Otaku Gadgets

Intel has been making the headlines for various reasons ever since this year’s IDF happened. The things showed off at the annual event have the industry still buzzing with the various developments around them. Of course, that is what Intel had hoped for. Moblin has been on and off the news for the past week or two thanks to Dell and others. Light Peak on the other hand has been getting a lot of attention due to the Apple connection. Intel has come in to the focus once again but in a rather indirect manner after NVIDIA announced that they are ‘postponing’ the development of new chipsets. Read all about it on the other side.

Chipset Wars

NVIDIA has been walking towards the end of the road for quite sometime now when it comes to making chipsets for Intel’s new Nehalem P55 PC structure. That’s because while they did have the license to a major Intel component that enabled it to make chipsets that accepted Intel chips, they do not have the required license when it comes to the new structure.

As a result, they have issued statements to various news sources stating in very eloquent terms that they are halting the process of developing chipsets even though they will still be bringing out newer chipsets to the market. Even though that sounds paradoxical, it simply means that they will be releasing things that are already in the pipeline but they will not be pumping funds into the development of new chipsets that might never see the light of day due to licensing issues. Even if they do, they will not be in the market for long once Intel comes out with its CPU/GPU combo chip.

Moblin Plans

In other news, cnet has been talking with Doug Fisher, vice president of Intel’s System Software Division, about Moblin and what lies ahead.

Fisher describes the Moblin OS as having a unified stack that is consistent through all device form factors. Thus it aims to provide a highly consistent UI and core functionality experience across different releases. This would ensure that a single API would help developers bring out applications for various Moblin devices. The assumption is of course that these devices are built around Intel’s Atom. But even in that consistency, OEMs and OSVs can customize the experience to a great degree. Fisher talks about Canonical’s Moblin Ubuntu Remix OS used by Dell on its Mini has an example of this kind of implementation.

Fisher envisions a future for Moblin where it is a highly relevant platform that focuses on three main areas – Internet usage, media consumption and social networking – the main interest areas for consumers.

Light Peak Leaks

Coming to Light Peak, it is looking more and more likely that we will be seeing the first instances of it as early as next year. Foci, the company that supplied the fiber optic component for the Light Peak demo that Intel did at the IDF, has stated that they should be ready for the pilot run this November with mass production due sometime early next year. So it is not as far off as we thought it was.

The main factor here is the question of relevance and mass adoption. Intel is trying influence the USB Implementation Forum to act on the matter but unless this technology is proven to be viable and consumer friendly, mass market manufacturers are not going to be interested in supporting this standard.

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