[CES 2011] It’s been exactly one year since NVIDIA announced and showed Tegra 2 to the world, and NVIDIA did not win a whole lot of contract (“design-wins”) with handset and tablet makers – until recently. If you follow this site regularly, you have probably noticed that Tegra 2 devices have been a common occurrence in the past couple of months, and you can expect this to continue going forward.
Why?
First of all, NVIDIA used to focus their software (drivers) efforts on Windows CE. It turns out that it was a mistake, although one that might be explained by the fact that an alliance with Microsoft and its early DirectX made NVIDIA successful in the past (RIVA 128 days).
NVIDIA has since turned its efforts towards Android, the Operating System (OS) that OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) really want. This new direction, combined with the realization by wireless carriers that multimedia and gaming capabilities do generate money, have propelled NVIDIA from being a marginal player to being a real threat for arch-rivals like Qualcomm, Ti, Freescale, Marvell and others players in that space.
Multimedia and Gaming Matter
Two years ago, people were reasonably happy with their smartphones if they could browse the web decently, and even that is still a challenge for some platforms… Today, games are the type of content that brings the most money in the eco-system (app stores), so all the sudden, carriers want to have a great gaming phones. And guess who has been powering gaming graphics for a couple of decades?
Master the basics first
Being a “fast gaming machine” is not good enough. First, Tegra 2 has to prove that it is good at the basic things: battery life, web browsing. According to NVIDIA, Tegra-equipped phones browse the web a whole lot faster than established (but also older) competitors out there. The graph above shows its relative performance in an array of web benchmarks. This is basically a demonstration of the multi-core nature of Tegra 2, as web browsing is something that can be made to be multi-core friendly. Other multi-core architecture should exhibit similar improvements.
Tegra 2 also uses a known principle: “perform the task quickly, and get back to sleep”. The idea is to allow the chip to enter a very “fast” mode (which consumes more power), so that it comes back to a “rest” state more rapidly. NVIDIA says that Tegra’s rest state is lower-power than many competitors. Although this might help battery life, the primary goal is to increase performance significantly – without making the battery situation worse. It might be counter intuitive, but using multiple cores at a lower frequency can lead to a significant power consumption reduction for a given task.
Then go to the next level
Flash
With basic stuff out of the way, the Tegra 2 team has identified two areas where they can make a big difference: Flash and 3D gaming. As you have seen, Flash might be available in select phones, but it doesn’t mean that it is usable at all. In fact, Flash (in the browser) is mostly unusable at this point.
Adobe Flash performance is typically slow and it is a CPU (and power) “hog”. On PC, Adobe, Intel, and many companies like AMD or NVIDIA have contributed to the Flash player code (or low-level portions) to make it what it is today. In the mobile world, this has not really happened yet – until now. If a company isn’t capable of optimizing Flash itself, it’s just not going to happen – that’s the bottom-line. With Tegra, NVIDIA has managed to accelerate the whole Flash pipeline in hardware. Years of working with Adobe Flash on the “PC” side is paying dividends here.
3D Gaming
Most people expect NVIDIA to do well here, so it’s not really a surprise, but is it still a technological feat. OpenGL ES 2.0 found on mobile phones is equivalent to DirectX 9, so that’s hardly new for a company like NVIDIA. However, there are a few details that are particularly interesting, like the use of an “Early-Z” (a technique to quickly discard unseen pixels), programmable blending, or cache memory that reduces memory traffic (and therefore power). Some of these techniques are used to simply increase performance in discrete PC graphics, but here, there’s also a huge focus on power preservation.
startups, Software, crm
Nutshell Building New CRM Software From Scratch, With A Big Focus On Mobile
Erin Kutz 12/20/10
For Guy Suter, starting from scratch is a good thing. At least when it comes to user interfaces, he says. His Ann Arbor-based startup Nutshell is building a customer relationship management software system from the ground up that he says offers a better user experience than what’s long been out on the market.
Suter first saw the problems with existing CRM software options while CEO of BitLeap, an offsite data backup and disaster recovery company that was acquired by Barracuda Networks in 2008. He found products like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM to be “cumbersome” and not particularly user friendly, he says.
Many of the biggest names in CRM got their start before the big modern features of the Web existed, says Suter, Nutshell’s CEO. Pretty important features, like Ajax, the Web development system used to create more interactive application on sites. Some of these long-time CRM brands have added layers to and tweaked their software to keep up with new Internet standards, but Suter says piling new features onto an existing, outdated platform still makes for a clunky user experience.
“That kind of leaves things lacking, it doesn’t feel as seamless as something you could start with a blank slate,” says Suter, who also works as a director at Barracuda Networks.
His 12-person team at Nutshell is putting a big focus on making the software systems for salespeople easier to navigate. Some features include: automatically refreshing the page when users update information, breaking up information so that it doesn’t read as one giant log that takes minutes to scroll through, and allowing users to grab data and move it to the appropriate place. The software also enables users to customize different steps and milestones of their sales process, offering different data entry variables and options for each step, Suter says.
Nutshell, was launched in 2009 by Suter and is internally funded—with no immediate plans to raise outside money. The company also has two staffers completely dedicated to developing the product for the mobile phone. “We want to build the best mobile CRMs in world; that’s where the world is going,” Suter says.
Right now, the iPhone version of Nutshell enables users to sift through their customer data and research leads, but in the future the company is adding geo-location features. One of the big problems for salespeople who travel is entering a lead’s or client’s information into the software system from a computer, and finding the Internet access to do it. With upcoming versions of the mobile edition of Nutshell, users will be able to enter information into the system “between the door of the client they just met with and the door of their car,” Suter says. The GPS features in the phone will enable the system to readily pick up a client location and enter it into the system.
The Nutshell software first hit the market a month ago, offering customers a free 30-day trial of the product, which normally costs $25 per individual user per month. Those first trials were just ending last week when I chatted with Suter, so now “it’s getting to decision time” for those first several hundred customers on whether they’ll stick with the product. The company attracted a mix of customers, but those in the Web development and design space were big, Suter says.
The first crop of customers will also determine the features and focus of Nutshell in the future, which could include mass marketing and enterprise resource planning, Suter says. “Ultimately Nutshell will be an entire business suite of software,” he says.
Erin Kutz is an Assistant Editor for Xconomy. You can reach her by e-mail at ekutz@xconomy.com or by phone at (617) 252-0700, or follow her on Twitter at @erkutz.
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