Today multi-core processors become popular. Intel just released its Core 2 Duo for both desktop and mobile. AMD was talking its 4x4 processor with double dual-core. But what applications require and apply the functions of multi-core processors?

The picture is the real-time mixing of a video, a picture, and a ticker video.

Single thread software is not going to benefit from multi-core processors for itself. The least condition is to use multi-threads or multi-processes in a software. Ladybug Player Vista is this kind of software, which accepts multi-channel videos and decode each one and mix them all with programmable shader in GPU. A key requirement is real-time processing.

The multi-thread engine inside Ladybug Player Vista creates many threads and allocate them to run on multi-core processors automatically. In contrast solo core processor can only execute each thread of decoder in sequence.

Processor is only one aspect to the performance of an application. To video applications, other aspects are CPU memory bandwidth, GPU performance and bandwidth, and speed of rendering. For example, we may expect 64-bit Ladybuy Player will be faster than 32-bit player.

One interesting performance factor is fullscreen mode. Almost all media players only run on frameless fullscreen mode, which allows easy control of windows. However, almost all games run on true fullscreen mode for performance. In our testing of trio video mixing , the frameless fullscreen can achieve 37 FPS in average. The true fullscreen can achieve 47 FPS in average, that is nearly 27% speed up!

There are no fast enough computers. Software can always make a computer slow!

"Google...innovative?!? Come on!" is an article on InfoWorld. Even the idea of integration between search and advertising is from Overture. What Google's doing is simple: dump free software and services on the Internet and attract more and more persons to click Google's advertising. The definition of innovation may be beeter described as an advertising term. Another popular advertising term is free.

"Bill Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role in Microsoft effective July 2008 to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and will continue to serve as the company’s chairman and an advisor on key developrojects." Microsoft Press Release

So far Intel and Microsoft have changed their leaders from technical guys to professional businessmen. Is it a good news for many small software and hardware companies?

When Intel was dependent on charging customers by the minor GHz difference on X86 microprocessor, AMD innovated its X86 platform and forced Intel to adapt dual core early to catch up. At the same time when Microsoft paid more attention on Windows Vista, the so-called another Moon Project, Google silently made its data center to become an information center of the world. Why Wintel get wrong?

Honest to say Bill Gates is a good corporation leader because he understand the details of technologies. So he knew what he was doing. Bill Gates' withdraw also hints the change of Windows strategy.

Before Microsoft's Windows Strategy is simple: Bundle more and more software in Windows. Microsoft provides free components such as media player and make profit on Windows . Furthermore, Microsoft copied and modified new innovations and features of software from third parties for their own products. Microsoft acted as both a landlord and a vendor on the Windows mall. Microsoft made software in every catalogies on Windows. Almost all of them lost money except Windows and Office.

Bill Gates tried to kill big ISVs in Windows by copycat strategy. ISVs did not make money on Windows anymore, they moved to Linux platform or explored new field. While Microsoft was enjoy to eat his partners' food, new lands was occpuied by other companies. Bill Gates' stepping down means the termination of Windows' strategy.

Bill Gates stepping down is a good news for ISVs.

Bob Metcalfe, Ethernet inventor, now Ember Chairman had a Keynote Address "THE FUTURE OF EMBEDDED NETWORKING" at Sensors Expo 2006 June 7, 2006 in Rosemont, IL (Chicago). In his speech, he presented a term CSI, short for control, sense, and identify. This is similar to our term WSCN, Wireless Sensor and Control Network.

Bob Metcalfe describ Ethernet Business Model as

1. de jure STANDARDS, not de facto, certainly not NO standards,
2. implementations of these standards OWNED by companies,
3. fierce COMPETITION among standards-promoting companies,
4. market ethics that prevent competing by being INCOMPATIBLE,
5. EVOLUTION of standards based on market interaction, and
6. backward compatibility to INTEROPERATE with installed bases.

Bob Metcalfe is bright. Zigbee was obviously worked in this way. The extra more falsh memeoy for Zigbee stack is helpful for the standard. The interoperability of Zigbee standard is better than TinyOS so far.

I attended the Sensors Expo & Conference in Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, Rosemont, Chicago, IL on June 6-7, 2006. There are 200+ exhibitors showed their products and solutions. I came to learn many kinds of sensors and a lot of applications. The triaxial accelerometer from Freescale, Kionix, Bosch are impressive. They provided low-g three axis sensors could be easilnto our WSCN module to control our new-generation media player.

There are many Fiber Optic Sensors that can be used as distributed sensors such as a chain of sensors for temperature measurement. However I have difficult to understand how to integrate optic sensors with a MCU.

Many wireless motes are available most of them support Zigbee. Ti/Chipcon, Freescale, Ember, Jennic provide a SoC with MCU and wireless functions. MaxStream's RF module with long distance over 1.6km is interesting. Although many manufacturers start to support Zigbee standard, its complexity of application development may limit Zigbee's application.

Ti's 4-20mA transmitter is an interesting chip. It is good at the use of RTD temperature sensors. It is a new technology for industry applications. Unfortunately I can not find a manufacturer in the medial sensor applications.

I asked a TI guy if they are integrating RF into MSP430 family, He said yes. Obviously they have Chipcon now, and the step is in logic. Next year we may read a release of a MSP430/Chipcon SoC. Fine, that will work for our WSCN 1000 series.

A: Take an order?
B: Yes, combo 3 please.
A: Coke?
B: Yes.
A: Here (or) to go?
B: To go.

This is an interactive dialog. As an daily customer I realized that a short script was much more effective and quick for service. It is

A: Take an order?
B: Combo 3, Coke, Take out.

You s a lot of persons are using scripts for daily life :-) Can we control Ladybug Player Vista with scripts? Tcl, Perl, Python?

From Digitimes "Leading notebook vendors, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Acer and Asustek Computer, reportedly have slashed their orders for CPUs and chipsets already placed with Intel by 30-50% ..."

In addition, the article said "the planned year-end launch of Microsoft's Vista OS is also a concern as consumers are worried that the notebooks they buy now might not be able to run with the 64-bit enabled Vista OS".

Windows Vista Capable PC requires a modern CPU, 512MB memory, and a GPU that supports Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM). The CPU and memory are no problem. However only Intel' 915G+ GPU will support Shader Model 2.0+ for Windows Vista. So a notebook may have a question mark for its GPU chipset. Usually the use of modern ATI/NVIDIA mobile GPU will be Windows Vista Capable.

It is easy to check if a PC is Windows Vista Capable by running Ladybug Player Vista Demo. If a notebook can display mixed video files it is Windows Vista Capable!

Thursday December 15, 2005, echusarcana (832151) posted on Slashdot.org
"An IDE typically reflects a programming environment where coding must be spread across a multitude of small files. In it's extreme, I'm not a big fan of this style as I don't think it documents the code well. An IDE often kicks in a build system, a debugger, a configuration management system, perhaps even a work management system. Integrated into one product none of these components is going to be ideal compared to dedicated tools. It much like an integrated stereo system - yes it does everything, but it will never sounds as good as discrete audio components."

This echoes our design of MyrmecoX Studio. It is much flexible without a project manager. Yes, it is fragement. Howerver, many times we can open a new file, write scripting codes, and one click to test it. Simple!

XBox 360, a game console devloped by Microsoft, is going to be released on November 22, 2005. Except playing game you can also watch DVD and connect to Internet. Furthermore XBox 360 supports HDTV. Although the GPU and CPU of XBox are as powerful as an Extreme Game PC, Microsoft may only market XBox 360 as a game console. That is XBox 360 is an Appliance of a Windows XP PC or a Windows Media Center Extender (MCE) PC that can be connected by WiFi wireless network.

You see PC will still alive even if XBox 360 will be sold in lose. Microsoft may combine MCE and XP as one Windows Vista in the future. What is a Windows Media Center? That is simply a shell of Windows XP. By using Windows Media Connect technology, Windows Vista is the center and studio of Digital Home, XBox 360 is a game player.

How could Ladybug Player Vista, a Windows Video Player, related to XBox 360? That is the function of Windows Meida Connect. Without media center such as Windows XP Home, XBox 360 works as Windows Meida Connect Device that is able to stream media from PC via 802.11g wireless network. So you can generate any special visual effects by Ladybug Player Vista on Windows XP and watch them on your HDTV through XBox 360. Cool.

We have tried XBox 360 pre-release in Toronto. Although the game control is not wireless, it is comfortable to use. Now the game control can be used with PC. Looks like we need a new game control and ATI Radeon X1800 card with AVIVO video technology to mix 720p HD videos in Ladybug Player Vista.

Today VMware Player is free. So how does it to do with MyrmecoX Studio? That is the story. MyrmecoX Studio worked on Windows XP perfectly. And there were large corporations who asked us to port MyrmecoX Studio to Linux. So we'd done our research. MyrmecoX Studio IDE was wrote with MFC (how many developers understand it today?), that was specially difficult to port to Linux. OK, why not using Wine? The Wine? The windows simulation on Linux, is it a vaporware? We are not sure. At least we thought that there were no benefits on performance.

Now the VMware coming. It makes a Linux act as a windows application on desktop. Why VMware is perfectly match MyrmecoX Studio? Firstly, developers can write, debug, and test their own scripting codes by using MyrmecoX Studio under Windows XP. Secondly, when developers want to port or test their codes to Linux, they can switch to Linux under VMware. MyrmecoX Engine can run on many other platforms such as Linux and Mac OS/X. Finally, developers can test deployment and packages on single PC. Sounds productivity.

We renamed Ne@tware Player 2005 to Ladybug Player Vista on October 5, 2005. Five days later I am interested in checking how fast the search engines to know these changes.So I searched the Goole, MSN, and Yahoo at October 10, 2005, EST 2:56:20pm with the keywords 'ladybug player vista'. Here is the snap of the search result: (click to enlarge pictures).

It is a little bit surprise that Google has not upgraded to the new Ladybug Player Vista. Aha, google's engine does not execute as excellent as its competitors. Especially we have remind the Google about the new change of our pages. We did not do that on both MSN and Yahoo. Google has been promoted as a unbeatable search engine with thousands distributed computers, why its reaction to the change of the world is slow?

The delay of ATI's R520 made ATI drop to the bottom in business. From Beyond3D "when the issue was eventually traced it had occurred not in any of ATI's logic cells, but instead in a piece of 'off-the-shelf' third party IP whose 90nm library was not correct. Once the issue was actually traced, after nearly 6 months of attacking numerous points ..., it took them less than an hour to resolve in the design, requiring only a contact and metal change".

We have the similar experience in our software design. One third party component worked fine. However in special cases there were bugs. It was hard to trace this bug. The default parameters of the component had been set in special values that caused the bug. Until we completely rewrote this component by ourselves and finally found the reason.

Default values of settings can be a source of bugs.

"The harddisk is the slowest part of a modern computer. While reading files is relatively fast, writing data to the disk takes a lot of time." This is also true for Flash Memory. We tested some USB Flash Drives and focus on the result of Read and Write speed. The Read/Write speed of USB2.0 High-Speed drives are 12.9/5.5MBs, 10.4/5.3MBs, 9.4/2.1MBs, 7.8/3.8MBs. The Read/Write speed of USB1.1 drive is 1.0/0.7MBs. The Read/Write speed of SATA Hard Disk is 45.7/32.6MBs.

The speed of USB Flash Drive is different even if they are for USB2.0. For Ne@tware Player 2005 although the video playback did not feel slow for streaming reading, the database update operation is obviously slow when write speed is below 5.0MB. The USB 1.1 is too slow to video playback. In contrast to USB Flash Drive, SATA Hard Disk is super for video stream.

is the information processing in portable devices through wire or wireless network connection.

Mobile Software is the software stored in a portable device and can be carried on everywhere. A Mobile Device can be connected to a Host System through a standard interface such as USB or WiFi. The Active Mobile Device includes a processor and memory so it can work independently. MP3 Player, iPod, PDA are examples. In contrast the Passive Mobile Device does not contain a processor such as USB storage device.

Mobile Software can work for the processor of the portable device or work along with the processor of a Host System. Thus, a Mobile Software can plug and play while the portable device is connected into a Host System. No installation on Host System is required.

Mobile Software and its device can be a token for security access to replace passwords. Many security features can be added on it such as vpn access, network access, web access, email access, boot and file protection, security key and certificate storage, and self-enrollment key.

The configuration database of a Mobile Software provides the information for different Host System. The Mobile Software allows user mannually or automatically select the setting data.

Microsoft plan to support Linux with Virtual Server. Virtual Server 2005 R2 will be support for Linux and Solaris. Virtualization Technology allows more virtual machines to run on one server. VMWare from EMC is widely used virtualization technology at present.

It is a good news for upcoming Neatware's MyrmecoX Studio 4.0. Why? For a long time, some Neatware's customers asked for the MyrmecoX Edition on Linux. We acturally explored this solution. However to develop a new edition for Linux, we need almost rewrite a new software package. The ROI is questionalbe.

Thanks to Virtualization Technology, our customers can develop cross-platform programs on Windows platform then test and deploy on Linux and other platforms in one PC. Lots of troubles are avoid. It is much easy to maintain and manage one source code base.

MyrmecoX Studio plus Virtualization Technology is a powerful environment to development of Enterprise Applications.

Cell is a general processor with a PowerPC core (CPU) plus 8 SPUs (DSP). So what are Cell's technology edges and its drawbacks?

1. No general programming model available to use Cell's SPUs is a drawback. It is difficult to catalog Cell's computing into the threading or streaming model. Cell's SIMD is similar to Intel's MMX except there are more processing units. It is hard to sync these SPUs to work together.

Although Cell's SPU instructions can be embedded into C++ code, there are no signs show if the SPU needs a new high-level language or just transparancy to software. The fundamental question is the programming model for SPU of Cell. IBM or Sony is clear. Doubt it.

2. GPU is better and more effective than Cell in graphic processing. GPU is a better vector processor for general purpose computing. Multiple GPUs can be used for large scale computing based on streaming model.

However one strength of Cell is its double precision floating point vector. This is very good for medical image processing with high definition. If Cell's SPU's floating point computing is faster than integer computing, many algorithms of codecs can be rewritten.

3. Multiple core CPU is better than Cell in general computing. Supported by thread model, multiple core CPU can speed up threading programs. The performance of current Ne@tware Player Engine with multiple thread support inside can be improved instantly without modify one line of code after the using of multiple core CPUs. Cell has no compatibile advantages.

4. Cell processor is not a low power consuming processor compare to Pentium M and ARM processors. It is hard to apply it on portable devices. Wait second, the Cell portable may be a change. Who knows.

Since Sony will open its PS3 as an open architecture computer, Microsoft may have to open its XBox to ISVs. The closed XBox will go to hell without ISV's support. However if XBox is opened the Home PC market will be shrinked.

Sony boasted that its PS3 can be a cheap Linux PC. Hey, we're going to see what they said is true or not. C++ is for dual-core Pentium; HLSL is for XBox GPU; so far we still do not know what high-level programming language is suitable for Cell programming.

General shader pool architecture is a right selection for future GPU. So a shader can be a vertex shader, a pixel shader, or a geometry shader. Aha, it can even be a physical shader, though a physical processor has not aappeared in the market. XBox 360 GPU (R500) looks impressive.