I have had good experiences with the The Cideko Air Keyboard, the Freespace Loop Pointer, and the well established Gyration Media Center Music Remote. With all three on one PC – yes you can! - I find myself instinctively reaching for one or another depending on what I am doing.

I reach for the Cideko Air Keyboard when browsing the web at a distance since it offers mouse and keyboard control in a single device and has text capability somewhere between a blackberry and a real keyboard – and the keyboard feel is quite good. I was suprised how small it is, but ultimately, that improved it’s usability as a mouse so I am not complaining.

The Freespace loop pointer has very good accuracy and serves as a functional showcase for motion sensing IC’s from Hillcrest Labs. It is the most accuate air mouse I have ever used and feels like a high-tech pointer should. It has an on/off button and it points perfectly. Like all of these pointers it is not absolute, but this mouse retains position awareness after moving it around very well. When you get out of whack, you just push up against one of the sides of the screen – it bcomes a reflex after a while. I have recently done a nice demo where I grab a video on one screen at a desk and drag it over to a large screen TV where a single PC is controlling both screens. After grabbing the window, you can basically stroll around with the left buttion depressed and then swing it onto the second screen, without worrying about where your hands where going in between. It’s a neat way to show the potential of multi-room computing and feels the most “Minority Report” of all of the controllers. Until Kinect for PC comes along and rocks our 10′ interface to Windows & Media Center world, this is about as slick as it gets.

The Gyration (at Amazon) controller is a just a great Media Center remote that has very good air mouse capability and my wife and I tend to use this remote the most and primarily to navigate Hulu which seems to want U/D/L/R and mouse control for easy navigation. This remote is able to employ the Windows Media Center play list so that you can cue music for playback even if your screen is out. It works, and music playback without the TV screen on is really a very nice feature, and it was really the one that drove me to my current undertstanding of the 10′ control problem. The Gyration keyboard also works fine with very good range but it’s not going to win any design awards.

Clearly the Cideko and Freespace solutions are using very recent motion sening tech and the Gyration remote is showing its age – but there still isn’t a better Media Center remote out there that I have seen. Batteries are required for all three and all three have very good battery life. No recharging docs. All of them have exceptional range – I think they are all BlueTooth based. And they each cost about $100. If I had to live with one, the Gyration solution is really priced well and includes a full keyboard. But each of these is very nice and I enjoy using all three.

Freespace Loop Mouse is at the HillCrest Labs Here is there store but otherwise it is scarce . I would buy one now rather than wait.

The Cideko Keyboard is pretty easy to find now and you can get it - direct link – here at Amazon

Industry and academia hail new benchmark which promises to trace the path toward machine intelligence and self awareness.

April 1st 2010 Embargo Until 12:01AM

SUNNYVALE, Calif.–(EON: Enhanced Online News)–AMID’s (NYSE: AMID) acclaimed platform technologies have enjoyed their rampage, blazing through the immersive games, revolutionizing productivity, transforming human interaction, and shattering world records. Reflecting the evolution in computing capabilities of massively multi-core computing and advanced GPU-based vector processing, AMID and partners from industry and academia have announced a new initiative to measure the performance of computing machines for the ultimate forward looking application, the machine mind. The outcome of the initiative is SingularityMark, a new benchmark which measures the performance of computers on a broad range of AI algorithms and test. SingularityMark will show where today’s machines lie on the path toward their intelligence and sentience.

“With SingularityMark we are able to measure PC performance as a simple fraction, where a score of 1 will represent the moment of the singularity. The scale is mostly linear with a logarithmic tail representing the massive compute performance necessary to bridge the gap between intelligence and sentience. We expect upcoming X6 processors to achieve a SingularityMark score of 0.10993 which we count as a major milestone, finally breaking the 1% of Singularity threshold” – Simon Solotko, Advanced Micro-Intelligence Devices

Performance enthusiasts around the world will now have a forward looking benchmark that truly strains even the most demanding systems. Aging benchmarks in the enthusiast community were beginning to frustrate overclockers who complained that today’s benchmarks simply were not demanding enough.

“The benchmarks we use today are CPU or GPU limited and unable to measure the real-world intelligence of high-end systems or utilize their full computational potential. In some cases the benchmark might stress only a specific capability of a single CPU core or measure some completely meaningless and insignificant value such as Pi. SingularityMark opens a whole new chapter in the world of competitive benchmarking, giving the community something relevant and world-changing to measure” – Sami Makinen, Advanced Micro-Intelligence Devices

Partners from industry and academia are heralding this announcement as the first real acknowledgement that today’s computers will actually evolve into sentient computational devices. One executive source, who asked not to be named, expressed their enthusiasm for the new initiative “Finally all of our hard work and Moore’s Law is going to pay off, even if it is in the far future. We were getting worried about being eclipsed by an emerging microarchitecture or non-silicon based technology but this benchmark shows we are really on the right path”

Supporting Resources

• AMD OverDrive Software the only application designed specifically to hasten the coming of the singularity, unlocking the massive headroom in today’s heterogeneous compute platforms while risking melting hardware, damaging data, voiding warranties, or potentially, achieving a SingularityMark score of 1.0000 and unleashing the great AI.

While Simon Solotko works at Advanced Micro Devices his views and this post are completely his own. AMID and SingularityMark are pure and unadulterated fiction.

The High End | Virtual Reality | The Human Body Becomes the Interface 

The buzz for 3D television is a mental smokescreen, the future is revealed when it is combined with a 3D interface and a powerful visual computing engine.  Natal for the PC is the other half of the tipping point for the virtual experience. The XBOX 360 is too stoggy a platform for virtual reality and social simulation. The PC will be the innovation hotbed, and the innovation in virtual experiences is going to be mindbending. Today’s consols will start to show their age as Natal and superior PC 3D capabilities raise the bar and force consols to start to make compromises. You know of what i speak. 720P instead of 1080p. Lower frame rates. You will wish it were easier to overclock your console. Fortunately for the PC – not a problem.

Just as Boxee, an innovative seed for video consumption, finds adoption on the PC, so will virtual experience applications fueled by the full body interface of Natal and it will catapult the massively multiplayer virtual experience. Natal is the wrong interface for shooters but the right one for second, third, and fourth lives. Don’t worry, no one else believs that the PC running Natal is going to change the world. Or that Natal is going to change the PC. Yet I believe that the demands of full virtual environments, 3D display, and an intelligent full motion interface will define a new role for the high end PC – in the living room.

The X86 TV Becomes a Platform For All | Implications Beyond Crushing Cable

Mass integration of web video access in televisions is cute but doesn’t change the game. However, the rules change when every TV has integrated video access, video playback, and god-knows-what applications on it running on an industry standard platform (x86+Google/MS) that allows the media engine and applications to be updated. Today’s STB’s are bricks that fail to deliver new format support and evolved capability. From the cable guys, Uverse is one of the few to break the mold but the platform innovation beyond video delivery remains minimal. The iPhone is the analogue transforming the cell phone into our intelligent travelling companion. The same phenominon is happening in living rooms everywhere as people transform their screen into dynamic entertainment platforms, either by piecing together a home theater PC experience or though one of the more capable, platform-esque, but still limited set top boxes – Popcorn Hour comes to mind.

The deciding factor is not the will of content owners to direct content through profitable pipes (cable) rather the unruly web and unruly end-customers who are tired of paying for “access.” Access services like cable create waste, as it forces consumers to pay for availability rather than content. When the market moves, in mass, to paying only for the content it wants (analogous to paying for singles rather than albums, or paying a low flat rate for access to ALL content) there will be the great video content apocalypse. Money will move out of cable and out of content development. That’s fine, there’s too much content, too much competition to build and market content as Mark said in the keynote. The solution is not cable. The solution the market will choose is direct, on demand internet access to video. The consequences are less (rapid growth in) high-budget content, a shift toward monetization of bandwidth, a new social contract with content makers (the music tax), and other preposterous changes forced, not asked for, by the slippery slope of web-direct content. The transformation will be complete by 2015. I also suggest checking out the Mark Cuban (Broadcast.com founder) and Avner Ronen (Boxee founder) slugfest, debating the future of television, watch the video or read about it here.

And I do not need to talk about 3D television. It comes. What will make it compelling is interactivity. That interactivity, high definition display, real-time 3D simulation, and oustanding 3D graphics are the design goal and target of only one industry, the PC industry, and it will bind the PC and the TV together at last. Not every solution will have high-end compute, but the bar is going to be substantially above where it is for today’s entry-level dedicated PC’s.

The Social Web Enters The Living Room | Two Way Video At Last

Why is video telephony a service not provided by cable companies? As soon as the TV and an open software platform come to the TV the shackles of innovation will be broken and the hold of access providers who wish to monetize all uses will be undone. The social, video web will replace it. A webcam on your PC is cute. A webcam on your TV pushes the obscurity of video based social media into every home. It may help to stratify the television space, creating premium tiers as virtual presence and the visual social web will require additional compute and consumer expertise, enabling a market for premium compute in mainstream televisions.

The Unruly Rue the Day

Together we have the new uses of the living room television driving the innovations “that in 10 years I can argue is old news just like we argue about internet video today.” Virtual reality will come to the living room and rekindle X86 as it will demand compute we do not yet have. Overclockers will once again rejoice as benchmarks that reflect real uses yet pose impossible challenges come to be. The Television will become an application platform, just as important as the smart phone but with much more bandwidth and a new kinship with every other connected device. These will help the social web extend to all screens enabled by applications and video, creating new rules for the social web and the way content is produced and distributed through increasingly social networks. The fact that Facebook is now a top destination has implications not just for the social web, but for how content is marketed, distributed, and ultimately consumed. The platformization of the television and the new applications for the living room will create demand and a viable ecosystem for high computational capability and diverse applications. And if you doubt that anyone wants their television to turn into a broad scope computing device, look down at your cell phone.

If you wish to follow this story as it unfolds, you can read more about the evolution of PC technology at AMD, follow on Twitter or join me at www.omnixedia.com

Note: This blog has been revised for a lot of good reasons.

Simon Solotko works for AMD but his views and unconvential view of the future are truly his own.

It’s pretty easy to slam the new iPad. It’s a media consumption device in a coffee table book form factor. And its not the first.

I carelessly abuse books. I don’t think this unit would survive the inhumane conditions granted to my last three paperbacks.

I worry my 50” plasma isn’t big enough. I have no intereste in watching TV in my lap, much less a move I actually want to enjoy.

I am an aggressive mutli-tasking web surfer. I don’t surf to surf. It just doesn’t work like that, and at least a PC based tablet has connectivity and productivity apps that map to my way of getting work done or connecting to the rest of my PC experience.

Companies are trying to sell digital store fronts into our homes. This is a tough ask. Apple TV was an STB not shown much love. Kindle and Nook may surprise. Most have failed miserably. A tough road to hoe, and its not easy to compete with cheap, timely, HD and free (even if sometimes virus infested). And the book form factor, closer than ever, remains still a bit out of reach. Timing the technology with the market, that magically lucrative crap shoot, remains a bit off.

Yet there is promise, and if 95% of CES hype was on the 3D television, the more important 5% was on electronic paper. The digitization of the old-school book. And the old school-book. Newspapers, maps, novels and comics. Something I can hold in front of my face and on my lap and just read. Or tap at.

Today’s PC derived tablets are too big, loud, warm, heavy, you get the idea. The Kindle and Nook make sacrifices in scope of functionality to get as close as they can to hardcover ergonomics. The iPad tries to cross the streams, a powerful netbook you are supposed to hold in some way to permit comfortable reading while still tapping on it regularly to tell it what to do next. And it will happen, the almost post-science-camp displays at CES were almost too good to believe, Moore’s law continues to squeeze x86 and ARM into a heat envelop below that causing heat rash and localized sweat. And slowly the form factor, performance, battery life, visual comfort, price, and business model will converge.

But its going to take a while.

It looks to me like we are going to wait a bit more for the digitization of everyday media to replace the splendor and ergonomics of a filleted newspaper or a paperback book. I’ve got a perfectly good PC tablet now. It collects dust; I have considered turning it into a giant remote control; project currently on hold.

I mean, have you ever noticed that the springiness of a paperback actually clings to your inset finger and helps to hold it perfectly wedged into your hand?

The iPad is not going to destroy or re-invent 2000 years of culture. The PC already did that. And at some point, we will invent an eBook that feels like a book should. And we will design an omnicient pad that writes our thoughts before we do. In the meantime, the iPad sits in the chasm, and we will see if it’s got the staying power and roadmap to grow out of its awkwardly shaped youth and highly protective and proscriptive parents.

Simon Solotko has been called “just some guy” and his views should not sway your own.

Digital Convergence | Yes. Two axes. Mobile Personal Assitant & Home Group Assistant | The mobile personal assistant is currently split into a range of devices from laptop to cell phone to media player, near term collapsing to Xphone plus mid for consumers and Xphone plus Ultrathin for mobile professionals | The home will fall to platform companies = companies with the good sense to build hardware with a regularly updated software stack to keep them relevant. Companies failing to create platforms are creating bricks and consumer are catching on.

USB 3.0 | DOA ?| Xntel and others have other plans?

Light Peak | Yes. Thin, lightweight, USB 2.0 compatible. Tethers Xphones & mids. The wire for the digital home has been revealed and you better pay attention. The ability to deliver upstream video and downstream content changes the potential of the Xphone, the mid, the laptop, and the PC. It speeds digital convergence as defined above.

Eyefinity | Yes. Multiple displays in one room today. Multiple displays in many rooms one day. Much work to be done but so much benefit upon introduction that’s its truly a marvel.

Ethernet | Yes. In the home makes for a mess as consumers try to plug everything into the network and expect it to actually solve problems in a consistent and reliable fashion. Some wild cards here. #1 Wild Card – Cloud-based rending & decentralized mini-platforms. Wired home networks may be short lived. Central PC talks to router. Router has wireless for all other devices. If only Europe didn’t have stone walls.

Cloud Computing | Yes. OnLive & cloud-based rendering brings the cloud into the living room. How does a console maker prevent their box from becoming an OnLive portal. Funny!

PC Gaming | Yes. OnLive plus stubborn free-thinking enthusiasts plus web-based gaming continue.

Consols | Yes. Next gen evolutionary. Delivery of web content to big screens is the #1 capability change in gen 2. And faster. And cheaper. Normal cycle. Video telephony, gesture gaming, the death of brick & mortar media outlets, PC replacment, world domination. Their mouths are open wide but its a lot to swallow.

Crowd Computing | Yes. More people collaborating online. More people collaborating @ home. Large screens connected to app-bearing platforms make it innevitable. More here http://links.amd.com/eyecndy

Remote | It’s a problem and has been for a long, long time. No solution. Many remotes.

DisplayPort | Yes. 1.2 will be a big deal. HDMI will evolve to support I/O and downstream connectivity or become a legacy connector like VGA was to PC’s. The future of interconnect is convergence. I/O, HD, Audio all in one cable over long distances. That’s the market requirement. If your interconnect does that its got a shot, otherwise, gone. Unlike LightPeak it’s got an install base and the cable can be cheap.

Multi-Session | Yes. The big guys have a lot of work to do. But no other application needs what Moore’s law will bring. And BigSoft needs a big vision with a big challenge.

Multi-Room | Yes. See above.

Netbook | Current generation sucks. UltraThin delivers on the user experience promise in ways a netbook to too stupid to fathom. Now, next generation with Android >2 plus dual core plus more capable media processor? Jury’s out.

Mobile Person Assistant |Yes, See Digital Convergence above.

Central Group Assistant | http://links.amd.com/eyecndy and particularly the prior entry in the series.

At Quakecon 2009 on Saturday #1 rated overclocker K|ngp|n and our own Sami Makinen reached a record 7.088 GHz by overclocking AMD Phenom II on Dragon technology. Also, in front of a live audience we achieved the #3 3DMark06 record and ran the benchmark at a quad-core record of 6.6GHz.

In Las Vegas in January 64NOMIS came prepared with vats of mineral oil with a vision of complete OC immersion. I envisoned a sealed and transparent PC. There were other battles that day so the project was shelved. Until Quakecon in August 2009. With the combination of Schradin’s transparent Phenom Cooler and help from The Nemesis the Abomination came to life. Hours of stable benching with no motherboard preparation.

  The Abomination | Transparent OC Chamber

In Finland in July an overclocking team at an event hosted by SF3D broke the 7GHz barrier on AMD Phenom II X4. Teamwork and concentration yielded this apex result.

Rigorouse work by Macci, chew*, Hardman, MSIMax, Gomeler and many others brought a series of gains in platform performance. Single card records, escalating frequencies, improved GPU tuning, and better DRAM performance.

In Austin K|ngp|n descended to temperatures uncharted with his first Liquid Helium runs. Core speeds hit 6.89Ghz and the 3dMark06 record fell yet again. He was joined by Gomeler, chew*, Schradin, Slappa, and Hardman and AMD’s silicon engineering team for two days solid of overclocking under Xtreme Conditions.

At the birth of Phenom II at CES, in a tent in the Desert, many saw for the first time the massive headroom of Dragon Technology yielding to an undprecedented Liquid Helium run in a first of its kind Experiment.  A record 6.5 GHz top speed for a modern multi-core processor and a 3DMark05 world record set to a cystal clear Las Vegas night is a vivid memory.

Now you can see it all. Together. For the first time. At Light Speed. Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6Hf6d404QY

As you may have read elsewhere I spend more time than natural thinking about the future of computing.

The personal computer is personal, being for one user at a time, on a single desktop, in one personal session, in one room. The evolved personal computer, the central computer, is designed for several users, each on their own screen, running multiple concurrent, but private sessions, anywhere in the home or beyond.

I have employed the term “digital nexus” or “central home computer” to describe a multi-user computer which supports several users at once, employing a single pool of computational resources and applications, from multiple locations. Applications may be installed once and used by each user. Settings may be set once and used in each location. User profiles can be customized and each user enjoys their own, separate usage session. The full computing experience is available in multiple locations and computing resources are shared by the group.

I call this model the multi-session | multi-person | multi-screen computing model. This model requires a multi-session operating system, one aware of multiple inputs and multiple users, which can map a separate set of inputs (keyboard, mice, remotes, game controllers) to each user and each screen.

Imagine the possibilities of a fully configurable I/O environment where a computer can support many keyboards, mice, and free-motion controllers. Dad can be in the den playing Tom Clancy’s Hawks (against his son) while his daughter is doing homework in her room and mom is managing finances in the office, all on the same, centrally managed PC. You can think of this model as multiple, simultaneous instances of single-session | single-person | single screen. The central computer would be capable of juggling multiple user sessions, multiple screens, and multiple input / output peripherals throughout the home.

I believe that we are on an inevitable path toward Crowd Computing. Many people, computing together, using many screens in many rooms with uniform and easy access to their user-settings, information, applications and powerful compute resources. The multi-monitor capability provided by ATI Eyefinity is an important piece of the puzzle, a powerful display adapter which can extend the computer to multiple separate displays in multiple positions or nearby locations.

To bind a digital nexus to screens throughout the home, I envisioned a single, unified cable connecting many displays throughout the home. I believed that the early candidates were DisplayPort 1.2  in 2012 and today a dual CAT5 solution employing long-run HDMI conversion and USB extension. Surprise, surprise. Looks like I am not the only one who has thought about this. But these guys figured you need to be able to go 100 meters.

And the cable ought to be thin and durable. And Optical. And they may be right. Intel Light Peek is indeed one cable which might rule them all. Making it a standard will be harder than climbing Everest. Many competing standards, and copper keeps getting better. For example, you can now port 1080p on a single CAT5/6 with Atlona’s single CAT5 1080p HDMI extender. And DisplayPort 1.2 builds on an existing standard and promises a similar combination of USB data and HD audio and video on a single cable.

The challenge this solution and DisplayPort 1.2 aim to resolve is the combination of HD video/audio and I/O via USB over a single cable that can stretch the PC experience throughout the home. DisplayPort has the lead in my book with a nice and growing installed base and an improving cost structure. It’s also copper, which has won similar battles over fibre in the consumer space just about every time.

As I have said elsewhere, enabling the use cases associated with this topology happens to require a multi-session OS with highly configurable multi I/O. Intel may say this is to get rid of wire clutter for laptop docking. My pajamas. You don’t need a hundred meters of fibre to dock your laptop. This cable is purpose made to wire the digital home and put a PC at the center of it. Period.

So my challenge now is that I have gone from finding the central home computing hypothesis appealing and plausible to finding it likely and potentially innevitable. Prevailing views that follow the trendline of the digitally networked and gadget infested home, our Gordeon’s Knot, simply don’t jive with this world view and you will make yourself unpopular at this year’s CES if you dwell too long.

I am very surprised by the rapid progress in the past two weeks toward the model, with the revelation of ATI Eyefinity, which is really an architectural and software solution to multi-monitor/audio, and now the revelation of Intel’s Light Peak, supporting long run video/video plus USB (or USB-like) based control. Now, I am certain that I am not the only one jumping up and down, saying to myself, it has begun. A few players had aces up their sleeves that are now flipped up and on the table.

The race is on. The question is, who’s heard the starting gun.

Excerpts previously published on www.amd.com and www.omnixedia.com. Reprinted by permission.

A month ago I asked K|ngp|n, chew* and Gomeler if they would join us in Austin for a liquid helium exhibition testing new, experimental processors. These processors are outside of standard specifications, kicking like a stallion, but tamed under xtreme cooling, have gone beyond any others. AMD Phenom II processors have exhibited the ability to scale with cold temperatures, and at the same time, to withstand the coldest, most extreme testing at temperatures approaching absolute zero. Video has preserved the memory, and today it is liberated for all to see.

These processors have inspired a new generation of xtreme cooling. Aaron Schradin has designed helium-specific processor coolers which we have been using since “The Experiment” in Las Vegas. His latest innovation the “Schradin Helium Router,” conserves coolant and improve cooling efficiency. K|ngp|n designed his own AMD Phenom II processor-specific prototype and brought it to the event. Aaron and I, who had collaborated on a concept for a transparent cooler, designed the “Phantom Pot” which allows us to see the before unseen dynamics of liquid nitrogen in a CPU cooler.

Based on these results we were able to redirect these processors before they found their way to that great unwanted pile of highly processed sand and we gave them a name. TWKR was born.

In the hands of the motivated, the relentless, and the talented, these processors may help you to slay your demons, defeat your naysayers, continue your reign of domination, stretch your sense of the possible. They may disappoint you, they may surprise you. We hope you enjoy the experiment, and continue to push the limits of what’s possible under XTREME CONDITIONS.

Be warned. Overclocking may destroy your hardware and obliterate your warranties. Working with liquid cooling can be dangerous, you’ve seen the hotdog trick. We destroy lots of hardware by overclocking under xtreme conditions. So don’t say you weren’t warned.