If you were fortunate enough to have attended this year’s Mobile World Congress you may have had the chance to test one of Intel’s pre-release smartphone models. The devices, courtesy of Orange, featured Intel’s Medfield platform. According to Intel’s Chief Operating Officer Brian Krzanich Intel’s manufacturing output is very well suited to the “fragmented mobile [...]Microsoft has released the beta of Visual Studio 11, with several treats in it. According to Herb Sutter, it has full support for “essentially the entire ISO C++11 standard library”, making it an industry first. The release also incorporates C++AMP, for parallel programming on CPUs and GPUs, with a fallback to multicore and SSE on [...]They’re both lightweight, portable computers. And they both have high-quality screens that are ideal for playing back media and visual entertainment. So what’s the difference between a tablet and an Ultrabook device? It’s easy to be flippant and say it’s the keyboard, especially as Ultrabooks are set to acquire touchscreens, GPS positioning and other sensors [...]If you’re a parallel programmer keeping one eye on tomorrow’s chip architecture, Intel has some interesting news for you. The company has published the details of its Transactional Synchronisation Extensions (TSX) for the upcoming Haswell processor. It’s chapter 8 of the complete Haswell specification (PDF). The solution enables you to use the concept of coarse [...]I’ve touched on this topic before, but I’m curious about whether great programmers are born (ie, their brains are hardwired for programming) or made (anyone can learn). Today, I read a research paper called ‘The camel has two humps’ (PDF), by Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat at Middlesex University. The paper’s a few years old [...]The Ultrabook is set to “reinvigorate the PC”, according to one of the interviewees in this video from the first Ultrabook Symposium. You’re probably aware of the Ultrabook concept, which makes high performance computing portable with ultra-light devices that have high quality keyboards and screens. The near instant-on and the upcoming incorporation of sensors will [...]
Last year, I attended Droidcon in London for the first time. It gave me a great insight into the Android community, and the developers who make it up. There were some great talks there, covering topics such as reskinning apps for different brands and languages (the solution is to plan this from the start, and [...]