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TECH UPDATE
New power processor design unfolded
With microchip technology reaching its physical limits, IBM says it’s shifting the focus of much of its processor-design strategy from the chips themselves to the creation of tightly integrated, high-performance architectures for specific industries and consumer applications, company officials said during a series of announcements.
To that end, IBM is working with a range of vendors, including embedded systems maker Wind River, Linux developer Red Hat, Chartered Semiconductor, and Chinese systems developer Culturecom Holdings to build a larger development community around its power technology. Furthering that, the company also revealed a partnership with Sony Group under which the companies will jointly develop system-on-chip architectures for video-game consoles and other Sony consumer products.
“Transistors are getting down to the size of what they’re made of,” IBM chief technologist Bernard Meyerson said, indicating they can’t get much smaller and that the company needs to look beyond metal and silicon atoms and toward tighter system integration to extend performance. “It’s no longer about gigahertz, it’s about optimization.”
IBM unveiled several initiatives to drive cross-industry collaboration into its chip-design process. It’s making design tools available to partners at no charge, looking at a Linux-style open-governance model to help guide the future of the Power architecture, launching a portal for developers of Power-based systems, and releasing a free evaluation kit that lets system designers create custom Power chips in a simulated environment. Additionally, new software will enable customers to develop Power-based custom chip and package designs. Among other things, the software will help designers solve performance delays through tighter coupling between the silicon and package design.
MS posts tool as open source
Anyone who thought Microsoft’s recent settlement with longtime nemesis Sun Microsystems seemed surreal was in for another shocker Monday, when the software giant made some of its source code freely available on internet.
Microsoft released the code on SourceForge.net, a website that provides free hosting for open source software development projects. The Microsoft tool set, called WiX, for Windows Installer XML, is intended for building Windows installation packages from XML source code.
WiX is being offered under the Common Public Licence, an open source licence originally authored by IBM, says Jason Matusow, Microsoft’s manager of shared source initiatives. The licence, one of many approved by the Open Source Initiative and listed on opensource.org, allows developers to modify the code and use it in commercial products, he says.
“It’s the first time we have posted a project under an open source licence, meaning one that is approved by the Opensource
.org folks,” Matusow says.
The company will continue to release code under various licences, Matusow says. Microsoft might release code under the Common Public Licence again, but it has no plans to use the GNU General Public Licence, under which Linux is distributed. Microsoft has frequently criticized GPL.
This type of tool, a small piece of code with only a command-line interface, is used by a broad range of developers and is available as free software from other entities already. The tool creates a database that installer software can use to understand where best to place parts an application on a Windows PC, Matusow says.
Microsoft believes WiX is better than the free tools and decided to offer it to developers, he says. It was developed at Microsoft and is already being used by several groups in the company, he adds. WiX runs on Windows NT and Windows 2000.
Google gets makeover
Beta versions of handy new tools released by the company include a search engine that matches results to individual interests, email notification, and an improved interface. Google also has put its Froogle shopping service front and center.
With the personalized search, Web surfers can control the degree of customization in their results. Web alerts provide automatic daily or weekly updates based on keywords punched in by the user. — Sci-tech World Report
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