Amazing, there is no actual lede to bury here.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/15/davies_at_fusion_summit/

What they didn't say, most likely, is some AMD x86 cpus would be gaining arm cores which share access to the GPU but can run when the primary power domain is fully turned off, possibly on internal RAM.

What they didn't say is this is the future, and it's AMD, not intel bringing it to you. The last time this happened was 64-bit computing. Intel decided it was only for business and pursued intanium to that end, dismissing home computers using 64-bit and a 64-bit variant of the x86 instruction set as AMD was. Shortly thereafter they announced EM64t, essentially a clone of AMD's x86_64 or AMD64, which itself built on some high memory extensions intel had developed for enterprise CPUs.

So here we are again, with flash and hybrid x86/ARM CPUs coming to PCs, which are mostly relegated to notebooks in this tablet world.

I imagine this will take two forms, the solution not presently being announced by AMD with the ARM core embedded in the main CPU and sharing a bus and access to an integrated CPU. The other is an ARM-based embedded controller (EC) which doubles as a second CPU but is limited by how it access the graphics. In the worst case this will be an embedded displayport (eDP) switcher chip, in the best, shared bus access to the GPU or at least it's scanout engine, and a shared framebuffer that can be seemless transitioned from ARM to x86 mode.

Take a look at the picture of Office next to some kind of slideout touch pane and wonder:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/08/a_beginners_guide_to_windows8/

Wonder what they could possibly thinking out there in Redmond, wonder how they could portray their bread and butter in such a negative light. Wonder how they could invest so much R&D in the ribbon then sabatoge that with this, paling it in comparison to this new new hotness. How does the next version of Office fit in here? Is it little more than a plugin for IE9 to natively render your documents inside a web page or HTML+Javascript application like old HTAs? I guess they realize like the rest of us that old Office has no place on tablets, nor does big old Windows as borne out by repeated market failures of the concept. But they seem to be willingly taking the desktop down with them. Apple is quietly, cleanly, and expertly bridging the gap in iOS5/Lion and Microsoft is, as the Zappos commercial says, "going in a slightly different direction."
Why keep Win32 around when the results of those API calls will look like this, like GDI+ in a DirectX 11.1/OpenGL4 world? Why bother with non-XAML anything when .net gets the same treatment. Why did they kill the DLR-based Silverlight 1.0 in favor of a heavy Framework-driven 2.0 just to go back to a dynamic language like Javascript?
And, really, call it Windows 8 and start marketing the hell out of this thing, remind people how much they liked Windows 7, if you can tear them away from their iPads long enough to glance up at one of your ads. (All PCs are the same? Isn't that the point?) Otherwise you might find them waiting for Windows 9 or Geoffries' Cat (tiny wildcat the size of a housecat and the perfect metaphore for the merging of iOS and Mac OSX, plus you're running out of cat names).
Leave it to Microsoft to disrupt their proven, still market-leading OS in favor of a failing mobile platform. Easier to announce that Apple finally one and your merging softie with BK? (As Cringely suggests)

This problem perplexes me more than all the others. It is not of course my problem, just an interesting diversion from real life.
The problem is partly Microsoft's and partly everyone else. Apple doesn't really need anyone else, anyone. They need intel for now, they need Foxconn or something that does what Foxconn does whether in mainland China, Taiwan, or Brazil.
They need ARM, Ltd. to continue designing chip IP, but only until their internal operation takes over and builds something that can be targeted by LLVM as a backend, ideally with both vector (GPU) and integer/floating point units, and lots of cores.
They need Qualcomm, but only until LTE replaces everything else and the better (fairer) RAND structure and the aftermath of the Broadcom/Qualcomm lawsuits finally play out in licensing.
They need the carriers to continue to screw up as they have been nicely right on schedule, and to continue to pay exhorbant fees and profit sharing for each iPhone sold.
They need Android as an also-ran, a second rate source of ideas (pull down notifications? where have we seen that before?)
They need the media companies until the artists are free to create for the company they love instead.
They need cluelessness on Wall Street as traders and 'analysts' keep pumping up their stock, taking a little and being suprised quarter after quarter as Apple continues to under promise and over deliver.
They need stupid speculation on the state of Steve's innerds, as he continues to engineer a successful company that survives his departure... to retirement having beat the odds and having the last laugh. (Dr. K died in his bed.)
That's what Apple needs, but what about Microsoft?

Microsoft needs a management that 'gets it,' one that can restore them to the head of the Clone Army, the money machine leading from Round Rock to Redmond by way of China.
They need xbox as an independent business unit free to innovate, direct it's own R&D, brand and market every product in it's stable. They need a Microsoft Hardware that can similarily innovate on products, directing portions of the remaining company to develop what they need in the way of operating systems and firmware recognizing that the OEM model of yesteryear is winding down. In both cases they need Windows to be little more than a stripped down kernel buildable for various platforms from Xbox to PC servers from the same source. Something that smart, empowered PMs can call up at will and say: "we need this build to do such and such" and have it happen. Microsoft needs to discover the ancient secret of pitch and plug some damn leaks. You can't build anticipation when you spill everything everywhere and nobody wants what your hawking anyway.
Microsoft needs to let the current Windows Phone OEM contracts expire and partner directly with Nokia to build something amazing for the North American market. But they shouldn't expect anyone to actually buy it. Kin was badly concieved but some elements of it make sense, the featurephone is dead so let's rebuild it from scratch at the same pricepoint. The problem? Carriers, something Apple is quietly remedying for their own purposes and at everyone else's expense.
This brings us back to the three platforms, Microsoft's is all Skype, Apple is on a private IP cloud/SIP/GSM stack of their own creation, and Google is on a massive datacenter-scale email and chat system that does realtime collaboration, sometimes.
More importantly, Microsoft is on DLNA with Kinect at the forefront of the living room revolution *if* they act now as Cupertino is already poised for the kill. More later.

Intel is spinning like crazy, not quite a meteorite hurtling towards the Sun as if propeled by Superman, but more of that political spinning jive.

Microsoft, however is very much on the former trajectory, from blue chip to cow chip.

Why? Intel is bending over backwards to tell us how Apple is not switching any of their PCs to ARM, how cooperation is great, how this and that. But Intel has never done this before, they've never had to. Intel's Wintel homogeny was never in question, and they expanded it into Mactel territory everything seemed assured. Along with this transition Apple had begun preoparing people to compile apps with a new mentality, just check a box to compile for PPC and Intel don't change anything else. To do this they had move their biggest ISVs, like Adobe, to C and Objective C and away from optimized PPC assembly language. They also had to move everyone to Cocoa from Carbon, though Mactel supported Carbon the push was stilll to transition to pure Cocoa, the carrot things like enhanced data binding and faster development.

And the the advent of the iPhone changed everything again. It spent a year in the web app desert, officially, though shortly after launch independent developers were compiling Cocoa Touch apps. It was the same API just a different instruction set architecture and people very familiar with Cocoa could figure it out. There was a Terminal app and few other ports.

The the App Store came about, with official iPhone and iPod Touch SDK and an explosion of games with recently announced developer payouts of 2.5 billion dollars.

The platform is Cocoa Touch, which is similar to Cocoa. Multitouch is supported on laptops, desktops (with Magic Pad) and iOS devices. Cocoa and Objective C are the twin native tounges of Apple device development. But, underneath, LLVM and clang translate to the targetted instruction set. And Apple uses Fat Binaries in their Mach-O format to support more than one. Write once, compile for anything.

This brings us back to Intel. Why are they so adamant about the platform, their "colloboration" with Apple engineers? Why stress this?

Because, I think, they are colloborating on the vast majority of Macs, the MacBook Air 13 inch and higher, all MacBooks, MacBook Pros and desktop computers. All save one. A new MacBook Air running OSX Lion/iOS5 on the same codebase with a modified SpringBoard shell that can support both modes of operation and both App Stores. IPAs and DMGs, all signed and delivered by the iOS/Mac App Store that Steve will announce in a few hours, alongside the SIP-based alternative/least cost iPhone/Mac/iPod Touch voice, video, and text platform with Facebook integration. Really, endgame RIM.

Oh, and Microsoft? Two SDKs, two DDKs, two Visual Studio configurations, three or four actual APIs sets (Xbox XDK, .net-based XNA, Desktop .net and WFC/XAML, Silverlight, Kinect, Sync, should I go on?)

Let's start with assumption that Microsoft can be saved, Windows will still dominate PC hardware sold by rebranding companies like Dell and HP, Office still has a place in the enterprise, and Microsoft still knows how to make developer tools and management software. We'll throw in the success of the Xbox and the licensed Kinect accessory. We cannot assume that Windows Phone 7 will have comparable marketshare to iPhone or Android anytime soon, keep hardware and carrier partners, and won't follow HP's webOS into obsolences.

We do assume however that the Windows codebase has not rotted completely, that Internet Explorer could well be the fastest rendering web browser ever and increasingly standards compliant. The first is curious, we know how well Server 2008 turned out, and Windows 7. We don't know what Windows 8 will really turn out to be, only that nobody is really talking about it beyond the enthusiast blogs that somehow still exist. That's mostly driven by a few leaks. We believe it will be available for ARM processors of some description, most likely Nvidia's Tegra chips with some customized boot code solution. We don't imagine there will be much third party software, given that Windows Phone 7 is built on an entirely different system and even the exe's will probably not be compatible.

The other big story, though likely overplayed, is the acquisition of Skype. Skype has an interesting and unique technology, a distributed network for connecting endpoints that allows the to mutually bypass firewalls (home and commerical routers, really) and exchange high bit rate communication, voice and video. They also have a user base, some paying, which they oddly bill in Euros. They make the same software for many different devices and operating systems, with frontends for Windows, OSX, Linux(QT4), Android, iOS, Windows Mobile 6.5 and, at one point, a toy.  They have tenuous relationships with carriers, who view them as competing for voice minutes and either block them or reroute over other media, as Verizon did on the version made for Droid. Even if Microsoft agrees to keep all of these clients around, many for competing operating systems, there's not much to be gained in integration with their software.

Enterprise UC
Microsoft has always had interesting offerings in the Telephony space, recently with an enterprise version of Messenger using the open SIP/SIMPLE standards and working with Exchange. Skype could conceivably replace this with a client that works better over VPNs as well as from home connections, possibly even as a browser plugin as Google has done with Gmail Chat.

So, we have the lay of the land, almost.

iPad

Microsoft has pushed a Tablet PC for nearly a decade, but never got the weight under control, never made it a better experience for a consumer, outside of OneNote. You can go as far back as Windows for Pen Computing, built on 3.1. And yet, with one product release Apple completely owned and redefined that market.

Apple has a competing office software suite, which they sell on iPad for nearly nothing. Microsoft, with a decade or more experience developing software for Mac operating systems, did not release a version of Office for the iPad. They did not take this seriously enough, even with six months notice and access to what became iOS, in the form of the iPhone SDK. They cannot look at the revenues and the unit price of Office, something corporations still pay for, and not see that offering it on a competing device still makes sense. Consider SharePoint, where is it without a working iOS/iPad client? It's wonderful wishful thinking to imagine a Windows tablet coming in a saving the enterprise customer, some 'vertical' that cannot get by without it, and yet every other product on Kickstarter is an iPad stylus.

Android

Android is a pretty good solution to a problem carriers and old Windows Mobile OEMs were facing, Apple will never license iOS. Android, built on a product acquired by Google, reinvigorated with some graphics library from another Google acquisition, morphed into something so unlike it's early rendition that it is impossible not to call it a copy of iOS. The most interesting parts of the Android homescreen were hardcoded in, widgets, shortcuts, etc., even in the version that shipped on the G1. Android still has the best notification system, the Market has gotten vastly better. (And the download service behind it, which failed randomly and consistently in early versions of Android 1.x) It's still a mess of technologies, with a fairly consistent programming interface and graphics subsystem which will finally be fully 3D accelerated in Honeycomb (without access to source code I can only go on what I've been told by Android developers working for Google.)

The important takeaway here is Microsoft failed massivly, unseated Palm and with a few months lost to iPhone and now Android. HTC doesn't even have a serious Windows Mobile device and maybe one or two Windows Phone 7 devices that just aren't selling. Every OEM that hedged with Microsoft has scaled back, judging from the declining request for Linux/Android ports on XDA and HTC-Linux channels, though I've cut back my participation there as well.

And now, saving Microsoft

1) Take the criticisms by the remaining employees seriously, like minimsft ignoring them does not make the problems go away.
2) Figure out which business units are truely strategic and build on them, find other things to do with the rest.
-- If something is strategic, act like it. Where are all the people clamoring for Windows 8 alphas? Or even news? Build on the massive PR success of Windows 7, at least contrasted with Windows Vista. As a mature platform, with mature developers, where are the hot new apps? Does anybody really care about the next generation of Windows?
-- Same for Office, decouple it from Windows, have a hosted (cloud) version, a local editor plugin, online collaboration across device and platform. Offer hosted Exchange and SharePoint on the same level as Google Apps, with a free introductory tier. Get developers in there to build on it, deploy locally and to the cloud. This is BizSpark, right? You've never been so good at communicating a vision, what is BizSpark for the developer not entirely engrossed in the Windows infrastructure and Visual Studio?
-- Mobile -- this is the hardest one, it's painful but here's about the only way
Combine Windows and Windows Phone at the kernel and technology level. Use a different shell on each but build on top of a shared pared down Windows NT kernel, same as Xbox. Kill non automotive CE entirely. CE6 is a nice system, but it's not necessary in a world where ARM clock rates and capabilities rival Intel. (Sorry to all my CE loving friends out there.)
When I say pared down I mean core HAL services, executive, 3D rendering and modesetting, most drivers in kernel space. NT is a good architecture, leave it alone and build a new win32k on top of it, finally expose the NT kernel interface and calls let the new applications build against a tiny subset of Win32, much like Android is built on Bionic, and let the .NET subsystem live on top of that. Kill GDI+ for non-legacy apps much as was done for Windows Phone 7 with GWES. Only support DirectX rendering contexts, or give up that battle and embrace OpenGL4 and ES2.0. Build two amazing compositors, cut Explorer to it's bare minimum as a flexible user interface, not a massive container for every COM/OLE control under the sun. You did it in IE, though you haven't gone far enough, the IE user interface is still too big, bloated, and incosistent. It should little more than a nice wrapper for Bing that let's you go back in the history. Tabs are good.
When I say cut Explorer to it's bare mimimum it looks something like this:
Windows 7 taskbar
Desktop icons de novo, not an explorer icon view
Explorer windows as separate processes
Remote filesystem support, uncoupled from the heavy Web Folder infrastructure
If you're going to use an IE-based renderer, do that, but use an different network library. Kill zones completely.
Make display 0 fast again, make it faster to kill misbehaving applications dead, killing the process if the event loop stops responding.
Drive letters are completely unneccessary with an NT namespace, just enumerate devices and make those symbolic links the cannonical ones through the system, they can be exposed to legacy Win32 apps, but shouldn't be visible in explorer, ever. Anything that supports a UNC should have no problem. At the same time fix remote filesystem access from all applications, quietly moving things around in Web Folders is not going to cut it anymore. Especially if my files are in the cloud and I'm running Windows 8 on a shiny new Tegra tablet.
-- fixing Windows costs a lot less than 8.5 billion dollars
-- not fixing Windows costs you the company. Microsoft announces a "bet the company" gamble yearly, they fail almost yearly and don't lose the comapny. Destroying a core asset through neglect would though.

If you're reading this we are practically in the same boat. I know
that sounds difficult to take when I'm offering advice, but I'm not
going to put an inauthentic face on my plight. I'm kind of
introverted, it's a nice word for shy. I sometimes get along better
with ideas than people. I like people, I don't push them away or
reject them but they don't always seek me out. Why would they?
I haven't made the effort.

So here I am building a company, a set of tools for personal
marketing, and finding myself needing to network. Not superficially,
but building deep and lasting connections, with certain goals and
objectives for both myself and my company.  About a year ago I started
using Twitter, specifically to build a professional identity that
let's me escape from my knowledge consumption driven ways. I did not
put much work into, followed a few people in the industry I was
interning for, particpated in a discussion, and made an online
acquaintance in an intelligent woman leading the way in the future of
online journalism. This was a good experience but just a taste.

Fast forward to this year. I began breathing startups, night and day,
hacking my own site into existence, and bootstrapping my way into
marketing, HR, and everything else. I have been on IRC for a couple of
years, talking to fellow hackers working on projects like android and
node.js. This is different though, now it's business people, product
managers, twitter chats almost nightly, employment and human
resources, recruiting, resumes, near burnout!

I live through SXSWi, though I remained thousands of miles away, my
distraction was the incredible social change in the Middle East and
North Africa terror, trauma, exhileration. I got a little in over my
head at times, again at a safe distance this time from actual peril.

All this time I have been improving Jobitr and working towards a launch
with as focused a feature list as I possibly can. I am building a tool that
I truely hope will help people like myself who are lost in the world
of linkedin, among the successful and connected with glowing
educational backgrounds and employment histories. I want to build a
tool for my fellow hackers, introverts, people with a lot to
contribute but who have been overlooked, who are full of ideas but lacking in the
real world experience and wisdom of age to execute those visions.

I want to be a home for creative people of diverse talent who do not
want to be one-sized-fits-all'd or pigeonholed. I want to be the first
resume, cover letter and profile you update with new experience, where
you brainstorm and test approaches (employment pirates?) because it's
the most useful. It's the one you can FedEx with one click, the one
that brings job postings to you without keyword searches, the one that
shows you what the recruiters see when they strip you down to a few
choice phrases and glance briefely at your ouvre. I want to give you
X-ray vision with a press of a buttton.

I want to do all of this, but first I need to launch.

 

Subscribe to our list and we'll keep you up to date on everything we're doing at Jobitr.

 

P.S Thanks to Mark Suster for inspiring this post

I'm not a champion networker, where do I start?

If you're reading this we are practically in the same boat. I know
that sounds difficult to take when I'm offering advice, but I'm not
going to put an inauthentic face on my plight. I'm kind of
introverted, it's a nice word for shy. I sometimes get along better
with ideas than people. I like people, I don't push them away or
reject them but they don't always seek me out. Why would they? I
haven't made the effort.

So here I am building a company, a set of tools for personal
marketing, and finding myself needed to network. Not superficially,
but building deep and lasting connections, with certain goals and
objectives for both myself and my company.  About a year ago I started
using Twitter, specifically to build a professional identity that
let's me escape from my knowledge consumption driven ways. I did not
put much work into, followed a few people in the industry I was
interning for, particpated in a discussion, and made an online
acquaintance in an intelligent woman leading the way in the future of
online journalism. This was a good experience but just a taste.

Fast forward to this year. I began breathing startups, night and day,
hacking my own site into existence, and bootstrapping my way into
marketing, HR, and everything else. I have been on IRC for a couple of
years, talking to fellow hackers working on projects like android and
node.js. This is different though, now it's business people, product
managers, twitter chats almost nightly, employment and human
resources, recruiting, resumes, near burnout!
I live through SXSWi, though I remained thousands of miles away, my
distraction was the incredible social change in the Middle East and
North Africa terror, trauma, exhileration. I got a little in over my
head at times, again at a safe distance this time from actual peril.
All this time I have been improving Jobitr, working towards a launch
with as focused a feature list as I possibly can. Building a tool that
I truely hope will help people like myself who are lost in the world
of linkedin, among the successful and connected with glowing
educational backgrounds and employment histories. I want to build a
tool for my fellow hackers, introverts, people with a lot to
contribute but who have been overlooked, full of ideas but lacking the
real world experience and wisdom of age to execute those visions. I
want to be a home for creative people of diverse talent who do not
want to be one-sized-fits-all'd or pigeonholed. I want to be the first
resume, cover letter and profile you update with new experience, where
you brainstorm and test approaches (employment pirates?) because it's
the most useful. It's the one you can FedEx with one click, the one
that brings job postings to you without keyword searches, the one that
shows you what the recruiters see when they strip you down to a few
choice phrases and glance briefely at your ouvre. I want to give you
X-ray vision with a press of a buttton.
I want to do all of this, but first I need to launch.

Signup for my mailing list

P.S Thanks to Mark Suster for inspiring this post

So here's the thing. I'm about to change the way you apply for your next job, the way you search for that job, the way you present yourself to a perspective employer...

Everything.

With Jobitr.

With Jobitr you get a profile and a unique address that looks like jobitr.com/yourname.  You also get a place to Clip jobs from all over the web or collect them automatically from email forwards (you get an email address too). 

Without downloading or uploading anything, you can compose a resume.  You aren't limited by templates but have the full power of HTML5 and CSS3 at your disposal with a powerful editor.  You can even make parts of that resume replaceable for different jobs, change the focus of one area, or highlight a specific element of your expertise.  Then you can add to this a customised cover letter, or a few of them.

When your ready to reply to that job posting, we'll handle the hard stuff for you. Email attachments, links to parts of your public portfolio (graphics designers and video professionals will love this), converting to different formats (PDF, DOC, PPT) and zipping it all up if required.

All of this is coming to Jobitr.com visit us and request an invite for our launch.

Thanks,
Timothy Meade
Founder,
Jobitr

So here's the thing. I'm about to change the way you apply for your next job, the way you search for that job, the way you present yourself to a perspective employer...

Everything.

With Jobitr.

With Jobitr you get a profile and a unique address that looks like jobitr.com/yourname.  You also get a place to Clip jobs from all over the web or collect them automatically from email forwards (you get an email address too). 

Without downloading or uploading anything, you can compose a resume.  You aren't limited by templates but have the full power of HTML5 and CSS3 at your disposal with a powerful editor.  You can even make parts of that resume replaceable for different jobs, change the focus of one area, or highlight a specific element of your expertise.  Then you can add to this a customised cover letter, or a few of them.

When your ready to reply to that job posting, we'll handle the hard stuff for you. Email attachments, links to parts of your public portfolio (graphics designers and video professionals will love this), converting to different formats (PDF, DOC, PPT) and zipping it all up if required.

All of this is coming to Jobitr.com visit us and request an invite for our launch.

Thanks,
Timothy Meade
Founder,
Jobitr

When Apple has a major product launch coming (the tablet, duh), a possible iPhone form factor refresh, and something on the iPod Touch side, it's important to examine one of the core compentencies of the App Store. That would be gaming. Reading Cringely's 2010 Apple predictions column has me thinking and anticipating what he might have to say tomorrow on and Android and the intgriguing Nokia partnership. (what??) But it makes clear that Apple has the cash and the need to do something only major gaming companies have done so far, and Microsoft who needed to shore up the Xbox, buy a game maker.

This may come as somewhat of a suprise to the hardcore gamers out there who are sure Windows is the only OS for them, but Apple computers have no hardware deficit featuring late nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs), only a, possibly perceived, lack of drivers. And a much more noticible lack of interest due to receiving most of the hot titles late if ever. If Apple owned a major publisher they could of course have an exclusive if not a simulataneous launch of the PC version (Mac version?) on OSX. At the same time they could have a library of games for the iPhone, iPod Touch, The tablet (I won't guess at a name), and maybe a new Apple TV (which could easily be a TV connected to a Time Capsule remotely).

So follow up with Cringely's columns tomorrow and feel free to comment here if you wish.