Office Web Apps Released in 15 More Countries
Microsoft is continuing to roll out its Web-based version of its Office productivity suite worldwide, a product that the company hopes will offer strong competition to offerings from Google and Zoho.
Office Web Apps is now available in China, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and Turkey, according to Microsoft. Office Web Apps is now available in 26 countries, Microsoft said.
The company's Web offerings allow people to view, edit and share Office documents using a Web browser and applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
Microsoft said that more than 20 million people used Office Web Apps within the first three months after it became available in June. Office Web Apps is free to people with a Windows Live account. Microsoft also lets Office 2010 volume licensing customers run Office Web Apps locally on their servers.
Oh boy, looks like another Vista.
Radical modifications seem fine and dandy until they try it and usually fail because they realize that lots of the things are hard to implement and get delayed, which gets features neutered. That's one reason they failed with Vista yet was successful with Windows 7.
Maybe not, but every other new OS MS screws up.
Microsoft's is also reportedly eschewing a central app store for native tablet apps and instead encouraging software companies to build HTML5 -based web apps. That certainly sounds a lot Google's Chrome strategy (and a strategy that could backfire since HTML5 apps will work on Chrome OS devices and iPad equally well)
TDP is only one of the criteria, and arguably the least important. I think most smartphone chips have a TDP in the range of 500-800mW. You could probably get away with 1W peak. But a phone will rarely, if ever hit its TDP, as not many will be folding on it.
The bigger problem is achieving low average, idle and standby power. And achieving high level of integration (wifi/4G/bluetooth radio's, camera controller, video and touchscreen controllers, power management controllers, GPS, etc etc). And preferably, it should be flexible so you can pick the components for the right product and market. Thats perhaps Intel's biggest challenge, and its not technical, its the business model. Its hard enough making the best mobile CPU, its just not possible to have the best (and cheapest) of all the other elements as well.
On todays Atom processors this usually means the chip will run as low as 600MHz when idle and at 133MHz increments all the way up to 1.66GHz under load. You dont normally drop below 600MHz because that falls into the inefficient range of CPU performance scaling for a netbook/nettop. In a smartphone though, the majority of time your CPU isnt being used. The SoC and accessory processors have enough custom logic offload a lot, even when your phone isnt idle.
Lincroft, or the Atom Z600 series, supports even lower frequency modes. The CPU can clock itself down well below 600MHz.
When you need performance however Lincroft has something similar to Turbo Boost on Intels desktop CPUs. On the Atom Z600 series its called Burst Mode and unlike Turbo, it is more tightly integrated with the OS.
EIST and other dynamic clocking technologies rely on OS P-states to determine what frequency the chip should run at. If an OS requests P0, the CPU simply runs at its highest frequency.
On the Core i5 and i7, if the OS requests the CPU be in P0, then as long as the chip doesnt violate any current or TDP limitations it will run at a higher turbo frequency instead of the default maximum clock speed the OS is requesting. P0 will always return the highest possible frequency given the thermal conditions of the chip.
The Atom Z600 doesnt work like this. All potential burst mode frequencies are enumerated as P-states by the BIOS. An OS with proper support for Moorestown will be able to request any specific clock frequency, even burst frequencies. Loading a web page for example might result in the OS asking for the highest possible burst mode frequency, but while youre reading the page the OS might request a slower P-state. The chip will run at whatever the OS requests, but it will exit burst mode if the chips temperature gets too high.
The FSB speed also scales with clock frequency. Once you reach a certain clock speed threshold, the Atom Z600 will automatically double its FSB frequency to help feed the CPU faster. The goal isnt just to deliver peak performance, but its also to complete tasks faster so that the SoC can return to an idle state as soon as possible. The hurry up and go idle approach to mobile CPU performance has been one of Intels basic tenants for well over a decade now. And it does work. This is the reason weve generally seen an increase in battery life from each subsequent version of the Centrino platform.
The software management of burst mode puts more emphasis on the OS and platform vendors to properly tune their devices for the best balance of performance/power consumption. You can see why Wind Rivers Android platform and Moblin are necessary to get the most out of Moorestown.
I agree, I used to use an Acorn Archimedes about 20 years ago (ARM based desktop). Nice machine, equivalent to low-mid end but current Wintel of the day. But time has been kind to CISC, the simplicity advantages of RISC are phenomenal at 32bit, 4 stage pipeline, but as architecture develops, new instructions become one of the few paths left to increase performance in an world bound by Amdahl's Law, so now we are back to CISC.
V8 increases performance by compiling JavaScript to native machine code before executing it, rather than to a bytecode or interpreting it. Further performance increases were achieved by employing optimization techniques such as inline caching.
Ben Parr Ben Parr Wed Jan 5, 11:49 am ET
The rumors are true: Microsoft has announced that the next version of Windows will support ARM-based devices.
Windows currently supports the x86 architecture utilized by Intel and AMD's processors. However, Microsoft is making it clear that the next iteration of Windows (Windows 8, we'll call it) will also support the System on a Chip (SoC) architecture, including the one designed by ARM.
More specifically, Windows 8 will support ARM-based systems from NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. The upcoming version of Windows is separate from the Windows Phone 7 OS, which already powers mobile phones utilizing the ARM architecture.
With todays announcement, were showing the flexibility and resiliency of Windows through the power of software and a commitment to world-class engineering, said President of WIndows Live Division Steven Sinofsky.
Word first leaked of Microsoft's intention to support ARM last month. The move provides a version of the OS that can run on low-power devices, especially tablet computers.
February 3, 2011 6:38 AM PST
ARM's 2015 plan: Grab PC, server share
by Larry Dignan
ARM Holdings owns the mobile market when it comes to licensing chip architecture, but by 2015 the company expects to have a foothold in the PC and server market.
That's the primary takeaway from ARM Holdings' earnings conference call earlier this week. ARM is basically an intellectual property licensing company. As a result, it's a dominant processing company without actually manufacturing a processor. Instead, companies like Nvidia do the heavy lifting. Nevertheless, the message is clear: ARM Holdings is deadly serious about being a PC and server player, and at CES 2011 some of the pieces fell into place.
And why not? Microsoft is supporting ARM. Nvidia's Tegra chipset is landing server design wins.