Some leaked slides on a Chinese website showing a PC Chipset with 10 USB 2.0 ports and 4 USB 3.0 ports.   Now you might ask, why only 4 USB 3.0 ports?

Isn’t USB 3.0 is faster than USB 2.0?  Yes

Isn’t USB 3.0 more power efficient per GB of data transferred?  Yes

Doesn’t USB 3.0 got to sleep faster and wake up faster for better power savings?  Yes. 

Last Week’s Question of the Week

What is the maximum theoretical read/write speed of a SATA 6 Gbps equipped SSD?
What is the fastest claimed speed?
What is the fastest benchmarked speed?

Mr. Posner wrote in:

What is the maximum theoretical read/write speed of a SATA 6 Gbps equipped SSD?

600 MB/s – Source: My brain, 6 Gb/s signaling with 8b/10b encoding

What is the fastest claimed speed?

Read 550 MB/s / write 525 MB/s – Source:http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/3871/ocz_technology_vertex_3_sf_2200_solid_state_drive_preview/index1.html

What is the fastest benchmarked speed?
Read 550 MB/s / write 520 MB/s -Source:http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/3871/ocz_technology_vertex_3_sf_2200_solid_state_drive_preview/index4.html(this is the ATTO test which reports raw performance)

So the maximum theoretical speed should be 80% of 6 Gbps or 4.8 Gbps.
This assumes zero latencies in the 1) PC, 2) Drive, 3) Drivers, 4) OS, 5) Peripheral firmware…

At a measured read speed of 550MBytes per second this equals about 4.4Gbps.  Reading through the Tweaktown article, the fastest previous SSD  reads at 285 MBytes per second.

So the fastest memory and the fastest SSD today, in 2011, can start to take advantage of USB 3.0.  Only SSDs of the highest speed get the full throughput 10x throughput.  More importantly, mainstream SSDs (or HDDs) can still take advantage of USB 3.0 at 3x-8x USB 2.0 speeds.  As the price of the high-end SSDs come down, USB 3.0 becomes more useful.

Why ask this question now?  Doesn’t this argue against USB 3.0?

The real reason to ask is Thunderbolt.  Even if Thunderbolt can delivered sustained 10 Gbps (which probably is 8b10b encoded, so less now) then the peripherals that serve data up at 10Gbps will cost 50% or more of the cost of a laptop.  So Thunder (for now) is directed at a fairly narrow market.

USB 3.0 – Immediately useful today, Tomorrow more useful.

Today’s Question of the Week

Why would I put faster flash memory (like the SSD above) in my Smart Phone?

Will PC’s go away?

Answer in the comments below.

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iSuppli predicts that Apple will become the world’s top consumer of semiconductor chips in 2012. 

This little prediction in July last year was so interesting to me, that I decided to keep it to myself.

Yes, it was reported  in the press.

Yes, there is an error in the graph above, the first column says, “Company” but it’s not my press release it’s iSuppli’s graph and analysis.

The reason I bring this up now, is that Apple has shipped about 10.2 Million mobile PCs in Q4 2010, about 7.3 million of those were iPads.  This is more than HP (9.3M), Acer (8.4M), Dell (5.9M), and Toshiba (5.1M) shipped in Q4.

So Apple has:

1) Become the number 1 Mobile PC supplier with the iPad as of Q4 2011

2) Pushes the suppliers around the world to increase their capacity for production.

Apple dedicated $3.9 Billion in prepayments over the next 2 years, iSuppli thinks these companies are LG, Samsung, Toshiba, and Sharp

I think this is Awesome because:

1) People are buying these iPads and iPhone, new ones every year. (and not giving the old ones to me)

2) It’s pushing demand for components, which should create new jobs

3) It’s pushing the demand for Apps, like games, not just on the Apple platforms, but also on the Google and eventually other platforms. Something like over 100 tablet designs, and lots of smart phones.

So

1) More demand for lots of components (cheap (connectors/cables/accessories) and expensive ones(touch screens))
2) More demand for design engineers, verification engineers, industrial design experts…
3) Read…

Question of the Week

What is the maximum theoretical read/write speed of a SATA 6 Gbps equipped SSD?
What is the fastest claimed speed?
What is the fastest benchmarked speed?

Answer in the comments below. Include a link to your source please.

My Negativity on Negativity

It drives me absolutely crazy to see the negativity around things like “Oh, Apple is closed,” or “the Mac App Store is restrictive” because I see a better experience on my iPod than I see on my PC. (And I will always be a PC person)

The other thing that drives me crazy is the criticism of Apple for charging 30% on iPad Magazine subscriptions.  I have news for everyone (for which I will not charge 30%).  This market didn’t exist 1 year ago!  You were already losing market share in print to on-line, and no one was paying for it!

I see more opportunities for hardware makers, software makers, after market devices, and LEGAL SUBSCRIPTIONS than ever.  In a market that didn’t exist for the iPad 1 year ago, and for the iPhone 5 years ago.

No one in the world could provide another way for companies to make money digitally, to get people to pay LEGALLY for Music, LEGALLY for Video, and actually pay money for magazines and subscriptions.

So what did Apple create?

1) Market for Apps
2) Market for Digital Video
3) Market for Digital Media
4) Market for Portable Games
5) Market for Digital Video Rental
6) Market for Digital Magazines and Newspapers

Wow.

How horrible.

I’m left to believe that anyone criticizing Apple just wants press time.

In fact I bet you stopped reading this right after you looked at the graph.

Answer to the previous question

What is missing from the Apple Patent?

Commenter “Chandrashekar BU” responded correctly.  Thunderbolt. 

After reading a few more articles, it appears that the patent, or some version refers to Dual DisplayPort which might imply Thunderbolt, but I can’t tell.

Comment below. Please.

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After about the first minute of the first earthquake, I took out my Blackberry and shot the first videos you saw in the first post.  Shortly after that we saw this fire from our window from the top floor of Synopsys NSGK.

Gervais Fong looks out at the fire in the distance.

Our customer meeting pretty much stopped, and we started watching the live video feed of the Tsunami hitting the Sendai area.

Mobile and landlines were jammed.  The Internet worked, so I Google Talked with my wife, and Skype’d with MCCI Japan.

The trains all shut down immediately during the earthquake, and most people ride the train 1-2 hours to go home.  This means everyone either walked home or spent the night in their office.  Here’s a train stopped right across a street.  The engineer likely slept inside the train all night long.

Ralph Grundler taking a picture of this train stopped over the road  near Shinagawa.

We had dinner with our co-workers, who all slept in the office that night.

Our team of Ralph Grundler, Gervais Fong, Hezi Saar, and I walked the 2 miles back to our hotel.  We saw thousands of people walking.  We ran into one of Ralph’s employees who had been walking for 6-7 hours to get back to the office. He had tried to rent a motorcycle, but the shop had sold out and closed.  It would have been much longer for him to have walked to his home, which was in the direction of Sendai.

By the time we got back to the hotel, only the freight elevator was running, so we didn’t have to walk up 26 flights of stairs.  We checked the 7-11 in the lobby, and all the ready-made food was gone at about 9pm, by 10pm, the shelves looked like this below. 

Every bag of salty snacks, every Cup-Of-Noodles.  Only Ice Cream and cold drinks were left.  Also, the battery powered cell phone chargers were wiped out along with all the batteries.  Some people were sitting in cardboard in the lobby, with their bags of snacks and phones out.  I guess they couldn’t walk home.

As you know by now, 13,000 people were stranded in Narita. We were scheduled to leave on Saturday, but the airport Narita Express wasn’t running.  The airports buses weren’t running.

Our flight went from “On Time” to “Indefinite” to “On Time.”

We took a cab.

We avoided the stopped traffic on the highway, taking side streets.  After 30 min, the driver said, “No problem”  10 min later we came to a stop.  Then we said, “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

We later found out that the streets going north were jammed with people and heavy machinery trying to go north to get to the Sendai area to help.

After we returned to the hotel from our attempt to get to the airport on Saturday afternoon, I took a nap.

Ralph Grundler woke me up via phone call:

“Ring”
Eric wakes up, grabs phone: “Hello?”
Ralph: “Eric, there was an explosion at the nuclear power plant.”
Eric: “What?”
Ralph: “Teresa, just e-mailed me, there was an explosion at the nuclear power plant.”
Eric: “What?!”
Ralph: “Eric, find out what you can on the internet”
Eric: “What?!”
Ralph: “Gervais and I are having appetizers in the lobby, come down and tell us what happened”. Click.

Sunday, we took the train for 4 hours down to Osaka, the opposite direction of Narita Airport, Sendai, and the nuclear power plant.  We had no problems getting to our flights.

It seems trivial to tell this story, in the face of the real problems facing the Japanese now.  My thoughts are with all my coworkers, friends, and their families in Japan.

14th Floor of Synopsys Japan in Tokyo during Honshu 8.8 Earthquake March 11 2011

View from 14th floor of Synopsys Japan in Tokyo during Honshu 8.8 Earthquake March 11 2011

You can see the antennas swaying right and left if you watch this video closely.

More info at http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/

Elevator shut down in our building.  Aftershocks continue.

Tom’s Hardware ran a series of performance tests using a Samsung USB 3.0 Hard Drive and an NEC USB 3.0 Host card (or a card using the NEC Host chip).    On average the system ran about 40% faster in 3.0 mode over 2.0 mode.   To summarize, the portable hard drive at 640GB sells for less than $100, and the speeds for USB 3.0 are consistently faster.

I’ve noticed in the results that the speeds never go above ~190 Megabytes per second.

I think the reason is that the PCIe interface limits the speed.

The NEC Host card seen here, is plugged into the PCIe x1 slot.

Images from Tom’s Hardware

  This shows that the slot is a PCIe x1 slot (although it’s mentioned in the article) this is an important point. 

This means that the PCIe Gen 1 throughput is limited to something like 2.5 Gigabits per second (250Megabytes per second).  USB 3.0’s maximum throughput is actually 4 Gbps (400Megabytes per second0 (after removing 1 Gbps for 8b10b encoding).   This means that the throughput of the NEC USB 3.0 Host will be limited to 2.5 Gigabits per second or 250 Gigabytes per second.  Our tests indicate at in a PCIe x1 plugged into a laptop achieves speeds in the range of 100 Megabytes per second. 

Shameless plug for Synopsys USB 3.0 IP:  We can achieve full USB 3.0 speeds with just the Synopsys Host with a  PCIe Gen 2 x1 connection on our Host.

The article concludes that the performance for USB 3.0 is greater, and the cost is now pretty comparable to USB 2.0.   I encourage you to click through the Tom’s Hardware article quickly here.

USB 3.0 Flash Drives have started to appear, and more importantly below the $20 mark.  This makes it a no-brainer purchase for enthusiasts.  The first SuperTalent drives performed well, but had price points up to $600.  The recent generation sells for under $20 for 8 Gbyte and 16 Gbyte capacities.

The Kingston USB 3.0 Flash Drive starts at 16 GB and goes up the 64 GB.

SuperTalent USB 3.0 Flash Drive

Lacie offers both a ruggedized hard drive and a standard USB 3.0 Flash Drive

Great I can buy Flash Drives, What can I connect the drives too?

You can connect it to your new Samsung Laptop, announced in September, the Samsung RF510 Multmedia notebook

You can rent movies

The first commercial company to make use of USB 3.0 is probably Flix on Stix.  You walk up to a Kiosk, insert your USB 3.0 Flash Drive (or 2.0 Hard Drive) and download the movie into you flash drive.  This would be much, much faster than downloading from the internet.  These Kiosks accept USB 3.0 Flash Drives and USB 2.0 Flash Drives.  Even at USB 2.0 effective speeds of 320Mbps, this is faster than most home internet connections of 1 to 21 Mbps.  You can use any flash drive, but with USB 3.0 it will be much, much faster.

Several questions are:

1) Why not just Pirate?
- It’s Illegal
- Viruses
- And it still takes too long to download a movie. You are still better off driving or walking to your kiosk and just getting the most recent, HD movie onto your flash drive.  you can do this faster than pirating a movie without getting your PC sick

2) Why not just rent a DVD disk?
- Sure. it’s a little 90’s, but that’s okay.
- You have to return the disk.   Personally, I think this is a big hassle.

3) Purchase a legal rental from Apple iTunes or others?
- I recommend this form so you don’t have to go to a physical location, but there are some people who don’t trust this or can’t do this for some reason.
- It still takes more time and preparation depending on your Internet speed.

Thanksgiving and the Kinect (A USB Peripheral)

During Thanksgiving, I usually introduce our family and friends to the latest in video gaming technology.  Mostly, because my friend that did this moved to Seattle and took all his game systems with him.

I bought an XBOX 360 Kinect bundle, 3 actually.  One XBOX overheated and stopped working, one stopped working during a firmware update. I returned both.  The 3rd one worked fine.

(I’d show you footage of me dancing to Dance Central, as it evokes hysterical laughter from my family and friends).  Instead, I’m directing you to this terrific, non-professional video of someone playing the hardest song in “hardcore” mode which is the hardest mode for the Kinect.  Enjoy.

Hardcore Dance Central on the Kinect

By the way, here’s an AMD Motherboard for $90 bucks at NewEgg.

If you want to see me do Dance Central, post a comment below.

Apple announced the MacBook Air and the only way to install programs is either via the Internet or USB.  Of course, if the OS fails, and you have no internet, you have to use USB.

So Apple ships a USB Flash Drive that re-installs your software to factory condition.

How does Apple get away with no Optical Drive (no DVD, no Blu-Rays)

1) Apple set the standard with iTunes and downloadable Apps. – The only way to install this software to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod is over the internet.�
2) Apple saves power – No optical drive, no spinning/moving parts.
3) Apple saves space – Obvious, I know.
4) Apple saves cost – No optical drive.

At the system level, Apple save enough to include a flash drive, instead of a cheaper DVD disc because Apple doesn’t have to pay for or deal with cost/problems of adding an optical drive.

Buyers can (of course) buy a separate USB DVD or BluRay drive, or reuse an old one. So it actually lowers their overall cost of ownership over the long term.  They can share or reuse these components.

Apple enters top 5 Handset makers

This is significant because it means that more and more people buy SmartPhone which are more expense, provide more functions, and provide a platform for everyone to sell more stuff. 

IDC Q3 data

 

Strategy Analytics Q3 data

The data above is from my source is at at EDN, here 

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My gym, 24 hour fitness, started installing fingerprint recognition in their clubs. 

“24 Hour Fitness is excited to introduce this new service that allows members
to access our health clubs without a membership card. No more fumbling
through your gym bag or purse… just enter your 10-digit check-in code,
scan your finger, and you’re on your way. “

The fingerprint reader will almost certainly use USB Fingerprint scanner like this.

I know of only 2 ways to scan for fingerprints:

1) Take a picture of the fingerprint, scan the swirls, keep track of those.  Problem: If your fingerprints get filed off, or burned off (please don’t do either of these) then it doesn’t work.

2) Do what Authentec does and scan the underlying pores, and map those.  Your pore pattern is unique.  So if you try to change your identity and your fingerprints, your pore pattern remains the same. (So Tom Cruise won’t be able to duplicate your pore patterns.)

When I read the e-mail, I first thought:  “Cool, no more fumbling out my card?”

My second thought: “I’m going to give my most unique identifying data to a company that has an employee turnover rate (I’m guessing)  of over 30%?   How secure is that?”

But I read the 24-hour fitness article, and it appears that they use a technology that does NOT store my fingerprint data.  Morphtrak creates some mathematical value, dumps your fingerprint, and only stores the value. This means that I’m not giving my data up to every person who’s ever worked at 24 hour fitness..

I’ve created this article, partially because it’s something that I thought you might find interesting, and partially to test if my Windows Live Writer will properly post my Blog to my Blog.

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I’ve placed my order for a 4th Generation iPod about 15 minutes after I read the announcement on September 1 (after work, after soccer, after dinner).  I tried to “Chat” with an on-line Apple Store person, but there was a 13 min wait, so I called the local Apple Store on my landline.  I got someone on the phone in about 1 min.  Then I placed my order online.  Then the online Chat person came on about 11 minutes after I finished my order.  I think they were really busy online.

As everyone else expected, the iPod has all the iPhone 4 features:

1. Retina Display – Better display
2. HD Video Recording
3. Picture taking (no flash, like the iPhone)
4. Video conferencing & Facetime
5. A4 Processor – Same as iPad and iPhone 4
6. Up to 64 GB of Flash
7. Up to 50 hours of battery life

The image above is from Apple and you can read more at their website here

The iPod has up to 50 hours of battery life, which the iPhone doesn’t have.  For casual users, you only need to charge the iPod once a week, if you only use it at the gym or on the drive home.

No DSC or DVC for me

This device means that I won’t be buying another Digital Camera or a Digital Video Camera for awhile.  I may get a DVC with USB 3.0 (and a really bright lens, but only when USB 3.0 is available.  I don’t expect the iPod the lens to be awesome, or any image stabilization, but this could be good enough for 60% of what I need.

Some crazy reporter said: The entry level iPod touch is $229 and an iPhone is only $199 for the same features. Of course for the $199 iPhone 4, you commit to 2 year contract with AT&T which will cost you $55-$70 a month for the phone plus data service.  If you have a data plan already, then it makes sense.  If you don’t need data out and around town, then the iPod touch does just fine.

New Nano

The New Nano uses a small touch screen, probably to save space and still provide a display.  The Nano is the first iPod to include the FM Tuner.  To me, the Nano can truly be worn like a fashion item with rotating pictures and music.  Video isn’t enabled.  I expect the video experience just wouldn’t be great and it would drain a small battery.

This image is from the Apple website and More from the Apple website here.

The previous version included video recording, but that feature is now in the Touch, so nano really has it’s niche of portable music for those that only need a solid MP3 player and want select what they want to listen to.  The Shuffle offers a no display version, but if you read this blog you already know that.

Competitors to Apple

To your left you’ll see the Sony S3 Walkman that outsold the iPod for a 4 week period this year.  The only time that it has outsold the iPod for a long time. 

The Samsung 7 inch Galaxy Tablet looks pretty cool running Android, and you would expect it to look good in an ad from Samsung.

Dell Streak Reviews – This 5 inch tablet runs Google Android also.  This 2 min video gives a nice summary of multiple reviews.

Peel for iPod

The Peel turns the last generation iPod into a phone.  It lets you connect any SIM card into the Peel  Engadget reported that it is a case, a battery, and a baseband chip.

The Co-Inventor of USB Ajay Bhatt appeared in a commercial seen below, and later on Conan O’Brian.  Here’s the original commercial showing the USB Rockstar Ajay Bhatt, followed by the real one.

I actually wondered if that was the real Ajay Bhatt, but no.

Here is the the real Ajay Bhatt, who I think could have actually done the real commercial.  If you love USB, you really should watch this all the way through.

I hope I get to meet this guy someday.

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