Intel’s 6-core Dunnington CPU coming this year

Quad-core shmod-core Intel, we need 6 cores or more to keep our uh, web browsers snappy. While you’re at it, how about tossing in some Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) so that each core can process two threads at a time — 16 simultaneous threads per 8-core processor or 32 for dual-processor, 8-core rigs. If that sounds good then you’re in luck; Intel just went official with its near-term architecture plans which include the 2008 launch of a 6-core Dunnington-class server CPU platform based on Intel’s 45-nm Penryn “tick” architecture. On deck is Intel’s second generation Nehalem “tock” architecture with SMT and scalable from 2- to 8-cores. We’re talking “dramatic” performance and energy improvements, according to Intel, from a microarchitecture bent on delivering an 8 MB level-3 cache, DDR3-800 memory support, 25.6GB per second Quickpath interconnects (so long Front Side Bus!), an integrated memory controller and optional integrated graphics to high-end servers and eventually laptops. Hear that AMD? Tick, tock goes the clock.

Teaching a computer to appreciate art

Is that a van Gogh?

A mathematical program that began as a lark for an Israeli scientist has become a serious effort to match some of the world’s greatest painters with their masterpieces. If the project pans out, it could help point out poor copies and eventually distinguish forgeries from the real deal.

Daniel Keren, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Haifa, said he’s been contacted by an Italian collector hoping to validate some of his acquired paintings as well as by aficionados embroiled in a controversy over the legitimacy of artworks allegedly by Dutch master Vincent van Gogh.

“I did it for fun, but now people are interested in it, so I will definitely expand,” Keren said.

Research in the rapidly growing field of computer vision, he said, still has plenty of catching up to do if scientists want computers to approximate our own abilities. One stumbling block has been teaching machines how to spot objects that are simple for people to recognize — another human face, for example.

Art as a mathematical formula
For his project, Keren tackled the problem by essentially breaking visually stunning masterpieces into sets of mathematical formulas. The computer program sought to capture the distinctive styles of different artists by dividing their paintings into discrete blocks and then converting each block into formulas that could be added together and compared.

“Suppose that one painter, he has very many vertical structures,” Keren said. Perhaps the painter favors depicting telephone poles, say, or skyscrapers. Converting blocks from that painting into mathematical symbols similar to the sine and cosine waves familiar to any trigonometry student will yield a distinctive sum of the parts. If another artist paints primarily with horizontal lines — perhaps in the form of logs floating down a river — “in that case, it’s very easy to detect who is painter A and who is painter B.” If a painting includes examples of both styles, the program can color-code each element accordingly to help decide if the whole piece is more A-like or B-like.

So far, Keren and his team have applied the test to five artists, including van Gogh and Rembrandt, surrealists Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, and Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky.

Altogether, Keren’s group used about 30 artworks from each of the five painters, half for the training sessions and half for testing their mathematical model. In all, the model correctly matched 86 percent of paintings it hadn’t previously “seen,” a solid B in most grading schemes. (If the program had been assigning the paintings randomly, it would have received a score of only 20 percent.)

Finding forgeries
The current incarnation might be of use to an art novice, though hardly helpful to an expert, Keren acknowledges. “I am sure it can be improved,” he said. A key to its continued development will be determining exactly how two paintings differ. If the subject matter is dissimilar but the style is the same, the computer likely will be able to identify the right artist, based on its past learning of core elements such as van Gogh’s characteristic use of swirls or Magritte’s preference for straight lines.

A sudden switch in painting techniques by the same artist, on the other hand, could present a far greater challenge, as would trying to distinguish painters with very similar brushstrokes, like some of the 19th century Impressionists.

Keren said he plans to significantly expand his project to include far more artists, including ones who have adopted similar styles. As for trying to identify potential look-alikes, he said his program could begin by classifying paintings according to a general group — Impressionism versus Surrealism, for instance — and then sort within each group according to increasingly fine-tuned physical traits.

Keren is “cautiously optimistic” that his mathematical program might eventually be useful in detecting fakes. “It will be good to have a database of 20 van Gogh forgeries,” he said, allowing the program’s formulas to zero in on subtle, but perhaps telling, differences.

NVidia premieres its ninth-generation GPU

With generational shifts in graphics processors taking place almost every 12 months now, instead of the 18 months GPU manufacturers prefer, the value proposition becomes more difficult each time. Yesterday, NVidia hoped it could make a play to the mainstream buyer.

The company’s ninth generation of graphics processors burst onto the scene yesterday, in the form of the GeForce 9600 GT card, the first unit to feature its GeForce 9 series GPU.

With a moderate pricetag estimated to be around $199, NVidia claims the 9600 to be “HD Gaming for the Masses.” However, this is not to say that enthusiasts will not also take note when considering processing-per-dollar.The specs revealed yesterday for the 9600 GT reference card read as follows: 64 stream Processors, a core clock speed of 650 MHz, shader clock speed of 1625 MHz, and a memory clock of 900 MHz. The card’s 512 MB of 256-bit memory has a bandwidth of 57.6 GB per second, and a texture fill rate of 20.8 billion per second.

If you’re familiar with NVidia’s nomenclature, you’ll note right away that the “6″ in the second digit, and the absence of an “X” at the end, indicates this will not be the high-end card in the product line, or in that of any of NVidia’s OEMs. But SLI configuration will be an option, the company said.

The GeForce 9 GPU is designed for the PCI Express 2.0 bus architecture, but devices on this standard feature backwards compatibility with former PCIe motherboards by design.

News of the new line of GPUs has been circulating since before Christmas, and some sites are already claiming this card to be the best in its class when weighed against competitors.

Additionally, the 9600 GT features NVidia’s trademarked PureVideo HD acceleration, which speeds up the decoding and post-processing, and Dynamic frame-by-frame contrast enhancement.

Microsoft’s latest interoperability pledge: How free is ‘open’ now?

No move by Microsoft to share information with its competitors will ever be taken at face value, and certainly yesterday’s new Interoperability Principle will come under very close scrutiny. Is this the opening of the floodgates the EC has been demanding?

In incremental, measured, if slow steps, Microsoft has made some efforts to comply with directives from the European Commission to make its software and protocols more interoperable with products from other manufacturers. Yesterday, the company surrendered one more boundary between its interoperability policy and the EC’s dream situation, making a huge chunk of the information it published in response to the EC’s order available to developers free of charge.

“We’re announcing that developers will not need to take a license, or pay a royalty, or other fee to access any of that information,” revealed CEO Steve Ballmer yesterday (according to Microsoft’s transcript). “As an immediate first step to apply the principles today we’re publishing to the Web over 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available only under a 4D trade secret license. In addition, protocol documents for additional products like Office 2007 will be published in the upcoming months.”The company’s newly published Interoperability Principle spells out the terms to which Ballmer referred: “Microsoft will publish its documentation for these Open Protocols and Open APIs on its website so that all developers will have the benefit of this technical information in a manner that takes advantage of the nature of open discussion on the web. Microsoft will not require developers to obtain a license, or to pay a royalty or other fee, to have access to all this information.”

But free access, the Principle makes clear, does not mean free use. While Microsoft will no longer charge fees or royalties for parties seeking information on how to make their software interoperable, it may yet charge royalties for the way others use that information.

“Some of Microsoft’s Open Protocols are covered by patents,” reads the Principle. “Microsoft will indicate on its website which protocols are covered by Microsoft patents and will license all of these patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, at low royalty rates. To assist developers in clearly understanding whether or not Microsoft patents may apply to any of the protocols, Microsoft will make available a list of the specific Microsoft patents and patent applications that cover each protocol.”

The use of APIs to access those protocols, however, will not require a license, even if the service with which software is communicating is itself protected by Microsoft patents. So the company is making it clear, interoperability will not require licenses or incur fees, but like operability (building a product using a design inspired by Microsoft’s patented IP) may very well.

The Principle does specify the products to which it applies: “Windows Vista including the .NET Framework, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of these products.” Previous editions of those products were not listed.

But while Ballmer and others referred to Office 2007 interoperability yesterday, there actually was no mention of Open Document Format, the basis of competing applications suites and the first such format to receive international standardization. Microsoft did open up access — or at least, open it up somewhat more — to its principal current products, so it did specify the “to what” part of the change argument, to borrow Rep. Barbara Jordan’s famous phrase once again. But it did not specify the “from what.”

Thus the status of an ODF plug-in for Office 2007 was not clarified yesterday, even though some got the impression that’s what Ballmer was referring to.

More calls on Microsoft to open up even more

The absence of any such mention was not lost on Red Hat chief counsel Michael Cunningham, in a response posted to his company’s Web site yesterday afternoon.

“Rather than pushing forward its proprietary, Windows-based formats for document processing, OOXML,” Cunningham wrote, “Microsoft should embrace the existing ISO-approved, cross-platform industry standard for document processing, Open Document Format (ODF) at the International Standards Organization’s meeting next week in Geneva. Microsoft, please demonstrate implementation of an existing international open standard now rather than make press announcements about intentions of future standards support.”But Linux Foundation board member and attorney Andrew Updegrove thought yesterday’s announcement was about ODF, in a sense…for the way in which it skillfully omitted mention of it.

“With respect to ODF, it will be important to see what kind of plug ins are made available, how they may be deployed, and also how effective (or ineffective) those translators may be,” Updegrove said yesterday, in a statement shared with BetaNews. “If they are not easy for individual Office users to install, or if their results are less than satisfactory, then this promise will sound hopeful but deliver little. I am disappointed that the press release does not, as I read it, indicate that Microsoft will ship Office with a ’save to’ ODF option already installed. This means that ODF will continue to be virtually the only important document format that Office will not support ‘out of the box.”‘

The fact that Microsoft’s making any movement in this direction at all, Updegrove added, is an indication to him that “multiple market forces” — which, he said, included the EC investigation and the popular uprising of ODF support — “are pushing and pulling Microsoft in a direction that it would have been highly unlikely to travel otherwise.”

Yesterday’s statement from the European Commission apparently was intended to serve as a reminder to everyone, including Microsoft, that its definition of “interoperability” is deeper than the mere dissemination of APIs. It said its current investigations are focused on “the alleged illegal refusal by Microsoft to disclose sufficient interoperability information across a broad range of products, including information related to its Office suite, a number of its server products, and also in relation to the so called .NET Framework and on the question whether Microsoft’s new file format Office Open XML, as implemented in Office, is sufficiently interoperable with competitors’ products.”

Microsoft’s APIs, as defined yesterday, provide open access by software with other software for the purposes of sharing information and functionality — which is actually the way professional developers typically understand APIs and interoperability to work. But the legal definition is often fuzzier, as indicated by the EC’s reminder yesterday that Microsoft needs to make its OOXML file format — as opposed to Office 2007, the software which utilizes the format — “sufficiently interoperable.”

That would require not an API as Ballmer describes it but a plug-in as Updegrove describes it. Microsoft has said it is participating with open, community efforts to produce such plug-ins, though critics continue to question why the company doesn’t just produce one on its own. Backers of Microsoft’s efforts pose the counter-argument that it shouldn’t be Microsoft’s responsibility to ensure one-to-one correlation between its own format and every other one that comes along, whether or not it’s an international standard.