Update at July 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT with additional information and corrections concerning the Intel-Nvidia dispute.
Nvidia said Monday that its multichip technology will be architected to work on Intel's upcoming Nehalem chip platform.
Nvidia SLI technology supports multiple graphics boards.
(Credit: Nvidia)This announcement may help Nvidia to work around a standoff with Intel over whether Nvidia can make chipsets that work with Intel's next-generation Nehalem platform, due later this year. And also demonstrates that despite Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang' s rhetoric, Nvidia must cooperate with Intel in order to thrive.
Monday's announcement has no relation to separate licensing negotiations, according to sources familiar with the discussions. In other words, Nvidia is not announcing a chipset for Nehalem--which would require a license. It is simply a statement that Nvidia will support Nehalem with its nForce 200 Scalable Link Interconnect (SLI) chip.
However, some reports say Nvidia has reached an agreement with Intel to license Intel's Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) technology, paving the way for Nvidia to design chipsets for Nehalem.
The nForce 200 chip will work with Intel's "Bloomfield" line of Nehalem processors and the accompanying Intel chipset. SLI allows Nvidia to use multiple graphics boards in one system.
Upcoming SLI motherboards will use Nvidia nForce 200 SLI silicon, Intel Bloomfield processors, and Intel Tylersburg (X58) chipsets, Nvidia said in a statement.
"The nForce 200 SLI processor features patented SLI technology for graphics bandwidth management and multi-GPU peer-to-peer communications, both required to optimize graphics performance," Nvidia said. GPU stands for graphics processing unit.
Future systems "can be powered by one, two, or even three Nvidia GeForce GPUs, including the new...GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 GPUs," according to Nvidia.
Nvidia included statements from system suppliers in the Monday release. "It's great to see that Nvidia opted to enable SLI on the future Intel Bloomfield platform," said Rahul Sood, CTO Voodoo Business Unit, HP. "Make love not war I say...and Nvidia's (enabling) of Intel chipsets to support SLI will make our jobs much easier."
Nvidia claims that nForce 200 SLI silicon with Intel's new Bloomfield processor and Tylersburg chipset core logic chipset will deliver up to a 2.8X performance boost over traditional single graphics card platforms.
Motherboards and PC systems that will use the Nvidia nForce 200 SLI chip, Nvidia GeForce GPUs, and Nvidia SLI technology will be available from companies such as Acer, ASUS, Dell, Falcon Northwest, Legend, and Velocity Micro.
Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors has sued a university in The Netherlands to block publication of research that details security flaws in NXP's Mifare Classic wireless smart cards, which are used in transit and building entry systems around the world.
NXP, formerly Philips Semiconductors, sued to prevent Radboud University Nijmegen from publishing a scientific paper on the technology in October. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday in the Dutch court, Rechtbank Arnhem.
"We feel the publication would not be responsible," NXP said in an e-mail statement when asked to comment for this article on Wednesday. "We cannot give further comments at this time, as it is in the hands of the court and the court has given a confidentiality order."
A court decision on the matter is expected next week, according to Karsten Nohl, a University of Virginia graduate student who worked with others to break the crypto algorithm last year and has been closely following the case.
The Dutch university's research builds upon Nohl's work. Nohl said he plans to publish his research in August and that NXP has not sued him to halt publication of his work.
"NXP spent most of this year defending the technology," Nohl told CNET News in a phone interview this week. "Only recently have they started admitting that the security is flawed, but they are still not ready for this to leak into the public domain."
"The only thing NXP would achieve if they win the lawsuit is prevent information from getting to other research groups that might very well be looking for solutions to this problem," Nohl said. Meanwhile, information on how to break the cryptography on the smart cards is already available to criminals who are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars, he added.
A statement issued by the Dutch University in March says: "Because some cards can be cloned, it is in principle possible to access buildings and facilities with a stolen identity. This has been demonstrated on an actual system."
Dr. Bart Jacobs of Radboud University Nijmegen demonstrated last month how he could ride the London transit system for free. Once he obtained the key used by the London transit system, he then brushed up aside passengers carrying the Oyster transit cards and was able to collect their card information on his laptop and make a clone of it.
This YouTube video shows how it is done:
In addition to the transit system in The Netherlands, the technology is used in the subway systems in London, Hong Kong and Boston, as well as in cards for accessing buildings and facilities. The Mifare technology is used in more than 80 percent of the market, Nohl said.
The university defended its plans to publish the research in a statement released Monday in Dutch, saying it has a duty to research and publish data on security technology flaws so that they can be fixed.
Intel has upstaged Advanced Micro Devices at DreamWorks Animation. The movie studio has decided to drop AMD and go with processors from Intel, citing better performance and a more promising roadmap.
DreamWorks specifically mentioned Intel's upcoming Nehalem processor and Larrabee graphics chip as reasons for the switch.
Intel and DreamWorks announced Tuesday that they had formed a strategic alliance for 3D filmmaking technology. DreamWorks plans to produce all its feature films in stereoscopic 3D--which requires the viewer to wear special glasses for enhanced 3D--beginning next year. Intel will provide DreamWorks with "the latest high-performance processing technologies, including future chips with multiple processing cores," the companies said.
This is a setback for AMD. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker rolled out its quad-core Barcelona last year at George Lucas' Lucasfilm campus in San Francisco to make a point: Barcelona would be big player in the movie industry. But a series of delays related to a processor bug put a damper on the high expectations for Barcelona.
"AMD maintained a long and fruitful relationship with DreamWorks Animation, beginning in early 2005. Earlier this year, AMD and DreamWorks decided not to extend our marketing and technology relationship. However, DreamWorks Animation is still an important and respected AMD customer and we look forward to having the opportunity to work with them again in the future," AMD said in a statement.
Essentially, DreamWorks looked down the road and liked what it saw coming from Intel better. "When we look at the Intel roadmap, it is more closely aligned with our needs," John Batter, president of production at DreamWorks Animations, said during a conversation with Nanotech: The Circuits blog. "The rendering times have been going up because of the complexity and richness of the images. Then you layer on top of that 3D. Something that's already growing--and doubling it."
Intel had the best technology, Batter said. "You need a lot more horsepower. On Intel's upcoming generation, the number of cores is going to help us satiate the big spike in our needs."
DreamWorks had been in a three-year partnership with AMD, Batter said.
He explained that Intel is also helping DreamWorks to redesign its animation tools. "Our animation tools are all proprietary here. Intel is rearchitecting our software tools...to take advantage of multicore and make our renderer highly scalable as well as making our character animation tools highly scalable."
DreamWorks uses rendering farms with as many as 5,000 cores to create animation and its tools need to be adapted to the increasing number of processor cores, Batter said. The Nehalem chip, for example, is expected to integrate as many as eight cores. Currently, Intel offers no more than four cores per chip. Larrabee is expected by many to offer as many as 32 cores.
Intel Nehalem architecture
(Credit: Intel)Batter specifically mentioned both Nehalem and Larrabee as a reason for the switch to Intel. He said that Larrabee would be "complementary" to Intel's general-purpose CPUs.
Nehalem is due in the fourth quarter of this year and Larrabee is expected in the 2009-2010 time frame.
The first Intel-Dreamworks release will be Monsters vs. Aliens, which is slated to hit movie theaters in March 2009.
Intel and DreamWorks Animation on Tuesday announced a strategic alliance designed to power up the movie studio's 3D authoring tools.
Faced with increasing demand for 3D animated feature films, DreamWorks will receive access to Intel's latest and future high-performance chips, including those with multiple processing cores. Intel's software engineers will also work with DreamWorks to tweak the studio's applications to run on an Intel-based computing infrastructure.
"Technology plays a significant role in enabling our artists to tell great stories. By utilizing Intel's industry-leading computing products, we will create a new and innovative way for moviegoers to experience our films in 3D," Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks' chief executive, said in a statement.
One of the first projects from the alliance will be DreamWorks' upcoming Monsters vs. Aliens film, which is scheduled for release March 27.
That film is part of DreamWorks' effort to produce only stereoscopic 3D feature films beginning next year.
Qualcomm has Snapdragon. Intel has Atom and Moorestown. Which of these chips is (will be) a more viable, compelling chip for the fit-in-your-pocket device and ultralight computer market? I'll let the reader decide.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon is a highly integrated chip that is shipping now. Products are due in Q1 2009.
(Credit: Qualcomm)All of these chips are targeted at mobile Internet devices, like the Apple iPhone, and ultralight (less than 3 pounds) notebooks, like the Asus Eee PC. Two (Snapdragon and Moorestown) are aimed at high-end smartphones.
Here's a very quick overview of the silicon. You decide which seem more compelling.
Atom is here now. For Intel, it is a very-low-power chip (but not considered low-power in the cell phone world), boasting a thermal envelope of about two watts, compared to 35 watts for a typical Intel Core 2 chip for laptops.
Atom, however, is not highly integrated. Graphics, audio, memory controller, and communications silicon are all on a separate chipset.
Importantly, Atom runs the same software and Web applications as any other x86 architecture Intel chip in a typical PC. This is a big selling point for Atom (or any Intel chip for that matter), according to Intel.
But Atom isn't fast. High-end Atom processors (1.6GHz) benchmark more or less on par with a low-end Celeron processor. (Celeron is Intel's low-end line of processors.) And Intel is on the record saying that Atom is similar in performance to circa 2003-2004 Pentium mobile chips.
Less is known about Intel's Moorestown (see graphic below), due in 2009 or 2010. This much is known: it will integrate additional logic, bringing it more in line with silicon designs in the smartphone market--at which Moorestown is targeted. For example, the SOC (system-on-a-chip) will integrate components like the memory controller and graphics, boosting communication speeds between these crucial devices. And, like Atom, it will run all the popular software on PCs today.
Enter Qualcomm and Snapdragon (aka Qualcomm QSD8250 and QSD8650), which is targeted at high-end smartphones and mobile Internet devices.
The key difference between Snapdragon and Atom (Intel's only well-documented processor for ultrasmall devices) is power and integration. Qualcomm--because of its background in the cell phone market where integration and low-power are the name of the game--has packed a lot of features onto one piece of silicon that is short on power consumption and long on battery life. By comparison, delivering integration and long battery life in a tiny device are not things Intel has focused on in the past.
(Qualcomm has been involved in the market for cell phone silicon since the early 1990s. Intel isn't even a player yet.)
Another salient point: Qualcomm isn't licensing the technology from ARM in the traditional sense. The company has licensed the instruction set only and then built its own processor, allowing it to boost the clock speed to 1GHz and beyond while keeping the power low. Snapdragon, however, is not a speed demon. It will offer relatively good performance within the targeted power envelope.
Key features: Snapdragon operates below 0.5 watts, is based on the newest ARM v7 instruction set, runs as fast as 1GHz, and integrates almost everything including the processor, GPS, an ATI graphics core, multimedia (digital signal processor), and 3G modem, all on one 15mm X 15mm piece of silicon (see graphic).
Qualcomm is claiming cell phone-like battery life.
The San Diego-based company is shipping Snapdragon to customers who will ship products in the first quarter of 2009. HTC and Samsung have announced that they will bring out products based on Snapdragon.
Moorestown silicon due in 2009-2010 is the closest thing Intel has to Qualcomm's Snapdragon
(Credit: Intel)
Germany-based Cizmo is offering an Intel Centrino 2-based gaming laptop that shows what's in store for mobile gamers this summer.
Intel's newest crop of Centrino 2 Montevina mobile processors are slated for a July 14 rollout and will include the Extreme X9100 processor: the first Penryn-class mobile processor to break the 3.0GHz barrier.
Cizmo CX1730M packs an Extreme X9100 mobile processor
(Credit: Cizmo)The Cizmo 17-inch CX1730M can be configured with an Intel X9100 Extreme processor running at 3.06GHz. A key feature of Intel X-class mobile processors is that they are designed to be overclocked.
The CX1730M can also take an Nvidia GeForce 8800M GTX graphics chip.
Memory based on the new DDR3 standard is also offered. DDR3 SDRAM can be hooked up to Intel's faster 1066MHz front-side bus. Currently, Intel's front-side bus--which carries data between the processor and other silicon--runs at 800MHz.
Other specifications for the CX1730M include Intel's newest PM45 chipset. Intel stated last month that initially only the PM chipset--for discrete (standalone) graphics chips--would be available. The GM version with Intel integrated graphics will arrive in August.
... Read MoreAdvanced Micro Devices' bet on a new approach to graphics chip design appears to be paying off, according to analyst Jon Peddie. This could put AMD's ATI graphics chip unit on top again--or at least on equal footing with Nvidia, the graphics leader over the last few years.
Peddie heads Tiburon, Calif.-based Jon Peddie Research, which specializes in graphics chip market research.
Test reports on AMD's and Nvidia's newest graphics chips are pouring in. Both companies are racking up good scores. (See Diamond Viper Radeon HD 4850 review here.)
But beyond the day-to-day test scores, AMD's ATI graphics chip unit may be winning the longer strategic battle. ATI has gambled on a radically different strategy for its latest series of chips--the HD 4850, HD 4870, and upcoming dual-chip R700.
"(AMD) is starting in the middle of the market and scaling up. That's a break with tradition," said Peddie. "We always started at the very, very tippy-top and build the most powerful thing you could and then let it scale down over time."
But Peddie said this traditional approach just isn't practical anymore. "The chipsets keep getting larger and larger despite the fact that we were going to smaller and smaller (manufacturing) process nodes. The chips grew faster than the process nodes shrunk and the consequences of that is that the power consumption went up, the costs went up, and it got to the point where it's kind of impractical to continue along that way," he said.
In essence, AMD's ATI unit strategy is to build smaller, less power-hungry chips and then gang them up to get better performance. Nvidia's strategy has been to build one large, extremely fast--and extremely power hungry--chip.
For ATI, the execution of this chip-ganging strategy is the key. And this is where ATI appears to have been successful. "The inter-processor communications. Getting that to work has been the trick. This is what ATI has done. They've come up with this stellar way of doing inter-processor communications so they can in fact get the scaling," according to Peddie.
And there's more than meets the eye. ATI has also cut in half the number of bits in the memory interface, Peddie said: down to 256 bits while Nvidia has remained at 512. "That has the benefit to ATI of reducing a big hunk of the power consumption."
Peddie said in the past this kind of approach would have been suicidal because it would have decimated ATI's test scores. "The argument against this is that graphics performance is a function of memory," he said. "Typically you want wider and wider (bit width)."
But ATI has countered this by using the fastest memory standard available. "So to compensate for shrinking down the bit width, ATI has jumped to the next-generation in memory design called GDDR5. GDDR5 is approximately three times faster than GDDR3--which is what Nvidia is still using and what ATI uses on their smaller cards," according to Peddie.
"So with three times the speed but half the width, they end up with 1.5 times the processing capability with the memory."
"A very clever thing that they did but mind you it was a gamble that looks like it's going to pay off," he said.
ATI has more processing units than Nvidia inside its chip too. "The other thing is that ATI has 800 processors in their chip and Nvidia has 240. That has a processor count advantage," Peddie said.
Though it remains to be seen if this advantage is borne out in testing over time, he added. "Nvidia and ATI keep improving their drivers so they'll seesaw back and forth with their scores, almost from week to week."
But in the long run, Nvidia may be forced to adopt ATI's strategy to keep pace in these week-to-week battles. "If ATI is successful, as we expect that to be, then Nvidia will have no choice but to adopt (ATI's) approach, just out of practicality," Peddie said. "It just makes a whole lot of sense."
AMD-ATI's upcoming R700 (rumored to be called the 4870 X2) two-chip graphics board will be the ultimate test of this strategy.
"It's a new proprietary inter-processor communication technology. If they put these two chips on one board and it does scale properly, then they have pulled off a coup," he said.
"When you gang up graphics chips (using the traditional Scalable Link Interface or CrossFire technologies) they roll off pretty fast. ("Roll off" implies that performance doesn't scale up well.) "So when you put two boards in, you don't get twice the performance but you (only) get one and a half. You put four boards in and you (only) get about 1.7, 1.8. What ATI is saying is that with two chips using (their) proprietary inter-bus, they will get 1.8 (the performance) with two chips. If that's true, you can expect to see four of them giving you something around 2.5."
Getting 2.5 times the performance from four boards would be a masterstroke for ATI.
The previous ATI dual-chip solution was very different, Peddie said. "The HD 3870 X2 was not a proprietary bus but a CrossFire connection. The CrossFire connection and the SLI connection are at the very, very end of the pipeline. Not the most efficient place to do an inter-processor communication. That's one of the reasons ATI has abandoned it."
AMD's ATI unit is also better positioned than it was before in manufacturing. "Part of the reason that Nvidia has been ahead is that ATI has been suffering over the last three or four years with manufacturing problems. It's not that ATI didn't have a good chip, the problem was that ATI couldn't build enough of them."
This should change with the newest series of chips. "This (design)--so they say--will really go into high-volume production." Though he cautioned this still remains to be seen.
"The (new ATI chip) is a really efficient, tight design. They used to do this all the time but they kind of got off that trail. And now they're back on it."
Sony is set to refresh its notebook lineup with upcoming mobile chips from Intel. Specifications posted on some reseller sites and leaked in Sony documents show a major refresh potentially in the offing.
Sony Vaio laptop
(Credit: Sony)This may be good news for Advanced Micro Devices, too: its mobile graphics processors look to figure prominently in the new lineup.
A post on Laptoping says some model will come with 16.4-inch screens. Other models include ultraportables "featuring a 13.1-inch screen," Laptoping said. This series, as well as other Sony notebooks, will have a High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI).
One reseller lists a Sony Vaio VGN-FW198U/H laptop with a 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 processor, 4GB of memory, a 320GB hard disk drive, and a Blu-Ray disc drive. A price of $2,149.99 is given.
The T9400 is not yet listed on Intel's processor pricing page, but logically slots in below the T9500 (2.6GHz) listed at $530.
This document posted on notebookreview.com shows a VGN-FW100 series image. One model (Vaio VGN-FW160E/H) posted on notebookreview.com is spec'd with a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo P8400, 4GB of memory, a 250GB hard disk drive, and Blu-Ray Disc drive.
The P8400 is part of the P series of upcoming Intel processors that uses less power than current mainstream mobile processors.
The Vaio FW series is expected to pack AMD-ATI HD 3470 graphics as well as other graphics processors.
A consumer notebook line with 13.3-inch LED backlit LCD is also cited with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 graphics chip on various sites. Models listed here specify an Intel Core 2 Duo P8400.
Sony said it would not comment on speculation.
Updated 12:00 p.m. Thursday with additional Trusted computing Group comment.
Early this decade, Microsoft weathered unrelenting criticism over a controversial set of technologies known as Palladium, which the company envisioned as creating a kind of secure vault to store passwords or medical records.
Academics warned it could "support remote censorship" and blacklists, likening Palladium to the Soviet Union's efforts to register typewriters and fax machines. Privacy activists predicted it would hand Microsoft "an unprecedented level of control" over the world, and free software doyen Richard Stallman solemnly dubbed it "treacherous computing."
It worked, kind of. Microsoft retreated by doing what any large bureaucracy tends to do in response to such a kerfuffle: it gave its problem a new name. Palladium became the awkwardly-titled Next-Generation Secure Computing Base, or NGSCB, (and the group Microsoft coalesced around the initiative changed its name from Trusted Computing Platform Alliance to Trusted Computing Group) and critics mostly moved on to worry about the recording industry and other threats to digital liberties instead.
Since then, the NGSCB--once derided as "nagscab"--has existed in an odd kind of technological purgatory. One report in 2004 said that Microsoft has "killed" NGSCB, which the company quickly denied later the same day. CNET News.com published a story in 2005 quoting Microsoft as saying NGSCB was "still coming."
After six years, the supposed world-striding colossus of a technology that once sparked so much fuss (one reviewer said it might become "either Santa or Satan") is much diminished. NGSCB never did live up to its early promise--or what critics would have said was its early threat as a digital rights management tool that would restrict how people consume content on their PCs and lock them into one vendor.
"It has changed from something that was very revolutionary and grandiose into something much more modest," said Andrew Jaquith, a senior analyst at Yankee Group.
And then came BitLocker
NGSCB does live on, manifesting itself in a Microsoft technology called BitLocker, a Microsoft spokesman confirmed.
BitLocker, Microsoft's only product to come from the Trusted Computing effort, is a feature in Windows Vista Enterprise, Vista Ultimate, and Windows Server 2008 that encrypts the disk drive to protect against data theft or exposure if the computer is lost or stolen. (Trusted Computing should not be confused with Trustworthy Computing, which is Microsoft's effort to improve the security of its own products and is largely considered to be successful.)
While it is useful, BitLocker hasn't taken the computing world by storm yet, or even been enough to justify upgrades to Vista, said Rob Helm of Directions on Microsoft.
"BitLocker hasn't been the rage anybody expected, although there is a strong case for using that feature on laptops," he said. In addition, plenty of third-party products--many offering whole disk encryption--exist.
Bruce Schneier, crypto researcher, author, and chief security technology officer of BT, was one of the more vocal critics when Microsoft first unveiled its Trusted Computing plans in 2002. In 2005, he was still beating the drum, writing that Microsoft was attempting to stall, and possibly get Vista exempted from a best practices document for the Trusted Computing Group that addressed many of the critics' concerns.
The Best Practices Principles (PDF), which was written in 2003 and eventually published in 2005, gives consumers some control over disabling the functionality, allows devices to support multiple users, adds privacy protections, and calls for interoperability and portability of data.
"We were concerned that users were able to opt in and not be controlled from above," said Susan Landau, a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems who worked on the Best Practices document after Sun joined the Trusted Computing Group. Sun was not a member of the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance.
"The public criticism certainly created pressure," especially when it conflicted with consumer privacy guidelines in Europe and elsewhere, she said.
"I think it's interesting that the (Trusted Computing Group) technology is continuing, but the big DRM push, so far, has not happened," Landau said.
Putting trust in a module
The centerpiece of the Trusted Computing Group is the Trusted Platform Module, a microcontroller that stores keys, passwords, and digital certificates in a secure, isolated area. They are widely distributed in computers from Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lenovo, Toshiba, and others, but most people don't even know they are there. BitLocker makes use of the Trusted Platform Module.
Microsoft has "convinced a lot of hardware manufacturers to put the chips in computers and they're in a lot of computers, but they're not doing anything," Schneier said. "The question is what are they going to do with the chips? How is Dell feeling these days?"
A Dell spokesman did not return a call seeking comment. Even Scott Rotondo, president of the Trusted Computing Group, acknowledges that the Trusted Platform Modules need more applications.
"A lot of them haven't been utilized fully and in some cases not at all," said Rotondo, who works as a senior staff engineer in Solaris Security Technologies at Sun. "The supporting infrastructure has been slow to materialize."
"It stands to reason that there might be frustration on the part of hardware manufacturers," Rotondo said, likening it to a "chicken and egg situation."
"We need to really make use of these things before the hardware manufacturers get tired and take them away," he added.
Trusted Platform Modules "have not yet fulfilled their potential, but Microsoft and other companies are working on it," the Microsoft representative said.
A Trusted Computing Group spokeswoman said on Wednesday that the organization is not focused on DRM and that applications that use the TPM include secure e-mail, multifactor authentication, password management, and single sign-on. The group is also working to extend the concepts of hardware-based security to storage, network security, and mobile devices, she said.
While initial concerns about misuse of the technologies slowed down the group's efforts, people see legitimate uses for the technology, and digital rights management could be among them, Rotondo said. However, any digital rights management systems would have to maintain a proper balance between the rights of the content owner and the rights of the consumer, he said.
Where Microsoft failed in doing that, Apple has succeeded, according to Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley-based technology forecaster.
"The biggest thing that has changed in the last five years is iTunes and the iPhone," he said. "The companies got their protection and the consumers got the right to purchase individual songs at a price that was less than the cost of the album."
Don't discount Microsoft just yet, warns Ross Anderson, a security engineering professor at the University of Cambridge's Computer Lab and an early critic of the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance.
Asked if the world has been spared a Microsoft digital rights management machine, Anderson responded in an e-mail: "Wrong--WMP (Windows Media Player) and the surrounding stuff that MS hopes will enable it to do to the HDTV market what Apple did for MP3s."
Saffo joked: "It's like a horror movie; they'll be back."
(CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report.)
Canonical on Tuesday released its first publicly available developer edition of Ubuntu for mobile Internet devices.
One option for Ubuntu MID's user interface.
(Credit: Canonical)
Ubuntu MID works on two devices at present, the Samsung Q1U and the Intel Crown Beach development station for building devices using the company's Atom processor. It also can be run on ordinary computers through the
"This release marks the start of a way for new users to experience Ubuntu and Open Source software and as the hardware becomes commonplace it will become a very exciting place to get users experiencing applications from our communities," said David Mandala, project manager of the Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Group, in a blog posting.
Canonical will release new versions of the software on the same six-month cycle as it uses for the desktop version of the open-source operating system, the company said.
"Ubuntu MID Edition, a fully open-source project, gives the full Internet, with no compromise," boasts the project description said. "All unnecessary complexity in the user experience is eliminated."
Ubuntu MID can be used with a touch screen and has a specially designed Web browser.
