Web Development Live

XMOS Semiconductor Ltd. (Bristol, England) has introduced a development kit for its XS1-G4 programmable device. Designs are created using a C-based software development flow, which the company claims shortens the time required to build electronic products and systems.

The XS1-G development kit features the XS1-G4 target device, a QVGA touch screen display, RJ45 10/100 Ethernet port, a stereo audio interface and XLink connectors for connecting multiple kits together. The XS1-G4 can be booted from JTAG, an SD/MMC card or on-board SPI boot PROM. In addition to the integrated multi-media I/O, designers have access to on-board switches, status LEDs and IDC expansion ports. A set of design examples is accessible on startup through a soft-key menu system.

The XS1-G4 device is programmed using web-based XMOS development tools which include C and XC compilers, simulator and debugger. The kit includes a tutorial on XC, which is the XMOS-originated programming language supporting parallelism, concurrent and real-time programming using channel-based communications, and event-driven control. Programs can be evaluated using the simulator, or loaded into the XDK for hardware verification. A GDB debugger is also provided to simplify program development.

The XS1-G4 programmable chip features four XCore tiles connected by a high-performance switch, with each tile containing an XCore, which is a 400MHz 32-bit event-driven processor. The four XCore tiles together execute up to 32 concurrent real-time tasks, provide 1600-MIPS of performance, and service up to 400 million events per second. Data and code is stored in 256-kbytes of RAM and 32-kbytes of ROM. Tightly coupled to a highly flexible I/O pin structure, the XCore processor can implement a range of hardware and software functions including I/O interfaces, state machines, application programs, DSP and cryptographic algorithms.

XMOS devices are general-purpose programmable chips. The device features and software-based design flow make the XS1-G product family well-suited for applications such as Ethernet audiovisuals and audio, intelligent LED display control, IEEE-1588 network time keeping and chip-level security systems. Additional information on how XMOS technology supports these applications can be found on the XMOS website.

Salesforce.com today introduced the summer upgrade to its on-demand CRM software, called Salesforce Summer ‘08, featuring enhancements on both the client and server-sides of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform.

Force.com, the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that allows developers to build their own applications to run along side the ones provided by Salesforce, has been expanded out to allow for developing any kind of application the users want with Apex, Salesforce’s Java-like programming language.

Also, Visualforce is now live in every edition of Salesforce, enabling developers to create their own custom interfaces based on Web 2.0 UI items that will work on any device. So it’s possible to make your Force.com applications run on a PC, laptop, BlackBerry or iPhone.

“Visualforce really completed the whole stack for how developers can use Force.com to create applications,” Al Falcion, senior director of product marketing for Salesforce, told InternetNews.com.

“Any client with a browser is covered. There’s definitely a need for different UIs, even if they use the same app.” As such, Visualforce lets developers create an application that presents data one way on a desktop, and in a different way on a notebook or smartphone.

One of the knocks on Web 2.0 is the performance of Ajax, which requires a lot of JavaScript to run on the client. “The key is having the right frequency of refreshes so they don’t drag the client down,” said Falcione.

Developers praised the programming experience and the potential of Google’s Android mobile platform at the Google I/O conference as the company emphasized its flexibility and showed cool new features.

There was a lot of buzz around Android at the conference, which covers all areas of Google development, and an “Introduction to Android” session was full. Google wants the technology to open up the mobile industry, where developers have faced hurdles getting applications ported to many different operating systems and approved by carriers. But Android will enter the fray as just one mobile platform among many, including the Apple iPhone SDK.

The latest prototype version of Android drew comparisons to the iPhone after it was demonstrated during a keynote session Wednesday morning. Google showed a home screen with colorful widgets similar to the Apple iPhone’s, plus a compass and a status bar that can be pulled down in any application to view messages. The compass, which could be built into a handset along with an accelerometer, would be able to orient maps according to which way the user was facing. As demonstrated with Google Maps Street View, it could show the exact view that a user was looking at, with street-name and address information built in to the map. Videos of the demonstrations were posted by the Android Community blog.

Aside from features on high-end phones, Android will reach far more people than the iPhone platform, if it meets its potential, said Atif Iqbal Chaudhry, a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who attended the conference. The platform could be extended to inexpensive phones with a smaller set of capabilities for average consumers, he said.

Android is an easy way to begin developing a mobile application, because Google provides all the pieces required, unlike some other platforms, such as PalmOS, Chaudhry said. He has been developing location-based applications through the PC-based emulator software for Android and said he is looking forward to trying out the software in the field on a real handset.

Google and its partners in the Open Handset Alliance are pushing Android as more open than other mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Developers won’t need to get Android applications certified by anyone, Google Developer Advocate Jason Chen told the Android breakout session. In addition, there won’t be any hidden APIs accessible only to handset makers or mobile operators, he said.

Developers will also be able to modify core elements of the interface and come out with replacements for the basic building blocks that come with Android, such as the address book, Chen said. Even the look of the home-screen widgets will be customizable. For users, that will mean being able to control their own experience by downloading their favorite third-party versions, Chen said.

Google expects the first Android-based devices to hit the market in the second half of this year and will make the finished software platform available to developers after that, so anyone can create their own phone platform, Chen said. The core elements of it will be released under the Apache open-source license.

Until all parts of Android are complete, Google won’t start translating the platform and documentation into languages other than English, Chen said in response to a question. The team doesn’t want translations to lag behind the current information, he said. But he welcomed an attendee to help Spanish-speaking developers by translating materials or participating in message boards.

Developers praised the platform, in which applications are written in the Java programming language and then compiled for the Dalvik virtual machine.

“It’s sweet,” said Free Beachler, owner of Longevity Software, in Boulder, Colorado. Beachler wrote an entry for the Android Developer Challenge, a competition to find the 50 best Android applications. His software, designed to store itineraries, contacts, destinations and other travel information for users on their phones, didn’t make the top 50. But he’s working on two projects for Android Developer Challenge 2, which will take place after handsets are out and the platform are complete.

Beachler, a Web developer, said it took time to learn to use Android but once he did it was logically organized and easy to use. He compared it to languages such as PHP for Web development.

Enterprises are asking R Systems International, a software services company in El Dorado, California, to write applications that work on any mobile platform, said Harsh Verma, vice president for global innovative research at R Systems. One way to do this is on browsers, but there are problems with that, including differences among mobile browsers and the need for a network connection, he said. Verma hasn’t yet started working with Android but believes it could reach a broad range of devices.

Yahoo and Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Limited, have announced an agreement to jointly support cloud computing research.

Under the agreement, CRL will make available to researchers one of the world’s top five supercomputers that has substantially more processors than any supercomputer currently available for cloud computing research.CRL’s supercomputer, named EKA, is the world fourth fastest supercomputer. It has 14,400 processors, 28 terabytes of memory, 140 terabytes of disks, a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second (180 teraflops), and sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops for the LINPACK benchmark. Of the top ten supercomputers in the world, EKA is the only supercomputer funded by the private sector and is available for use on commercial terms. This effort is the first of its kind in terms of the size and scale of the machine, and the first in making available a supercomputer to academic institutions in India.

The Yahoo CRL effort is intended to leverage CRL’s expertise in high performance computing and Yahoo’s technical leadership in Apache Hadoop, an open source distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation, to enable scientists to perform data-intensive computing research on a 14,400 processor supercomputer, claimed Yahoo.”The Tata group has always contributed to scientific research in India, and the EKA will strengthen this cause further in the field of cloud computing. This partnership brings together Yahoo!’s leadership role in the development of Hadoop and CRL’s expertise in high performance computing, and will help bridge the gap between traditional supercomputing and cloud computing research in India,” said S. Ramadorai, chairman of CRL.EKA is expected to run the latest version of Hadoop and other state-of-the-art, Yahoo-supported, open-source distributed computing software such as the Pig parallel programming language developed by Yahoo Research.

DEEP in the bowels of a Las Vegas hotel, a smiley face and the
words “Hello World” display on a web page. Applause breaks out. The
page is called the Acid2 Browser Test, and the web browser is a
preview of Internet Explorer 8, presented by its platform
architect, Chris Wilson.
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” says a member of the
audience to more applause from about 3000 web designers and
developers at the Mix08 conference, where Microsoft showed its
latest internet technology.
The Acid2 page (webstandards.org/action/acid2/) was created by
the Web Standards Project to test whether a browser conforms to the
official standards for describing page layout, mainly focusing on
cascading style sheets (CSS).
The reason for the applause is twofold: first, until now
Microsoft’s web browser, used by an estimated 75 per cent of
net surfers (although Firefox has been eroding that hold), has
never been close to passing the test; second, Internet Explorer’s
poor standards compliance causes significant extra work for web
designers.
When users navigate to a web page, they expect it to look and
work the same whatever the browser or operating system they are
using. Achieving this is difficult. Different browsers display the
same page differently, with IE often the worst offender.
Web developers now hope they do not have to insert conditional
code to account for these differences, but can deliver a standard
page to all browsers. “CSS support in IE8 looks thus far to be
very, very promising,” says Eric Meyer, an independent expert in
the field. “It’s very important, because the level of CSS support
in IE7 and IE6 has served as a brake on advanced CSS adoption by
authors, limiting them to less-advanced techniques and
capabilities.”
Internet Explorer has a curious history. Six versions were
released between 1995 and 2001, the time of the “browser wars” with
Netscape. Microsoft won the war and then did not release another
major version of the browser for five years - long enough for it to
become thoroughly outdated.
IE’s CSS implementation fell far behind that of other popular
browsers. In late 2006 Microsoft released IE7, which fixed some
problems but still lagged behind its rivals. “Differences between
browsers simply waste too much developer time,” says Dean
Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s general manager for IE, without
mentioning the extent to which Microsoft created the problem.
Mr Hachamovitch, who has led the Explorer team since 2003,
explains why Microsoft took so long to address these deficiencies.
“It comes down to what we were doing with our time,” he says.
“Between 2001 and 2003 we were building what you experience now as
Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight.”
These technologies display not HTML, the language of web pages,
but XAML, Microsoft’s proprietary code for creating rich visual
content.
“In 2003 and 2004 we were making IE secure,” he says, referring
to the security-focused Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Security remained the theme in IE7. The dilemma was that fixing
bugs introduced compatibility problems. “You can’t just flick a
switch and have all the browsers in the world change, or have all
the servers and services in the world change,” Mr Hachamovitch
says. The result was that some websites looked worse than before,
because they detected that IE was accessing them and delivering
content that took into account presumed peculiarities.
Microsoft’s answer was to build “compatibility modes” into IE8.
The manner in which this was done remains controversial. The
question was whether to default to the IE7 compatible mode, or
default to the better standards mode, Mr Hachamovitch says. “(We
found in) releasing IE7 that web developers were slow to modify
their sites. We wanted to keep the web working.”
Microsoft initially announced that IE8 would behave by default
like IE7. Page designers would have to include special code to turn
on IE8’s standards support. The decision was greeted with a hail of
protest because it might perpetuate a non-standard web.
Earlier this month, Mr Hachamovitch announced that Microsoft had
changed its mind. “We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default,
interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it
can.”
Apparently the key to that change of heart was a separate
strategic announcement last month, covering what Microsoft calls
interoperability principles and promising “open connections to its
products, support for industry standards and data portability”.
According to Mr Hachamovitch, Microsoft now had “a more
interoperable way; a more compatible way”.
It sounded good, but what about browser scripting. The context
is important. Mr Hachamovitch had already stated that Microsoft
spent three years neglecting IE for the sake of a more proprietary
technology, which is now appearing on the web as a browser plug-in
called Silverlight.
This is similar in some ways to Adobe’s Flash, and supports rich
multimedia effects within web pages as well as the ability to run
applications written in Microsoft’s .NET Framework.
Silverlight and Flash applications in effect bypass the browser.
Web standards advocates are wary of them because they replace the
open web with content that depends on a proprietary plug-in.
The Mozilla Foundation, creator of the cross-platform Firefox
browser, prefers to upgrade the capabilities of the browser itself.
A key component of this is JavaScript, the programming language
that runs in the browser and that is standardised by ECMA, the
European standards body, under the name ECMAScript. Mozilla is keen
to see the current JavaScript upgraded to a far more powerful
version called ECMAScript 4.0.
“Why do we care about ECMAScript 4.0?” asks Mozilla’s
vice-president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer. The answer is that
JavaScript is the language of the net. We want to keep pushing that
technology forward to make it easier for people to build bigger,
faster, more secure websites.”
Asked if Microsoft will implement ECMAScript 4.0, Mr
Hachamovitch prevaricates and talks about competing demands on the
IE development team.
“Right now there isn’t really an ECMAScript 4 offering to
implement, there is an ECMAscript for discussion.” he says.
The Guardian

LAS VEGAS Sprint Nextel Corp. on Tuesday said it is betting heavily on a touch-screen phone that appears to be the closest thing the U.S. market has seen to Apple Inc.’s vaunted iPhone.The Samsung Instinct will be available in June for a yet undetermined price, Sprint announced at CTIA Wireless, a cell-phone industry trade show in Las Vegas. Executives hinted that the price would be substantially lower than the $399 for the cheapest iPhone.Sprint, which has been losing subscribers, will spend $150 million to advertise the Instinct when it launches, compared with $30 million for a typical product introduction, according to David Owens, the company’s director of devices.Like the iPhone, the Instinct lacks a keypad and has just a few buttons. Most of the functions are accessed by touching the screen.A few touch-screen phones appeared on the U.S. market last holiday season, after the iPhone’s debut in June.Verizon Wireless launched the LG Voyager, which has an exterior touch screen and folds out to reveal a non-touch screen paired with a keyboard. Sprint introduced the Touch by HTC, a slim pad with only a touch screen.Both phones were hampered by the lack of software designed specifically for a touch screen. The Voyager dealt with that by adding a keyboard. The Touch grafted some touch-friendly features on to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Mobile operating system, which is designed for smart phones that either lack a touch screen or are intended for use with a stylus. Some functions on the Touch are hard or impossible to use by tapping with the fingers alone.The Instinct is based on a Samsung phone that’s already available under different names, and with different software, in South Korea and Europe. Sprint commissioned its own software from European design house Icon Mobile.”We took a more active part than we ever have” in a phone’s development, Owens said. “This was designed from the ground up to be a touch-screen phone.”The software is based on Java, a commonly used programming language that should make it easy to develop applications for the phone.The Instinct will have a few features the iPhone lacks. For one, it will be the first consumer phone in the U.S. to use EV-DO Rev. A, the fastest cellular broadband technology available on the Sprint and Verizon Wireless networks.AT%26T Inc. has phones that use a competing technology with equivalent speeds, but the iPhone is not one of them: It runs on a comparatively slow network, supplemented by Wi-Fi access.The Instinct also contains a Global Positioning System chip, for location applications. The iPhone lacks one, but it can use cellular and Wi-Fi signals to determine an approximate position.The Instinct’s screen measures 3.1 inches diagonally, compared with the iPhone’s 3.5 inches.The Instinct won’t be able to take input from more than one finger at a time: The iPhone’s characteristic “pinch to zoom out, spread to zoom in” feature won’t work. Sprint compensates for this by using the phone’s motion sensor. In a demonstration of a prototype, tilting the phone while holding a button made a Web page scroll.

DEEP in the bowels of a Las Vegas hotel, a smiley face and the
words “Hello World” display on a web page. Applause breaks out. The
page is called the Acid2 Browser Test, and the web browser is a
preview of Internet Explorer 8, presented by its platform
architect, Chris Wilson.
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” says a member of the
audience to more applause from about 3000 web designers and
developers at the Mix08 conference, where Microsoft showed its
latest internet technology.
The Acid2 page (webstandards.org/action/acid2/) was created by
the Web Standards Project to test whether a browser conforms to the
official standards for describing page layout, mainly focusing on
cascading style sheets (CSS).
The reason for the applause is twofold: first, until now
Microsoft’s web browser, used by an estimated 75% of net surfers
(although Firefox has been eroding that hold), has never been close
to passing the test; second, Internet Explorer’s poor standards
compliance causes significant extra work for web designers.
When users navigate to a web page, they expect it to look and
work the same whatever the browser or operating system they are
using. Achieving this is difficult. Different browsers display the
same page differently, with IE often the worst offender.
Web developers now hope they do not have to insert conditional
code to account for these differences, but can deliver a standard
page to all browsers. “CSS support in IE8 looks thus far to be
very, very promising,” says Eric Meyer, an independent expert in
the field. “It’s very important, because the level of CSS support
in IE7 and IE6 has served as a brake on advanced CSS adoption by
authors, limiting them to less-advanced techniques and
capabilities.”
Internet Explorer has a curious history. Six versions were
released between 1995 and 2001, the time of the “browser wars” with
Netscape. Microsoft won the war and then did not release another
major version of the browser for five years - long enough for it to
become thoroughly outdated.
IE’s CSS implementation fell far behind that of other popular
browsers. In late 2006 Microsoft released IE7, which fixed some
problems but still lagged behind its rivals. “Differences between
browsers simply waste too much developer time,” says Dean
Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s general manager for IE, without
mentioning the extent to which Microsoft created the problem.
Mr Hachamovitch, who has led the Explorer team since 2003,
explains why Microsoft took so long to address these deficiencies.
“It comes down to what we were doing with our time,” he says.
“Between 2001 and 2003 we were building what you experience now as
Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight.”
These technologies display not HTML, the language of web pages,
but XAML, Microsoft’s proprietary code for creating rich visual
content.
“In 2003 and 2004 we were making IE secure,” he says, referring
to the security-focused Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Security remained the theme in IE7. The dilemma was that fixing
bugs introduced compatibility problems. “You can’t just flick a
switch and have all the browsers in the world change, or have all
the servers and services in the world change,” Mr Hachamovitch
says. The result was that some websites looked worse than before,
because they detected that IE was accessing them and delivering
content that took into account presumed peculiarities.
Microsoft’s answer was to build “compatibility modes” into IE8.
The manner in which this was done remains controversial. The
question was whether to default to the IE7 compatible mode, or
default to the better standards mode, Mr Hachamovitch says. “(We
found in) releasing IE7 that web developers were slow to modify
their sites. We wanted to keep the web working.”
Microsoft initially announced that IE8 would behave by default
like IE7. Page designers would have to include special code to turn
on IE8’s standards support. The decision was greeted with a hail of
protest because it might perpetuate a non-standard web.
Earlier this month, Mr Hachamovitch announced that Microsoft had
changed its mind. “We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default,
interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it
can.”
Apparently the key to that change of heart was a separate
strategic announcement last month, covering what Microsoft calls
interoperability principles and promising “open connections to its
products, support for industry standards and data portability”.
According to Mr Hachamovitch, Microsoft now had “a more
interoperable way; a more compatible way”.
It sounded good, but what about browser scripting. The context
is important. Mr Hachamovitch had already stated that Microsoft
spent three years neglecting IE for the sake of a more proprietary
technology, which is now appearing on the web as a browser plug-in
called Silverlight.
This is similar in some ways to Adobe’s Flash, and supports rich
multimedia effects within web pages as well as the ability to run
applications written in Microsoft’s .NET Framework.
Silverlight and Flash applications in effect bypass the browser.
Web standards advocates are wary of them because they replace the
open web with content that depends on a proprietary plug-in.
The Mozilla Foundation, creator of the cross-platform Firefox
browser, prefers to upgrade the capabilities of the browser itself.
A key component of this is JavaScript, the programming language
that runs in the browser and that is standardised by ECMA, the
European standards body, under the name ECMAScript. Mozilla is keen
to see the current JavaScript upgraded to a far more powerful
version called ECMAScript 4.0.
“Why do we care about ECMAScript 4.0?” asks Mozilla’s
vice-president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer. The answer is that
JavaScript is the language of the net. We want to keep pushing that
technology forward to make it easier for people to build bigger,
faster, more secure websites.”
Asked if Microsoft will implement ECMAScript 4.0, Mr
Hachamovitch prevaricates and talks about competing demands on the
IE development team.
“Right now there isn’t really an ECMAScript 4 offering to
implement, there is an ECMAscript for discussion.” he says.
The Guardian

LAS VEGAS Sprint Nextel Corp. on Tuesday said it is betting heavily on a touch-screen phone that appears to be the closest thing the U.S. market has seen to Apple Inc.’s vaunted iPhone.The Samsung Instinct will be available in June for a yet undetermined price, Sprint announced at CTIA Wireless, a cell-phone industry trade show in Las Vegas. Executives hinted that the price would be substantially lower than the $399 for the cheapest iPhone.Sprint, which has been losing subscribers, will spend $150 million to advertise the Instinct when it launches, compared with $30 million for a typical product introduction, according to David Owens, the company’s director of devices.Like the iPhone, the Instinct lacks a keypad and has just a few buttons. Most of the functions are accessed by touching the screen.A few touch-screen phones appeared on the U.S. market last holiday season, after the iPhone’s debut in June.Verizon Wireless launched the LG Voyager, which has an exterior touch screen and folds out to reveal a non-touch screen paired with a keyboard. Sprint introduced the Touch by HTC, a slim pad with only a touch screen.Both phones were hampered by the lack of software designed specifically for a touch screen. The Voyager dealt with that by adding a keyboard. The Touch grafted some touch-friendly features on to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Mobile operating system, which is designed for smart phones that either lack a touch screen or are intended for use with a stylus. Some functions on the Touch are hard or impossible to use by tapping with the fingers alone.The Instinct is based on a Samsung phone that’s already available under different names, and with different software, in South Korea and Europe. Sprint commissioned its own software from European design house Icon Mobile.”We took a more active part than we ever have” in a phone’s development, Owens said. “This was designed from the ground up to be a touch-screen phone.”The software is based on Java, a commonly used programming language that should make it easy to develop applications for the phone.The Instinct will have a few features the iPhone lacks. For one, it will be the first consumer phone in the U.S. to use EV-DO Rev. A, the fastest cellular broadband technology available on the Sprint and Verizon Wireless networks.AT%26T Inc. has phones that use a competing technology with equivalent speeds, but the iPhone is not one of them: It runs on a comparatively slow network, supplemented by Wi-Fi access.The Instinct also contains a Global Positioning System chip, for location applications. The iPhone lacks one, but it can use cellular and Wi-Fi signals to determine an approximate position.The Instinct’s screen measures 3.1 inches diagonally, compared with the iPhone’s 3.5 inches.The Instinct won’t be able to take input from more than one finger at a time: The iPhone’s characteristic “pinch to zoom out, spread to zoom in” feature won’t work. Sprint compensates for this by using the phone’s motion sensor. In a demonstration of a prototype, tilting the phone while holding a button made a Web page scroll.

Mundie, who took over as Microsofts lead visionary from co-founder Bill Gates in 2006, is preparing the company for a technology shift that he expects will be as big as the rise of the personal computer or the internet: parallel computing.
Its a lot easier for us to have a fairly accurate sense of what will happen and even make good technical progress toward achieving it, Mundie said in an interview last week. Almost everything we tried to do took longer than we expected.
The overseer of Microsofts $US7 billion ($NZ8.7 billion) research and development budget, Mundie knows firsthand how even promising technologies can take time to develop. After all, he has led Microsofts efforts in Web-based television and nontraditional forms of computing.
Parallel computing has been hyped for years as the next big thing in technology, allowing computers to run faster by dividing up tasks over multiple microprocessors instead of using a single processor to perform one task at a time.
The technologys full potential is almost unfathomable today, but it could lead to major advances in robotics or software applications that can translate documents in real time in multiple languages.
The computer industry has taken its first steps toward parallel computing in recent years by using multi-core chips, but Mundie said this is the tip of the iceberg.
To maximize computing horsepower, software makers will need to change how software programmers work. Only a handful of programmers in the world know how to write software code to divide computing tasks into chunks that can be processed at the same time instead of a traditional, linear, one-job-at-a-time approach.
A new programming language would be required, and could affect how almost every piece of software is written.
This problem will be hard, admitted Mundie, who worked on parallel computing as the head of supercomputer company Alliant Computer Systems before joining Microsoft. This challenge looms large over the next 5 to 10 years.
The shift to parallel computing was born out of necessity after processor speeds ran into heat and power limitations, forcing the semiconductor industry to assemble multiple cores, or electronic brains, on a single chip.
Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have already assembled chips with as many as four processors on a single chip. Tilera Corp, a Silicon Valley chip start-up, foresees a 1,000-core chip by 2014.
KILLER APPLICATIONS
Mundie, who assumed half of Gates job almost two years ago, sets the long-term technological direction for the company as the co-founder moves to a part-time role in July to focus on philanthropy. Ray Ozzie, chief software architect, sets the shorter-term agenda.
Mundie has at his disposal Microsofts research department with over 800 PhD researchers working on the new technology.
The research focuses on everything from Web search to simultaneous translation to touch-screen technology, but parallel computing is certainly among its top priorities because it will likely affect every part of Microsoft.
Computers about 100 times more powerful than now will emerge within 20 years, Mundie estimated, packing the capabilities of a corporate data center into a single die sitting inside a mobile phone or laptop.
A killer application will bring this computing power to the forefront, he said, just like what word processing and spreadsheets did for the PC and how e-mail and the Web browser popularized the internet.
Pushing a company as big as Microsoft %26ndash; with about 80,000 employees %26ndash; to look past historical strengths and traditional ways of doing things to focus on new technology is not easy.
Bill (Gates) and I have both talked at times over the years that you cant do these jobs unless you are an optimist, almost an extreme optimist because in a way you are fighting so many forces that are resistant to change, said Mundie.

LAS VEGAS Sprint Nextel Corp. on Tuesday said it is betting heavily on a touch-screen phone that appears to be the closest thing the U.S. market has seen to Apple Inc.’s vaunted iPhone.The Samsung Instinct will be available in June for a yet undetermined price, Sprint announced at CTIA Wireless, a cell-phone industry trade show in Las Vegas. Executives hinted that the price would be substantially lower than the $399 for the cheapest iPhone.Sprint, which has been losing subscribers, will spend $150 million to advertise the Instinct when it launches, compared with $30 million for a typical product introduction, according to David Owens, the company’s director of devices.Like the iPhone, the Instinct lacks a keypad and has just a few buttons. Most of the functions are accessed by touching the screen.A few touch-screen phones appeared on the U.S. market last holiday season, after the iPhone’s debut in June.Verizon Wireless launched the LG Voyager, which has an exterior touch screen and folds out to reveal a non-touch screen paired with a keyboard. Sprint introduced the Touch by HTC, a slim pad with only a touch screen.Both phones were hampered by the lack of software designed specifically for a touch screen. The Voyager dealt with that by adding a keyboard. The Touch grafted some touch-friendly features on to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Mobile operating system, which is designed for smart phones that either lack a touch screen or are intended for use with a stylus. Some functions on the Touch are hard or impossible to use by tapping with the fingers alone.The Instinct is based on a Samsung phone that’s already available under different names, and with different software, in South Korea and Europe. Sprint commissioned its own software from European design house Icon Mobile.”We took a more active part than we ever have” in a phone’s development, Owens said. “This was designed from the ground up to be a touch-screen phone.”The software is based on Java, a commonly used programming language that should make it easy to develop applications for the phone.The Instinct will have a few features the iPhone lacks. For one, it will be the first consumer phone in the U.S. to use EV-DO Rev. A, the fastest cellular broadband technology available on the Sprint and Verizon Wireless networks.AT%26T Inc. has phones that use a competing technology with equivalent speeds, but the iPhone is not one of them: It runs on a comparatively slow network, supplemented by Wi-Fi access.The Instinct also contains a Global Positioning System chip, for location applications. The iPhone lacks one, but it can use cellular and Wi-Fi signals to determine an approximate position.The Instinct’s screen measures 3.1 inches diagonally, compared with the iPhone’s 3.5 inches.The Instinct won’t be able to take input from more than one finger at a time: The iPhone’s characteristic “pinch to zoom out, spread to zoom in” feature won’t work. Sprint compensates for this by using the phone’s motion sensor. In a demonstration of a prototype, tilting the phone while holding a button made a Web page scroll.