Microsoft opening café in Paris to build excitement for Windows 7

You know what the French love? Cafés. They love them so much, apparently, that Microsoft has decided to open one in the heart of Paris to drum up excitement about Windows 7. The Windows café will serve coffee and pastries (it is a café, after all), and will also have Microsoft products -- such as the Xbox -- on hand for customers to play with, but it won't actually sell any Microsoft wares. The shop, which is currently being built at 47 Boulevard Sebastopol, will be open from October 22nd onward, so if you're in the area you should check it out before it's gone for good -- we hear it'll only be there for a few short weeks. Finally, a reason to go to Paris!

Rumor: New, Thinner iMacs Rolling Off Factory Lines, Maybe With Blu-ray and Mystery Features

New iMacs aren't just coming soon, they've been rolling out for two weeks,according to AppleInsider. They're thinner and look more like the LED Cinema Display, with mystery features that make them the "most versatile ever."

One of those features might be Blu-ray (uh, finally), and another might something "related to audio." AppleInsider says they'll be extending the "capabilities of at least one technology introduced on the Mac platform as recently as last fall," which to us means either an LED display, or the unibody build. (Or hey, maybe it's a super Mini DisplayPort.)

Whatever's new, we wouldn't be surprised for the new iMacs to follow the overall Apple trend of packing in more features for less money than before, like the recent MacBook Pro revisions. Supposedly, the announcement will come any time between next week and mid-October, depending on when marketing feels like it.

Courier: First Details of Microsoft's Secret Tablet

It feels like the whole world is holding its breath for the Apple tablet. But maybe we've all been dreaming about the wrong device. This is Courier, Microsoft's astonishing take on the tablet.

Courier is a real device, and we've heard that it's in the "late prototype" stage of development. It's not a tablet, it's a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They're connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.

Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it—Microsoft's brightest, like Entertainment & Devices tech chief and user-experience wizard J. Allard, who's spearheading the project. Currently, Courier appears to be at a stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies.

Microsoft has a history of collaborating with other firms, especially in the E&D division: Zune and Xbox have both gone through similar design processes. (And plans for the Microsoft Store leaked through a third-party agency were confirmed as genuine prototype layouts and concepts.) This video is branded Pioneer Studios, a Microsoft division within E&D that specializes in this kind of work, working with another agency that's a long-time Microsoft collaborator on confidential projects.

The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple's tiger style. It's complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a "pocket" to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft's tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we've seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.

The Pink Phone Pictures Microsoft Doesn't Want You To See Yet

Project Pink is Microsoft's secret new phone, their first major phone play since the iPhone. Here are the first pictures of Pink phones, Turtle and Pure.

These phones are going to be made by Sharp, who'll get to share branding with Microsoft. Sharp produced the Sidekick hardware for Danger, who was bought by Microsoft two years ago. Pink will be primarily aimed at the same market as the Sidekick, and the branding and identity for it is highly developed, pointing toward a later stage in the development cycle.

The prior relationship between Danger and Sharp is the only reason we can think of why Microsoft stuck with Sharp for the new phones, and perhaps why they look so much like remixed Sidekicks. The youth bent is somewhat surprising, if Pink is going to be their big consumer phone play, building off the expertise of Danger and members of the Zune team.

The hardware design has a definite younger feeling: Turtle looks like a chunky child's version of a Palm Pre, while Pure seems like a standard slider, and both are clearly plastic, with an overall sense of roundedness, thanks to lots of soft angles and circular keys.

It's been reported elsewhere that Pink phones will include Zune services, and haveits own app store, making it as close to the Zune phone as we may get. We'll see if it's close enough in the coming months, though these are the only facts our source will let us safely publish for now.

ARM attacks Atom with 2GHz A9; can servers be far behind?

ARM took a major step this week in bringing the netbook fight back to Intel by boosting its Cortex A9 processor up into Atom territory. One of the engineers behind Amazon Web Services is even talking up the part as potential datacenter web server material.

Intel hasn't been shy about its plans to challenge ARM in the low-power embedded space, and the world's largest chipmaker is gearing up for the debut of the 32nm process that will enable it to reach new levels of x86 power efficiency. But ARM isn't sitting still, and the British IP company took a major step last week in bringing the fight back to Intel by boosting its Cortex A9 processor up into Atom territory. One of the engineers behind Amazon Web Services is even eyeing the part as potential datacenter web server material.

On Wednesday, ARM announced the availability of IP for a 2GHz dual-core A9 processor on TSMC's 40nm process, which the company claims will offer massively more performance than Atom within a smaller power envelope. You'll recall that Cortex A9 is an out-of-order processor, so, unlike the in-order Atom, the A9 should have much better performance per clock on standard integer code. So while some of ARM's claims about the performance delta between its 2GHz A9 and Atom may be overblown, the part at 40nm should therefore be more than competitive with a 32nm Atom in performance per watt.

Unfortunately for ARM's netbook ambitions, Linux is the only netbook OS that matters that runs on ARM, and the jury's still out on whether it can really take on Windows 7. As for Windows on ARM, it just ain't gonna happen, ever. (Same for Mac OS X on ARM... and please read that previous link before writing in to inform me that the ARM-based iPhone runs Mac OS X, or that WinMo runs on ARM.) Given that even the most insanely power-efficient, Atom-smashing 2GHz ARM netbook product is going to be relegated to whatever netbook niche Linux can carve out for it, it's worth asking what sort of future there is for such a high-powered ARM part.

One idea would be servers, believe it or not.

An ARM-based web server

The idea of building cheap but capable web servers from ARM parts has been enthusiastically floated by James Hamilton, a Vice President and Distinguished Engineer on the Amazon Web Services team. In a postearlier this month, Hamilton enthused about the idea of using a multicore, cache-coherent ARM SoC to do low-cost, power-efficient web hosting.

"The ARM is a clear win on work done per dollar and work done per joule for some workloads," Hamilton concludes. "If a 4-core, cache coherent version was available with a reasonable memory controller, we would have a very nice server processor with record breaking power consumption numbers."

Clearly, Wednesday's 2GHz A9 announcement was right up his alley, so he followed up with a post on the part suggesting that it may be what he's looking for. The post features a nice benchmark graph that he got from ARM, showing the 2GHz A9 doubling the performance of a 1.6GHz Atom N270 at EEMBC Coremark.

Those numbers are impressive, but before we talk performance, let's talk price.

Physicalization and Intel's margins

What Hamilton is essentially endorsing is "physicalization," an approach to server design that packs multiple, cheap, low-power systems into a single rack space. The name is a play on "virtualization," because instead of having one large, expensive system running multiple virtual machines, you use a fistful of small, cheap physical machines. The end effect of both is multiple OS instances packed into one rack space.

If you're thinking that physicalization is an odd use of Moore's Law, you're right. The only thing that makes the technique feasible from a performance per dollar perspective is the fact that Intel charges a fat premium for its higher-end server chips. Avoiding that premium is the sole reason that anyone would even consider using board-level integration (i.e., multiple chips and physicalization) instead of die-level integration (i.e., one Xeon and multiple VMs).

But given Intel's markup, and given a robust ARM ecosystem that keeps ARM prices relatively low, physicalization with something like a 2GHz A9 could well deliver more Linux OS instances per dollar than a regular Xeon-based server.

For performance and performance/watt, there's more than just the core

If we grant Hamilton that ARM may turn out to be a cheaper way to pack OS instances of acceptable performance into a datacenter (at least until Intel lowers prices in response), it still doesn't necessarily follow (contra comments I see at Hamilton's blog and elsewhere) that ARM could just pack four or eight A9 cores onto a die, crank up the clockspeed, and slay Intel's Nehalem or AMD's Shanghai in performance/watt at a given absolute performance level. This is because performance/watt numbers are much higher for low-performance processors than they are for high-performance processors (GPUs excepted).

David Kanter at RealWorldTech has recently posted a great article comparing a number of CPUs and GPUs in performance/watt and performance/mm2 (die area). Atom is literally off the charts in performance/watt, besting Nehalem by some 3X. This isn't because Intel sprinkles magical performance/watt pixie dust on Atom—it's because high performance/watt ratios for individual chips are much easier to achieve at Atom-scale than at Xeon-scale, owing to the much larger amount of system-related complexity and overhead that goes with the Xeon's much higher level of integration and performance. As is the case with everything from dinosaurs to automobiles, it just costs more to be bigger and badder, and one of those costs is net energy efficiency.

It's also the case that for raw performance, interconnects and system architecture issues matter a great deal, and they matter more the more cores and other types of resources (like high-bandwidth I/O interfaces) you try to cram onto one die. The minute you put four or eight of any kind of core onto a single die and try to wire it all together with the best cache hierarchy and the optimal mix of I/O and memory bandwidth, then all of the sudden you're trying to solve a much harder problem than you are with a simple dual- or quad-core embedded chip. You're also playing a high-stakes game where one or design mistakes could blow the whole configuration, and you're playing it on Intel's and AMD's home turf.

In the end, the era of cache-coherent multicore is fundamentally different than the single-core era that preceded it, because in that earlier, simpler era core-specific factors like microarchitecture and clockspeed were all that mattered. But nowadays, system design and microarchitecture relate to midrange and high-end multicore processor performance somewhat like oxygen and fuel relate to a flame's heat output—you need both of these elements tuned to give the desired result.

My ultimate point is that any four-core ARM desktop or server processor that shoots at a similar absolute performance target as a four-core Nehalem processor will either look pretty much like a four-core Nehalem, or it won't hit the target. It will also have relatively similar performance/watt characteristics, and will end up competing with Intel and AMD on fab muscle.

[Via ArsTechnica]