Semi sales up 7.6% year on year (via Briefing.com). Lots of market talk about LCD sales softening as well.
Semiconductor chip sales during July increased 7.6% from last year, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. In turn, total July sales were $22.2 billion. Sales were also up from the prior month when they totaled $21.6 billion. Year-to-date, sales have totaled $148.3 billion, reflecting a 5% increase over the same period last year. Chip sales continue to benefit from healthy demand as consumers continue to buy anything from personal computers to increasingly sophisticated cell phones. However, sales of DRAM and NAND flash memory declined as a result of continuing price erosion.
Engadget summarises the Berlin IFA show — the European equivalent of CES in Vegas — with a yawn. The biggest crowd pleaser was the Wii, which is two years old now. That’s despite new 150″ HD displays and some interesting netbooks.
Netbooks seem to be a related phenomenon, offering cheap and simple pleasures in comparison to overly complicated and overly expensive laptops that consumers can find intimidating. It’s not that there’s a lot of “innovation” in the space, merely the repackaging of the previously niche, expensive ultraportable as a cheap and simple secondary computer. Similarly, Toshiba is taking a gamble that consumers would rather make their existing DVD collections look a bit better through upconversion instead of investing heavily in a whole new generation of disc media — and they could be right — but even that very upscaling can be a hard sell at times. Blu-ray is also feeling heat from downloadable content, and downloadable content is in turn feeling heat from low-fi streaming like Hulu, with its “good enough” quality and ease of access.
China is making progress in CPU chip manufacturing to compete with Intel:
The ICT group began designing a single-core CPU in 2001, and by the following year had developed Godson-1, China’s first general-purpose CPU. In 2003, 2004, and 2006, the team introduced ever faster versions of a second chip–Godson-2–based on the original design… Godson-3, a chip with four cores–processing units that work in parallel–will appear in 2009… Importantly, Godson-3 is scalable, meaning that more cores can be added to future generations without significant redesign… The four-core Godson-3 will consume 10 watts of power, and the eight-core chip will consume 20 watts… This latest chip will also be fundamentally different from those made before… engineers have added 200 additional instructions to Godson-3 to simulate an x86 chip… [Intel says that] the chip will only perform at about 80 percent of the speed of an actual x86 chip…
Google is monopolising sources of satellite imagery; signing an exclusive deal with GeoEye to complement the one with DigitalGlobe, the other major civil satellite imagery provider. (via Slashdot)
Under the deal, Google is the exclusive online mapping site that may use the imagery… in its Google Maps and Google Earth product. And as a little icing on the cake, Google’s logo is on the side of the rocket set to launch the 4,300-pound satellite in six days from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. GeoEye-1 will orbit 423 miles above Earth, but it will be able to gather imagery with details the size of 41 centimeters… Google, though, is permitted to use data only with a resolution of 50 cm because of the terms of GeoEye’s license with the US government.
The Economist writes on progress towards a solar plane.
Bertrand Piccard (of the famous family of explorers) and Andre Borschberg, at the Beijing Olympics for sponsors to help them build a solar-powered aircraft capable of circumnavigating the globe… With the wingspan of a commercial airliner, the two-man Solar Impulse (pictured above) is designed to climb on solar power to almost 30,000 feet during the day, and then gently glide on thermals, uplift and battery power down to 6,000 feet at night—repeating the procedure for several days at a time. While the plane should be able to fly more or less indefinitely, the crew will need to make numerous landings to replenish their food, water and oxygen supplies… The other interesting development was the three-and-a-half day flight by an unmanned, solar-powered plane called Zephyr. The 66-pound reconnaissance plane, built by the QinetiQ group in Britain, was guided by autopilot and satellite to an altitude of over 60,000 feet, drawing power from the sun during the day while relying on rechargeable lithium-sulphur batteries at night. That demonstration flight, made from an American army testing ground in Arizona, more than doubled the world record for unmanned flight, set by Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk in 2001… In a sense, the two solar planes in the news this past week are a validation of battery technology more than solar-cell developments.
The effect of the ‘cashback’ scheme to lure searchers to MSN lasted one month…
An important judgement that video sites are not liable if they follow take-down notices. They are allowed to transcode and store content and do not have to pre-emptively police it.