The latest Point Topic forecast has revealed that UK broadband growth appears to be healthier than expected. Britain added 445,000 net new broadband lines in H1-2009 to reach over 17.8m in total, about 100,000 more than forecast at the start of 2009. The number of net additions forecast for 2009 is now 900,000, an increase of 240,000 (36%) more than before.

The forecast now projects over 23 million broadband lines in the UK by the end of 2013, nearly 1.2 million more than in its previous estimate. However the figures show there are still over 9m ‘no-net’ homes today and the number is falling only slowly. Come 2014 there will still be 6.5m homes without Internet access.

There is a long way to go to meet the Digital Britain Implementation Plan target of 90% coverage of next-generation broadband by 2017 as well.Point Topic notes that coverage is negligible today, but is expected to increase quickly over the next year and will pass 50% by 2014. At that rate the 2017 target should be achievable, although it will depend on some kind of subsidy to reach the more remote areas.

So, assuming all goes to plan and the necessary subsidies are put in place, what will the UK broadband market of 2014 look like? Some 7m people will use next-gen fibre lines and next-gen broadband as a whole will have 30% of the market, cable services ( e.g. Virgin Media ) will have 21% andDSL ( ADSL , ADSL2+ etc. ) should drop to 49%.

However history teaches us that such major developments rarely go according to plan, especially where there is reliance upon subsidies. Then againBT has already accelerated its original rollout of FTTP and FTTC next-gen broadband services so it might still be realistic.

AMD puts its processor lineup back on track

Hark! The long awaited B3 stepping of AMD's Opteron and Phenom finally made its way to system integrators this week.

AMD made it virtually impossible to obtain any K10-based Opteron processors after the TLB bug caught the world's attention last December. Desktop Phenom processors continued to ship, though the BIOS workaround for the TLB race condition severely hampered performance on some benchmarks.

The vendor who obtained the B3 sample photographed couldn't be more ecstatic. "There's been no Opterons since November. We've even been shipping Socket F Opterons to fill AMD orders. This is a big deal," he tells DailyTech.


"Pre-production" Opterons sent to Torrent search engine IsoHunt last February were later revealed as gray-market B2 stepped processors, which AMD tracked to October 2007 samples.

In addition to fixing the TLB race condition, AMD will finally increase the core frequency of the Opteron series on the B3 stepping. After the initial OEM orders are filled, channel vendors like Newegg and TigerDirect will carry the new Opterons in frequencies ranging from 1.8 GHz to 2.4 GHz. Vendor estimates put this e-tailer ship date in early April.

AMD roadmaps also indicate the Phenom and Opteron lines will reach 2.6 GHz before this Fall on the new B3 stepping. In 2009 both lines will transition from the 65nm to the 45nm process node, codenamed Shanghai, with additional SKUs at higher clock frequencies.

B3 Opterons can be easily identified by the "GH" as opposed to "GD" at the end of the product number. With the exception of Phenom and Opteron SE processors, AMD emphasizes to DailyTech that no vendor should be selling or distributing "GD," and customers who obtain these older B2 steppings should contact their local AMD distributor.

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY - 17 Mar 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM) scientists today took another significant advance towards sending information inside a computer chip by using light pulses instead of electrons by building the world’s tiniest nanophotonic switch with a footprint about 100X smaller than the cross section of a human hair.

The switch is an important building block to control the flow of information inside future chips and can significantly speed up the chip performance while using much less energy.

Today’s announcement is a continuation of a series of IBM developments towards an on-chip optical network:

• In November 2005, IBM scientists demonstrated a silicon nanophotonic device that can significantly slow down and actively control the speed of light.

• In December 2006 an analogous tiny silicon device was used to demonstrate buffering of over a byte of information encoded in optical pulses a requirement for building optical buffers for on-chip optical networks.

• In December 2007, IBM scientists announced the development of an ultra-compact silicon electro-optic modulator, which performs the job of converting electrical signals into the light pulses, a prerequisite for enabling on-chip optical communications.
  

“This new development is a critical addition in the quest to build an on-chip optical network,” – said Yurii Vlasov, manager of silicon nanophotonics at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center. “In view of all the progress that this field has seen for the last few years it looks that our vision for on-chip optical networks is becoming more and more realistic”.

Today’s announcement is another significant advance in their quest to develop next generation high-performance multi-core computer chips which transmit information internally using pulses of light traveling through silicon instead of electrical signals on copper wires.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Photonics, IBM unveils the development of a silicon broadband optical switch, another key component required to enable on-chip optical interconnects. Once the electrical signals have been converted into pulses of light, this switching device performs the key role of “directing traffic” within the network, ensuring that optical messages from one processor core can efficiently get to any of the other cores on the chip.

The IBM team demonstrated that their switch has several critical characteristics which make it ideally suited to on-chip applications. First, the switch is extremely compact. As many as 2000 would fit side-by-side in an area of one square millimeter, easily meeting integration requirements for future multi-core processors.

Second, the device is able to route a huge amount of data since many different wavelengths or “colors” of light can be switched simultaneously. With each wavelength carrying data at up to 40 Gb/s, it is possible to switch an aggregate bandwidth exceeding 1 Tb/s -- a requirement for routing large messages between distant cores. Last but not least, IBM scientists showed for the first time that their optical switch is capable of operating within a realistic on-chip environment, where the temperature of the chip itself can change dramatically in the vicinity of “hot-spots,” which move around depending upon the way the processors are functioning at any given moment. The IBM scientists believe this temperature-drift tolerant operation to be one of the most critical requirements for on-chip optical networks.

An important trend in the microelectronics industry is to increase the parallelism in computation by multi-threading, by building large scale multi-chip systems and, more recently, by increasing the number of cores on a single chip. For example the IBM Cell processor which powers Sony’s PlayStation 3 gaming console consists of nine “brains,” or cores, on a single chip. As users continue to demand greater computing performance, chip designers plan to increase this number to tens or even hundreds of cores.

This approach, however, only makes sense if each core can receive and transmit large messages from all other cores on the chip simultaneously. The individual cores located on today’s multi-core microprocessors communicate with one another over millions of tiny copper wires. However, this copper wiring would simply use up too much power and be incapable of transmitting the enormous amount of information required to enable massively multi-core processors.

IBM researches are exploring an alternative solution to this problem by connecting cores using pulses of light in an on-chip optical network based on silicon nanophotonic integrated circuits. Like a long-haul fiber-optic network, such an extremely miniature on-chip network will transmit, receive, and route messages between individual cores that are encoded as a pulses of light. It is envisioned that using light instead of wires, as much as 100 times more information can be sent between cores, while using 10 times less power and consequently generating less heat.

The report on this work, entitled “High-throughput silicon nanophotonic wavelength-insensitive switch for on-chip optical networks” by Yurii Vlasov, William M. J. Green, and Fengnian Xia of IBM’s T.J.WatsonResearchCenter in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. is published in the April 2008 issue of the journal Nature Photonics. This work was partially supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through the Defense Sciences Office program “Slowing, Storing and Processing Light”.

Additional information on this development as well as on the IBM’s nanophotonics project can be found at the website http://www.research.ibm.com/photonics.

Microsoft India has announced a range of price reductions on the retail versions of Windows Vista.

Aimed at benefiting individuals purchasing stand-alone copies of Windows Vista, the price reduction is effective immediately and will be applicable only for Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate editions.

The reduction varies from 13 percent to 39 percent, with the estimated retail price for Windows Vista Home Basic Edition now at Rs. 4,000, Windows Vista Home Premium available for Rs. 5,300 and Windows Vista Ultimate at Rs. 11,500 (all estimated street prices - may vary by city and partner).

"Today, there is a transformation taking place in the way consumers purchase software. With the rise of the retail industry in India, we are witnessing increasing demand for off-the-shelf computer software from the do-it-yourself audiences. This reduction in pricing will enable us to reach out to this set of consumers, while at the same time providing our channel partners with a greater opportunity to sell original software," said Prasanna Meduri, Director – Windows Client Business Group, Microsoft India.

Globally, the revised rates of Windows Vista vary from market to market and the price cut in India is at par with emerging markets

Samsung has already given us a mobile camera with 5 megapixels and that’s not something new. To take it a step further they decided to add a 3X optical zoom lens to the mix. Given the fact they seem to want to take the mobile camera to new levels, their latest attempt was the world's ultra-thin CMOS camera phone module.

The module itself has dimensions of 28mm × 15.3mm × 8.5mm, which is nothing to sneeze at. With a module like this, we can expect a wider range of features from the next line-up of camera phones like face-detection, better macro and night modes and the like. More importantly, what we can hope to see with this module integrated into a handset is a camera phone with an 8-megapixel resolution. That’s definitely something we’ve been looking forward to for a while now.


The module is a key component of a mobile phone camera and with dimensions like these the next camera phone we could see from Samsung may not necessarily be as plump as the G810. We can hope.

Gartner has recommended "appliance-level" support status for the iPhone, once a more enterprise-friendly version of firmware and security enhancements are released by Apple. During the initial launch of the iPhone, Gartner analysts expressed concern over some security issues with the device, but recently announced enhancements, expected to be delivered in June 2008, have caused Gartner to change its recommendation.


"Appliance-level" status permits the iPhone to be used for PIM, e-mail, telephony and browsing applications. It also permits the device to be used for other dedicated functions where the software is supplied by a third party, functionality is kept to a restricted set, the software supplier offers support for a backup platform and IT development resources are not needed to program custom code locally residing on the device.

"In its initial release, the iPhone was, with few exceptions, an Internet tablet with browser-based applications as its main offering, however, the release of firmware 2.0 changes that, enabling enterprises to develop local code and create applications that do not depend on network capabilities," said Ken Dulaney, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "The iPhone will thus match up initially in several segments against its main smartphone competitors - BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian Series 60."

Earlier this month Apple announced developer access to the iPhone software developer kit (SDK) and firmware 2.0, licensing of the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol suite, support for Cisco IPSEC and the addition of WPA2 security for Wi-Fi connections.

"By licensing Exchange ActiveSync and exposing its basic security policies, enterprises can provide sufficient security for iPhone during Exchange personal information manager (PIM) and e-mail use," Dulaney said. "This will open up a huge market for the iPhone, which previously had been stymied by a lack of basic business security and application functionality. However, Apple must widen distribution and of course deliver what they have promised."

Expansion of the iPhone into the enterprise could mean that Apple will become a mainstream supplier of client platform development tools. This could mean that other Apple products begin to appeal to end users. However, this will push enterprises to invest in technologies with which they are unfamiliar and that require training and further investment.

"Management of the iPhone outside the Exchange e-mail/PIM application will require familiarity with new products such as Apple's iPhone Configuration Utility. And enterprises should thoroughly review the platform's management and security options to understand how they can control any consumer elements of the platform that may pose a risk," Mr. Dulaney said.