolutionary neural networks
• genetic programming
• fuzzy logic
• temporal difference learning
• human ingenuity
• hybrids of the above

This reminds me of the Terminator TV series where a computer designed to compete in chess acquires an artificial intelligence that eventually threatens humanity. If you enter watch out for cyborgs and time travelers.

IEEE Gets in the Game

The IEEE Consumer Electronics Society is holding its first Games Innovation Conference in London on August 25-28, 2009. Focusing on both technology and creativity in games this international conference is for almost everyone involved in creating and studying games including 'researchers and practitioners'...'from different disciplines in acedamia and industry.'

Wolfram Alpha

The makers of Mathematica have created a website to "make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything." They need some help at the moment and will give you a link to participate if you find something the site is missing like digital filter, frequency spectrum, Hamming window, or impulse function.

Wolfram Alpha is currently more powerful than using Google's built in calculator but I find the interface to be cumbersome. If you perform more than one calculation the history function can interfere with your text input and you lose the focus from the text entry box after each result.

It does look useful for learning about mathematical functions, try e^pi*x for example, you can see a quick graph and they give a lot of useful formulae like series representations and integrals.

iPhone 3G S Specs

The new iPhone 3GS has just been introduced in a few different models. Here is a brief feature comparison to the iPhone 3G. 3GS Features include:

• 3 megapixel camera
• 30 fps video with third-party application integration
• photo and video geotagging
• digital compass
• proximity sensor
• ambient light sensor
• accelerometer
• assisted GPS
• 7.2 Mbps HSDPA (not available from AT&T until later this year)
• OpenGL ES 2.0 3D
• hands free voice control

Here are the full iPhone 3GS specifications and iPhone 3G specs. The 3GS release date is June 19. Prices are $199 for the 16GB 3GS and $299 for the 32GB model with new $99 price for the 3G. The 3GS specs are close to those leaked a month ago on a Chinese website according to this article on Brighthand. A few more specs that were leaked are a 600MHz processor and 256MB of RAM, these were both on the Chinese site and an accidental post to a T-Mobile spec page in the Netherlands.

Electronic Prototype Power Supply

I have had great success bringing up new hardware with this small bench-top power supply from Lascar Electronics. The PSU 130 is inexpensive at under $90 US on Amazon.com or direct from the manufacturer (which gives quantity discounts). It is powerful enough to handle most electronic devices that I work on, and is small enough to fit underneath my computer monitor. The backlight is great for working in dim lighting and the large display is easy to read. I have unintentionally tested the short-circuit protection when I powered up a new prototype with a wiring mistake, and the supply suffered no damage. The only problem I have had is that one of the plastic tabs underneath the unit has broken, these are similar to what you find underneath most keyboards. This prevents me from easily raising it slightly for a better viewing angle (as shown in the picture). On the electrical side I have never had a problem. The current display is very useful working on prototypes, I can see when the SDRAM is initialized by the increase in current, I can see a short circuit condition and can easily measure power usage in different operating modes.

Link to a review on ThomasNet.com

Kindle 2 Outperforms Smartphones

Kindle 2: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)

With a 500+ MHz Freescale ARM11 the newly released Kindle 2 is faster than many smartphones including the iPhone according to a teardown at ifixit. It also uses a 32MB mobile DDR SDRAM and 2GB moviNAND both made by Samsung. Also improved are the display, battery life, ergonomics and wireless (3G) to allow book title browsing and download without a computer. Free internet access is limited to Wikipedia, magazines and blogs are available in the kindle store.

Qt Now Available Royalty Free For Embedded Linux

Nokia owned Qt Software (formerly Trolltech), is offering a royalty-free license for the latest release of its windowing system Qt 4.5. The Linux port of Qt was formerly called Qtopia, now called Qt for Embedded Linux. It is advertised to be optimized for embedded and includes features to aid embedded developers. These include C++ class libraries, built-in support for hardware-acceleration, a free cross-platform IDE and the ability to simulate the device display on your development workstation. Also available for consumer electronics development are Qt for Windows CE and Qt for S60 on Symbian OS.