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Maggie Shiels

Small is beautiful and lasts longer

  • Maggie Shiels
  • 3 Jun 08, 17:00 GMT

The holy grail in the world of technology is achieving optimum battery power.

In the go go go lifestyles that so many people lead today, the ability for our pdas, ipods, smart phones, mobiles and notebooks or laptops to keep powering through the day is crucial. But the truth of the matter is that we are still connected to the wall socket and the battery life on all our fabulous gizmos just doesn't go the distance.

And all those little extra things we do to preserve the battery like dimming the backlight and powering down when not in use really doesn't make that much of a difference.

TegraWell now the graphics company thinks it has the solution to all these annoying problems in the shape of a 'complete mobile computer on a chip' called the Tegra.

The official launch of the new processor took place at the show in Taiwan, but execs at the Santa Clara company gave the 大象传媒 a look at the thing in action before showing it to the world.

Michael Rayfield who is Nvidia's general manager for mobile business told me "Clearly the future is about visual computing. As screens get larger that's what we do for a living and the thing they really need is extreme battery life and none of the solutions to date have allowed that."

And he basically said the shrunk down laptop known as a notebook just doesn't cut it in providing productivity functionality along with entertainment functionality. In other words the marriage between an iPhone and the BlackBerry.

"Notebooks have done a great job of being mobile computing devices, they are highly productive and are very powerful. But they are basically a dehydrated laptop and you can't get very far from a wall outlet. They run for a couple of hours and you need to plug them in or if you run them longer you trade functionality."

To drive his point home he did a simple comparison test. The Tegra versus the Diamondville low cost mobile chip designed by

Size is all in this battle for the mobile internet devices space.

Tegra graphicMichael pointed out some facts and figures. The Diamondville is a three chip solution which is just shy of 2000 square millimetres. Tegra is a single part at 144 square millimetres.

This is vital maintains Michael because it means the Tegra has "the flexibility to fit whatever shape device I want from an ipod to a regular media player to a tablet or mobile phone."

Next comes the real killer app. He claims playing a video on a Diamondville or Atom driven device will give you four hours of screen time versus the Tegra's 26 hours. For powerpoint or viewing files its one hour against 10 hours.

"We are 10 times smaller and last up to 10 times longer. It's a full internet experience. You can search the web, work on your powerpoint document, listen to your favourite music and watch videos" explains Michael.

"It's all about doing everything for a full day on a single charge. You've got all day power."

Next up was Stuart Bonnema, the comany's technical marketing manager with a gizmo to test the amount of power each device was using.

Doing nothing, the Diamondville was chewing through 10 watts of battery power with the backlight off. When Stuart fired up a movie, in this instance, the number of watts went up to 13.

For the Tegra, it burned one watt just sitting there and 1.3 watts playing the movie. And that was showing a 720 pixel movie compared to just standard def on the Intel chip.

Now I know this all sounds like a huge advert for the Tegra but the thing was pretty impressive in action. The picture quality on the Tegra eight inch screen compared to the notebook's four inch was a world apart. And so was the action.

On the Diamondville chip, the movie juddered as it tried to upload the code and play the action scenes. In part it semi froze and jumped frames. The Tegra try out went smoothly.

"The thing that has kept the mobile internet device between a cell phone and a notebook computer from being successful in the past is that there hasn't been a good architecture to build around it" says Michael Rayfield,

He says the company has invested a lot of money in the Tegra which was built from the ground up with the help of between 500 and 600 engineers who worked on it for exactly 365 days.

"The sky's the limit on this next computer revolution" an enthusiastic Michael told me.

He reckons devices armed with the Tegra processors will be on the market in time for Christmas with a base asking price of $199 (拢100).

And there will be a lot of competition among companies trying to dominate this space.

Intel's boss Paul Otellini agrees a lucrative market awaits valuing it at around $40 billion in a couple of years. His firm, which is the world's No 1 chipmaker is planning to update the newly launched Atom chip next year with one called Moorestown.

Also entering the fray are of Taiwan which will soon release its Nano processor aimed at the same market, as will , , and .

And all of this is great news for us the consumer. With more competition not only are we likely to end up with a high grade device, but also one that we can afford.

Let battle commence.

Rory Cellan-Jones

Begging for Broadband

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 3 Jun 08, 10:37 GMT

Our tour is underway - and we're in Arnisdale, an idyllic village in the North West of Scotland. This is one of the few places where BT will still not supply a broadband connection - it is nine miles from the nearest exchange in Glenelg, and the copper cable just won't bring the signal that far.

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But if you want to know just how important a service broadband has become, this is a great place to come. The people here have been making an ever louder clamour about their desperate need for a faster connection.

People like Rick Rohde, Anna MacKenzie and Jenny Munro. They all work from their homes in this remote community, where a trip to the supermarket means a two hour round trip. Rick, an American who settled here as a crofter thirty years ago, is now an academic working with colleagues in South Africa. Jenny is a graphics designer who needs to send and receive large files. And Jenny, who trains health workers, needs to keep in constant touch with colleagues across Scotland.

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They have all gone to extraordinary lengths to get connected, Rick sailing across the loch just to pick up his e-mail, Jenny driving nine miles along a steep and narrow road to her mother-in-law's house just to send e-mails, Anna having to make a similar journey with her graphics files.

But broadband is now coming to Arnisdale through something called the project. It's a kind of home-brewed concoction, beamed to a series of masts around Arnisdale from a college on the Isle of Skye. But this is not a commercial operation - it is funded by Edinburgh University and the University of the Highlands and Islands, and, by the sound of it, would be pretty pricey if sold to residents at a realistic rate.

Rory Cellan-Jones, ArnisdaleWhat it does deliver is pretty scorching speeds - downloads at up to 10Mbps, and pretty fast uploads too. I sat directly next to one of the masts, and managed to download the 10Mb test file we have placed on this website in just 16 seconds, a new personal best.

By contrast, back in Glenelg, I used the hotel's BT broadband connection, and it took over four minutes to download the same file. By the way, do try this at home - and .

There is a Scottish government plan to bring broadband to places like Arnisdale by next Christmas, probably using similar technology to the Tegola project, with a few really remote homes being served by satellite. But even when that arrives, you can bet that the people here will soon be looking with envy at the 20 or 50Mbps connections that are going to be available in some other parts of Britain.

So what have we learned on day one? That just because you live in the middle of nowhere your need - or desire - for speed is no less than that of someone living in a humming metropolis. And that satisfying the desire for ever faster internet connections right across the UK will be a challenging and expensive undertaking, with pressure on everyone from BT to local government to put their hands in their pockets.

Later today, we start driving to Dundee for a glimpse of our high fibre future. And, after a couple of days in stunningly beautiful surroundings, only marred by a dearth of mobile phone and broadband connections, it will be quite a relief to be able to get online with ease once more.

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