ITNEWS !!

Intel appears ready to take another crack at flash memory-based acceleration–this time offering it with future chipsets.

Intel Braidwood technology is based on a flash memory module.

(Credit: Intel)

“Braidwood is a flash memory technology that provides faster boot-up time, faster application launch, and a snappier, more responsive system,” said Rob Crooke, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Business Client Group, speaking during a presentation streamed over the Web from the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, earlier this week.

Braidwood will be offered with the future “5 Series” chipset family–which is Intel’s first single-chip chipset–and the future “Clarkdale” processor (see discussion below).

The architecture accelerates I/O (input/output) accesses by saving that data to flash memory, according to Crooke. In a demonstration at Computex, Crooke showed Braidwood “caching the I/O…And then, when it launches that application again, it happens very quickly,” he said.

Intel’s first stab at technology analogous to Braidwood came in 2006. That product was code-named Robson and eventually branded as Turbo Memory. But it only received lukewarm reviews and was never adopted widely.

“Clarkdale,” a Nehalem-based processor, will be offered with Braidwood, according to Intel documentation released at Computex. Clarkdale will integrate graphics silicon into the same package as the main processor. It is on track to begin production in the fourth quarter of this year–with systems available in 2010–and is built on Intel’s second-generation 32-nanometer process technology. Clarkdale will be offered with the Intel 5 Series chipset.

On another front, Crooke also talked about the mainstreaming of Intel’s Nehalem Core i7 desktop chips, which are currently limited to high-end enthusiast systems. Due later this year, the “Lynnfield” processor is a new four-core, eight-thread processor that will be paired with the P55 Express chipset. Threads essentially double the number of tasks a processor can perform.

Users can expect 40 percent better performance on widely used SPECint benchmarks with the Lynnfield-based platform, compared with last year’s mainstream Core Q9650 processor-based technology, Crooke said.

WASHINGTON–The Transportation Security Agency’s plans to use X-rays to peek under air travelers’ clothes may soon be shelved.

In a 310-118 vote on Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives approved legislation that curbs the growing use of what critics call “virtual strip searches” at airport checkpoints.

Privacy groups say that the low-energy backscatter X-rays allow “a highly realistic image to be reconstructed… of the traveler’s nude form” that’s “detailed enough to show genitalia.” The TSA, on the other hand, says it has made improvements to its scanning technology including a “privacy algorithm” that will provide the operator with vaguer outlines of body parts. (See related CBS News video.)

The House vote attached an amendment drafted by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, to a broader TSA bill.

TSA’s X-ray backscatter scanning with “privacy filter,” front view

(Credit: TSA.gov)

Chaffetz’s amendment says that whole body imaging “may not be used” as the primary method of passenger screening, and that passengers have the right to refuse it and “shall be offered a pat-down search” as an alternative. It also prohibits the storage or transmission of the whole-body images after they’re no longer necessary for screening.

“Whole-body imaging is exactly what it says; it allows TSA employees to conduct the equivalent of a strip search,” Chaffetz said in a statement after the vote. “Nobody needs to see my wife and kids naked to secure an airplane.”

Chaffetz had first introduced the measure as a standalone bill in April. His original bill made it a federal crime for a TSA screener to share or copy a passenger image; that penalty vanished in the final version attached as an amendment.

Backscatter X-rays are relatively low-power and are believed to be safe even for frequent flyers. One manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems, boasts that its equipment can detect “explosives, narcotics, ceramic weapons” such as ceramic knives that traditional metal detectors can’t. (A competing technology is called millimeter wave.)

On May 31, a coalition of advocacy groups including the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Gun Owners of America, and the Consumer Federation of America sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano asking her to “suspend the program until the privacy and security risks are fully evaluated.”

TSA’s “millimeter wave” technology

(Credit: TSA.gov)

TSA says that it’s currently using millimeter wave technology at 19 U.S. airports, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Washington Reagan National.

During the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., Peter Pietra, the TSA’s director for privacy policy and compliance, defended full-body scanning technology. (See CNET’s 2006 interview with Pietra.)

“It’s much better for me than going through a magnetometer,” Pietra said. There’s “an awful lot of work that’s gone into it.” Any suggestions on how to improve the privacy of the screening process, he said, could be sent to tsaprivacy@dhs.gov.

On Thursday, the full House approved the Transportation Security Administration Authorization Act by a vote of 397 to 25. Now the bill heads to the Senate, which could choose to preserve or strip out the privacy amendments.

People are searching with Microsoft’s Bing, but perhaps not as much as one company thinks.

(Credit: Screenshot by Ina Fried/CNET)

Ah, statistics.

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine has received positive reviews in its first week on the planet, but did that early buzz translate into traffic? A report from Statcounter picked up by TechCrunch suggested that Bing’s debut was successful enough to eclipse Yahoo Search during its first week, but subsequent analysis from Search Engine Land as well as data from CNET’s network of sites suggests otherwise.

Statcounter, a Web traffic tracking company, reported that as of Thursday, June 4, Bing accounted for 16.28 percent of the U.S. search market, surpassing Yahoo’s 10.22 percent just days after going live on Monday. Worldwide, Bing’s advantage was said to be slimmer (5.62 percent to Yahoo’s 5.13 percent), but that was enough for Statcounter to proclaim “Bing overtakes Yahoo!”

However, it’s not quite that simple. Statcounter’s data is “based on aggregate data collected by Statcounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion page views per month collected from across the Statcounter network of more than 3 million Web sites. Stats are updated and made available every 4 hours, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 7 days from publication,” according to the company.

Therefore, it will be interesting to see if those numbers change next week. Search Engine Land checked in with Comscore, Nielsen, and Hitwise, and found that over the past week in the U.S., Yahoo Search did about three times more traffic than Bing, roughly the same level where it was the week before when Microsoft-branded search consisted of Live Search and MSN Search.

Nielsen figures show that there was indeed a surge in interest among U.S. Web surfers related to Bing on June 1, the first day it went live. But that’s not all that surprising given natural curiosity surrounding something new and shiny, and Bing’s surge appeared to neatly replace the corresponding drop-off in traffic to Live Search and MSN Search.

CNET data suggests a similar story. For the first four days that Bing was live, the new search engine accounted for 2.2 percent of all session starts across the various CNET sites, including News, Reviews, Download, CNET TV, and CNET Shopper. Yahoo searches accounted for a little more than twice as many session starts, or 4.5 percent. Google, of course, was responsible for the rest. Bing did better than Yahoo on some sites, but worse on others.

Measuring Internet market share is notoriously tricky, and five different companies could very well reach five different conclusions. But even Microsoft has said that its basic goal for Bing over the next year is to pick up 2 percentage points of share, which unless Yahoo goes completely dark will still leave it solidly in third place behind Google and Yahoo.

Engadget brightened up a slow news day on Friday with a leaked memo from Best Buy that offers a number of Windows 7 details.

Most notable is the fact that the memo puts a date on when people can start buying Vista-based machines and qualify for a free upgrade to Windows 7. According to the memo, June 26 is the magic date–and I’m hearing that date is correct.

The memo also says that on June 26, Best Buy will start preselling upgrade versions of Windows 7 Home Premium for $49 and Windows 7 Professional for $99 via its Web site. It’s not totally clear whether those are standard or promotional prices, although the memo says the pre-order program will run only for 16 days.

Microsoft Senior Vice President Bill Veghte did say in an interview this week that the software maker was considering requests from Vista owners to have a free or cheaper way to upgrade to Windows 7, so perhaps this pre-order option might be that program.

Best Buy also offers its marketing pitch for Windows 7 in the memo. “This new operating system isn’t just a ‘Vista that works’ program – it’s a new operating system with improved productivity, functionality and creativity that uses less computer resources.”

A Best Buy representative was not immediately available to comment on the memo’s authenticity.

When it announced October 22 as the official ship date for Windows 7 earlier this week, Microsoft also confirmed that it planned to have such a tech guarantee program, however the company did not say when it would start. A Microsoft representative said on Friday that the company had nothing more to add about the timing of the program.

Update 11:05 a.m. PT: No word back from Best Buy, but I did get independent confirmation of the memo, which was released on June 1. I’ve included a copy below.

(Credit: CNET)

At this year’s E3 Expo in Los Angeles, both Sony and Microsoft pushed upcoming services and devices that allow users to download full games to their hardware. For Microsoft, it’s a new arm of its online marketplace that will let gamers download full retail games to their system’s hard drives. For Sony, it’s the new PSP Go, a slimmed-down version of its flagship portable gaming hardware that does away with its game slot in place of pushing Wi-Fi game downloads to its 16GB of built-in memory.

Both companies are pushing direct downloads as the premiere way to buy new games, and many are expecting the direct-downloading technology to be one of the main selling points in the next generation of gaming hardware. As a side effect, the new revenue model largely cuts out used game retailers, since there’s less physical media to resell or swap with friends.

But let’s get real for a moment, this is nothing new. In fact, game companies have been trying to get direct-download games working on consoles since the early 1980s. Let’s take a brief look at previous efforts to sell console games without any physical media:

Intellivision’s PlayCable (1981-83):
Intellivision was the first home console to let users download games via a coaxial cable line. Subscribers rented a special cartridge that hooked up to local cable and would be able to download single games that could be played until users decided to download new titles.

The service’s downfall was a result of innovations to Mattel’s Intellivision game system, which began using cartridges with ever-increasing amounts of memory. The PlayCable service could no longer keep up, since the special cartridge could hold only a fourth of the total space that newer games required.

(Credit: The Arctic Computer and Console Museum)

The GameLine (1983)
Game consoles of the ’80s pioneered the use of cartridges. Early on, many were simply ports of arcade titles and thus retained the coin-sucking gameplay mechanics that kept users playing again and again to get high scores. The only problem was that once the consumer bought the game, that was the end of the revenue stream for the publisher.

Then GameLine came along. This third-party game download service from Control Video (which later became America Online) worked with multiple game consoles and would let users download new games through a telephone line connected directly to a special cartridge. It would then limit gameplay to a certain number of plays that users would have to prebuy.

Despite GameLine’s innovative approach to game distribution, it had two big problems. The first is that it never got big game publishers on board, meaning that users were paying big money for smaller titles that weren’t available at retail. It also came out the same year as the video game crash of 1983, when most of the hardware vendors and software-publishing houses were going bankrupt.

The Sega Channel (1994-98):
The Sega Channel was a monthly subscription service for Sega’s 16-bit Genesis system. Similar to Intellivision’s offerings, users paid $15 a month to get access to an ever-changing library of games that could be downloaded directly to a cartridge that plugged into coax cable. Not all of Sega’s games were available on the service, but it had several big titles that could be downloaded without leaving the house. It was also the first service to give users special games that were never released as retail offerings.
While the Sega Channel’s special cartridge kept the same amount of internal memory throughout its life span, newer Genesis games were growing in cartridge size. To work around that limitation, some Sega Channel games were split up into parts that could be downloaded and played on their own. This kept it from running into some of the size problems that led to the demise of Intellivision’s PlayCable.

The Sega Channel was discontinued at the end of the Genesis life cycle, and it was not brought back to work with the company’s follow-up console, the Saturn.

With the Satellaview, Super Famicom users could only access game downloads during certain parts of the day.

(Credit: Wikipedia)

The Nintendo Satellaview (1995-2001)
The Satellaview was an ambitious project by Nintendo of Japan to offer games, music, and news over satellite. Users could tune in at certain times of the day to get at the content, which would be downloaded into a special add-on accessory that strapped onto the bottom of the Super Famicom system.

Nintendo offered a wide range of games to the Satellaview. It also featured an innovative menu system that played like a video game. Users would have to navigate around a virtual house in order to download certain titles or access news feeds.

Satellaview operated by subscription and was never released outside of Japan. Its service ended when Nintendo released the Super Famicom’s successor, the Nintendo 64.

Nintendo’s RandNet (1999-2001):
Nintendo’s RandNet service was specific to the 64DD add-on to the Nintendo 64. Released only in Japan, this peripheral added a magnetic disk drive to the bottom of the console and allowed for games that took up more space than Nintendo 64 cartridges could hold.

The 64DD was never released outside of Japan. It latched on to the bottom of the Nintendo 64 and added a disk drive.

(Credit: Wikipedia)

For about $30 a month, users got a special cable modem cartridge that plugged into the top of the N64 and hooked up to coax. It fed information into the 64DD, with which games up to 64MB in size could be downloaded from an online service. Users could also play certain games with one another, surf the Web with a built-in browser and, most importantly, download early levels from unreleased games. There was no game purchase store for full titles, but with a little more onboard storage, it could have led to that.

Xbox Live Arcade/Marketplace (2004-present):

Live Arcade
Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) is a downloadable game service from Microsoft that’s stretched from the original Xbox into Microsoft’s current game hardware, the Xbox 360. When it was released for the original Xbox, gamers were required to have a special Xbox Live Arcade DVD in their systems to access any of the games they had purchased and downloaded to their hard drives. Once the Xbox 360 was released, Microsoft simply built it into the system’s software to let users download games directly.

Games on XBLA are typically casual titles. Early on, they were limited to 50MB in size to be able to work for Xbox 360 owners who had purchased the lower-end versions of the machines that did not come with hard drives. Microsoft later lifted that cap to 150MB, then to 350MB, though several games have managed to get by that limit, including a movie tie-in game for “The Watchmen” that was 1.2GB in size.

Xbox Live Arcade games can be downloaded directly to the Xbox 360. They were were a precursor to full titles, which are coming to the system this fall.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Marketplace
Full-game downloads on Xbox Live’s Marketplace didn’t come until the launch of a service in late 2007. Called “Xbox Originals,” the service let users download select original Xbox titles that could be played on their Xbox 360. Unlike the system’s backwards compatibility with most older Xbox titles, Xbox Originals provided full digital copies that would be downloaded directly to the 360’s hard drive.

At this year’s E3, Microsoft announced plans to offer a similar service to Xbox Originals, except for Xbox 360 games. Called “Games on Demand,” Microsoft is going to offer a selection of older titles, along with releasing new games as direct downloads. Each title falls somewhere between 4GB and 6GB in size, and can be redownloaded an unlimited number of times, if deleted.

(Credit: Nintendo / CNET)

Nintendo Wii Shop (2006-present)
The Wii Shop came as built-in software on Nintendo’s Wii. It lets users purchase Wii applications and games using virtual currency tied to real-world dollars. The shop houses classic games from older consoles (including some of Nintendo’s past competitors), along with new downloadable games that have been specifically developed for the Wii.

Due to size restrictions on the console, these games are not as large or full-featured as standard Wii titles. They’re also similar to what’s found on Microsoft and Sony’s download stores.

PlayStation 3 / PSP Store (2006-present)
The PlayStation Store, which comes preinstalled on the PlayStation 3, lets users download movies, music, and video games. Like the Wii and Xbox 360, it has a selection of low-cost casual games that can be purchased online only. It also has some original PlayStation games that can be downloaded straight to the hard drive and run using a software emulator.

(Credit: Sony)

In late 2007, Sony began releasing select PlayStation 3 titles as direct downloads. It was the first current-generation console to do so. These games cost about the same as their Blu-ray Disc retail counterparts, but only eight have been released as direct downloads out of the hundreds of titles that have hit retail.

Along with games that run on the PlayStation 3, users can also purchase some games for Sony’s portable system, the PSP, which can be transferred via USB cable to the device.

PSP users can download some games directly to their device instead of purchasing them on Sony’s proprietary UMD physical format. Sony has not made all the games it’s released at retail available for digital download, but it is expected to do so later this year to coincide with the release of the PSP Go, which features no UMD slot and uses internal solid-state memory instead.

The DSiWare shop can be accessed on Nintendo’s handheld gaming device.

(Credit: Nintendo / CNET)

DSi Shop (2008-present)
Nintendo’s DSi portable system includes DSi Shop software, which enables users to buy DSiWare games over a Wi-Fi connection, and store them on the system’s internal or external memory. Unlike what’s available on the PSP, however, these games typically have fewer features.

The future (2010 and beyond)
Going forward, direct downloads are sure to be a staple in all next-generation console hardware, for both the home and on the go. There are serious benefits to distributing game code digitally, especially for publishers. With built-in digital rights management, they get tighter control over leaks, and with the removal of a used market, their sales potential increases.

What’s changed over the years has been less about delivery and more about storage. Storage, naturally, is an area in which some of the biggest problems crop up for hardware manufacturers.

Back in the ’80s, GameLine and PlayCable were working with mere kilobytes of storage, whereas Microsoft’s new Games on Demand service will have titles pushing 6GB. Some PlayStation 3 titles are nearly four times that size, maxing out single-layer Blu-ray Discs, which can handle up to 25GB.

Sizes like that aren’t going to work for downloads, unless you’ve got some serious hard-drive space. The PlayStation 3 tops out at 160GB, though it can be expanded, if users install third-party drives. That has to be one of the factors that has kept Sony from making more of its titles available as direct downloads.

With advances in storage size and broadband speeds, optical media’s days are definitely numbered, but we may be seeing the same hybrid approach we’re seeing in this generation for the next one too. Where game companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo face the biggest roadblock is in trying to balance the ease of distribution with the burdening necessity of pricey and underperforming storage mediums.