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Deneb and Shanghai are essentially shrunken versions of the integrated quad-core Phenom and Barcelona processors introduced last year. AMD is well behind Intel in introducing 45-nanometer processors, as Intel’s first models shipped in November, and has set an ambitious goal of switching from 65nm chipmaking technology to 45nm technology in 18 months; it usually takes 2 years.

PCs using the chipsets will start arriving in the second quarter from all of AMD’s current partners, including the big guys like Hewlett-Packard and Dell. There will be two varieties, the 780G with more performance and the 780V for the truly cost-conscious buyer.

Integrated graphics chipsets are used in the majority of PCs sold in the world. They’re designed to provide PC users with basic graphics technology at a lower cost than adding a discrete graphics chip from a company like Nvidia or ATI.

The company plans on Tuesday at the CeBit conference to unveil its most up-to-date integrated graphics products for low- to mid-range desktop PCs in the new 780 series chipsets. The chipsets allow moderately priced PC buyers to run games based on the DirectX10 technology and to get additional performance out of discrete graphics cards if they need more juice.

AMD was a little late to the party when it comes to delivering a standardized CPU and chipset combination, but its acquisition of ATI Technologies allowed it to catch up to Intel. Intel’s integrated graphics division has struggled over the past few years, and AMD has tried to seize upon that weakness as a competitive balance to Intel’s current advantage in just about every other part of the market.

And if customers of a 780-series PC decide they’d like a little more performance, they can use AMD’s Hybrid Graphics technology to add in a discrete graphics card and get the combined benefit of both the integrated graphics and the discrete card. According to AMD, most times the integrated graphics technology in a generic chipset is disabled when a PC owner adds a discrete card to the mix.

The support for Microsoft’s DirectX 10 technology allows more sophisticated games designed using the technology to run on AMD-based PCs, said Niles Burbank, a product manager in AMD’s graphics division. Perhaps not nearly as well as those games would on a more expensive gaming system, but at least they will work.

AMD is looking to put a troubled 2007 behind it with a pair of announcements Tuesday highlighting its desktop chipsets and manufacturing advances.

AMD is also using CeBit, held in Hannover, Germany, to make a manufacturing announcement related to its chip-making factories in Dresden. The company will formally announce that it has begun shipping samples of “Deneb” and “Shanghai,” its first 45-nanometer processors for desktops and servers, respectively.

There were a slew of new open-source companies launched (or still getting first looks) at last week’s Open Source Business Conference. A few sites (Socialized Software and ZDNet, to name two of them)have been pointing to some of the more promising ones.

It will be a few years, but I can’t wait until Zimbra and MySQL have loosed their golden handcuffs so that they can start new companies, too. That’s how the open-source business market will be enriched and grow.

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Here are a few to watch:

Acquia - Drupal-based social/web content management company
Ringside Networks - Social networking platform/application server
Loopfuse - Marketing automation (Disclosure: I’m an advisor to Loopfuse)
Projity - Microsoft Project competitor

And more. Check out the sites above to see who else caught the eye. Interestingly, JBoss executives sit on the management teams of several of them. As the market grows, there will be more cross-breeding between commercial open-source projects. This is a Very Good Thing.

The Tokyo facility will be linked to the new North Carolina facility and seven other IBM cloud computing centers in cities including Dublin, Ireland, and Beijing.

In November 2007, IBM unveiled its “Blue Cloud” bundle of services. And at a conference in Los Angeles in April, IBM executives made it clear that providing hosting services is nothing new to them. The rest of computer industry? According to IBM, they’re new to this game.

Clean air benefits aside, few should be surprised that IBM, which runs the largest computer consulting business in the world and derives the bulk of its revenue through services such as software hosting, should jump head-first into cloud computing services.

IBM announced Friday that it’s spending nearly $400 million on new cloud computing data centers in North Carolina and Tokyo. Big Blue will spend nearly $360 million to renovate an existing building at its Research Triangle Park campus in North Carolina. The goal is to reuse 95 percent of the existing building’s “shell,” recycle 90 percent of the old building’s material, and make sure 20 percent of the new material is recycled. The new center is expected to be completed by late 2009.

While Google caters to consumers with its Web-based applications, Amazon provides hosting services to start-ups, and companies like Salesforce.com provide an array of on-demand software, it can be easy to forget that IBM is the real heavyweight in business computing.

Who knew cloud computing could also clean the air?

Big Blue also boasts that the new data center’s mechanical equipment will be “50 percent more efficient than the industry average, equaling a reduction of approximately 31,799 tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year.” If IBM can follow through on that promise, that would be the equivalent of taking 5,800
cars off the road, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

SAN FRANCISCO–The AeA (American Electronics Association) plans to expand its focus on government technology policy to include many more individual states, the trade group said Thursday.

After spending much of its history lobbying for governmental policy favorable to the industry at the federal level and in a few key states with high-tech centers–California, Texas, Florida, New York, Massachusetts–the group says the current legislative environment requires more.

Even though Hansen said he’d prefer to have a uniform federal policy on issues like electronic waste laws so companies don’t have to have a different product or program for each of the 50 states, the states demand his group’s attention. “The fact of the matter is, that’s where things move,” he said.

Though most state lawmakers are just getting back to business, there are some key issues coming up this year that will likely be highly debated in most states. According to Jim Wall, the chair of the AeA’s State Government Affairs program and regional government affairs director for Microsoft, that includes environmental policy, RFID tags, privacy, taxation on digital goods, workforce, and education.

At a meeting of member companies here, new CEO Christopher Hansen said that it’s necessary the AeA expand beyond those traditional tech meccas. “Legislation affects this industry in a lot of places you wouldn’t expect,” he told a small gathering of reporters.

That’s because states are finding themselves confronted with not only tech companies manufacturing products within their confines, but voters who want policy on spam, spyware, child Internet safety, electronic recycling, and more.

There’s a lot going on locally, and each state may take a different tack on the same issue. For example, there are 12 different states with e-waste management laws on the books as of last summer, according to the Congressional Research Service. While one may focus on landfill policy, others may determine how specific hazardous materials are disposed of, and who pays for e-waste removal and recycling.

Half Light got an Australian producer to mix their last album. No plane trips required.

My brother did the same thing a few years back with one of his heroes, Terry Brown, who recorded Rush’s Moving Pictures and other classic albums. In that case, he had to fly to Toronto a few times, but the majority of the tracking was done in his home town, El Paso, then the individual tracks were transported to Toronto for mixing.

(Credit: Album design by Megan Bailey)

Modern musical technology makes the world smaller.

Anyway, Half Light knew that Church drummer Tim (Time Bandit) Powles operates a production house called Space Junk. Fifteen years ago, it would have been a major effort to have him produce their record–most non-label bands couldn’t afford the flights to Sydney, let alone the hours of studio time. But Half Light tracked into ProTools in Seattle, got in touch with Powles online, and hired/convinced him to mix their new record. Everything was done by exchanging data CDs of ProTools files back and forth. I got an advance copy and it sounds amazing–I’m sure the original tracks were recorded well (first rule of recording: you can’t polish a turd), but the production’s top notch–great tones, perfectly balanced, and some interesting effects and arrangements that sound like they were added in the mix.

Correction: The original post implied that the Church is no longer active. In fact, the band has been touring and putting out albums continuously for almost 30 years, and Tim Powles is still their drummer. Apologies for the mistake.

Example: Seattle band Half Light are big fans of Australian art-rock band The Church. [Disclosure: I played bass with another incarnation of Half Light in 2004 and 2005 and am still friendly with the band.] Americans of a certain age probably remember The Church’s 1987 hit “Under the Milky Way,” but the band is still going on strong and is considered highly influential among a certain class of rock musician. Basically, if you were into guitar music in the late 80s and early 90s but didn’t care much for “grunge” or that era’s punk “revival,” The Church are probably on your playlist.

(Credit:
Virginia Tech)

“There are several variables, such as geography and climate, technology type and efficiency, and accuracy of measurements that come into play. However, by standardizing the measurement unit (BTU, or British Thermal Unit), we have been able to obtain a unique snapshot of the water used to produce different kinds of energy,” Virginia Tech professor Tamim Younos said.

Corn ethanol emits about 20 percent fewer greenhouse gases than gasoline, but it requires more water, and it has raised the price of grain and food.

The water equation comes to energy.

That statistic was published on Thursday by researchers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, who have studied how demand for a dwindling natural resource–fresh water–plays into energy.

Fresh-water supply is a serious concern among scientists studying climate change. Recent droughts in Europe and the southeast United States have been blamed for strains on production at nuclear and coal power generation facilities.

Biofuels, in particular, are being increasingly scrutinized, as people start to measure the trade-offs of making liquid fuels from biomass.

In terms of power generation, they found that geothermal and hydroelectric energy use the least amount of water, while nuclear plants use the most.

Here’s a measurement you probably haven’t thought of before: it takes between 3,000 gallons and 6,000 gallons of water to power a 60-watt incandescent bulb for 12 hours a day over the course of a year.

The most water-efficient energy sources are natural gas and synthetic fuels produced by coal gasification. The least efficient are ethanol and biodiesel–two fuels booming in production because of supportive government policies, followed by rapid investment.

A United States-wide tally shows that power generation requires 655 billion gallons of water a year.

On Wednesday, the service announced that the Artist Royalty Program had gone live and that more than 450,000 tracks have been uploaded in conjunction with it.

Disclaimer: Last.fm is owned by CBS Interactive, which also owns CNET News.

Back in January, social music service Last.fm announced that it would be launching something called the Artist Royalty Program that allows unsigned artists to reap royalties each time one of their songs is played through the site’s ad-supported streaming music feature or Web radio. (They just have to upload their music first.)

“We’re leveling the playing field by offering them the same opportunities as established bands to make money from their music,” Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel said in a release Wednesday. “The young musician making music in a bedroom studio has the same chance as the latest major label signing to use Last.fm to build an audience and get rewarded.

It’s also an incentive for them to promote Last.fm as a promotional hub for their music, potentially eating into a market dominated by News Corp’s MySpace.

The SDK is available as a free download from Sony Ericsson’s developer site, and the kit includes such things as Microsoft Visual Studio templates, developer guidelines, sample code, and an Xperia X1 emulator. In addition, developers can submit their applications and panels for the Sony Ericsson Content Awards, where there will be a category dedicated to the Xperia X1. When ready, Sony Ericsson will offer a download service that will showcase all the available panels from partners and developers, and allow you to download them directly to the smartphone.

(Credit:
Sony Ericsson)

If you’ll remember, the Xperia X1, which was first introduced in February at GSMA, features a interactive panel interface that allows user to customize their Today screen. Given that capability, the SDK is an opportunity for content makers to develop such panels for various apps, such as videos, e-mail, games, and music.

To learn more, check out this video by Sony Ericsson’s Ramanath Bhat, who is in charge of application and product planning for the Xperia X1.

It’s not exactly the announcement we were looking for, but we’ll take it as a sign that the launch of the highly anticipated Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 is that much closer. On Wednesday, Sony Ericsson released its Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows Mobile 6.1 that will allow developers to create Web and native panels for the Xperia X1 smartphone.

Sony Ericsson’s SDK will let developers create Web and native panels for the Xperia X1.

Lee attaches small reflectors to his fingertips, which the sensor bar can track. The result is a user interface that can respond to gestures such as pinching and swiping. And by tracking four points, it enables the “multitouch” abilities that are all the rage with Apple’s iPhone and MacBook Air as well as the Microsoft Surface “Milan” project.

The whiteboard application relies on use of a pen with an infrared LED in its tip. After a quick calibration–the subject of Lee’s thesis–a computer can track where Lee is “drawing” on a wall, tabletop, and laptop screen.

Perhaps the most mainstream potential comes with Lee’s Wiimote-based multitouch user interface.

I support the hardware-hacking philosophy on principle, but most of the movement’s labors have left me uninspired. That all changed when I started seeing the uses that Carnegie Mellon researcher Johnny Chung Lee has found for the
Nintendo Wii’s infrared remote control.

Correction 7:45 a.m. PST: I got the sensor bar and the Wiimote’s duties mixed up. Names notwithstanding, the sensor bar has the infrared LEDs, and the Wiimote actually has the cameras that detect the signals.

The Nintendo game device includes a bar-shaped device, ordinarily placed atop a TV screen, with two LEDs, or light-emitting diodes. It emits infrared light that the Wiimote can detect within a 45-degree field of view. Lee uses a computer to process data from those components and dramatically expand their utility.

In a collection of videos, notable for their lucid explanations, the Ph.D. graduate student from CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute shows exactly how versatile the “Wiimote” system can be. Among the uses he convincingly demonstrates: a virtual-reality head tracker; a virtual whiteboard on a wall, tabletop, and laptop screen; and a Minority Report-style arm-waving and finger-pointing multitouch user interface.

Lee’s open-source work has traveled beyond his own domain. Cynergy Labs’ Maestro project shows the Wiimote-based multitouch system in action. And his work has spawned a discussion site called Wiimote Project.

By attaching the sensor bar to his head and the Wiimote to a TV, he was able to construct a system that knows where his head is located. That information is then fed into an algorithm that changes the perspective of an image on a monitor. The result is a very convincing 3D feel that looks like it would be a great fit for video games.

Lee also is notable for another practical design, a poor man’s steadycam.

The release of Scribe is also, in a sense, a message to some of the critics who’ve been skeptical of Facebook’s ability to keep its infrastructure humming along at a reasonable cost now that it has more than 100 million active users sending messages and uploading photos around the clock. By releasing Scribe as open source, Facebook is effectively saying, “Not only can we come up with something to run our site efficiently, we’ll let you see it, too.”

Facebook is known for keeping its cards pretty close to its chest, so to speak. But in recent months, the company has been drumming up its commitment to open source–and on Friday, Facebook announced that a piece of internally created software, called “Scribe,” would be released back to the open source community.

So what is Scribe? Well, per a post on Facebook’s blog, it’s been instrumental in helping Facebook handle the enormous amounts of data that come through its servers. As the page for Scribe says, “If you use the site, you’ve used Scribe.” More specifically, it’s a “server for aggregating log data streamed in real time from a large number of servers…designed to be scalable, extensible without client-side modification, and robust to failure of the network or any specific machine,” which means that the average Facebook user won’t have much use for the newly open-sourced product.