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My on-again, off-again Apple relationship

Filed under: Cult of Mac, Apple

With TUAW’s Your First Apple series, we let you get a glimpse of our own histories with the Mac. My own history with Apple’s computers has been a bit convoluted. The first Apple computer, in fact the first computer of any kind I remember using, was an Apple II+. I was in kindergarten in Saudi Arabia at the time, so I don’t really remember much about those early experiences. Like many people of my generation, when I returned to the US I went to schools that had computer labs crammed full of Apple IIe computers. Of course, the only programs that were ever run on my elementary school’s Apples were marginally “educational” games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Odell Lake, and the massively popular Oregon Trail. Meanwhile, my family had a KayPro PC at home, which meant my dad had to teach an eight-year-old kid how to navigate through the amber-lettered jungles of DOS — something I’m glad I’ll never have to do with my own kids.

The Apple IIe was the only computer I used in school through 1990. I spent most of seventh grade cooking up little text-based adventure games in BASIC, and I even learned some rudimentary drawing and audio programming, all of which I forgot long ago. In mid-1990, the school revamped our computer lab with brand-new Macintosh Classics: the first Mac I ever used, the first machine I used that had a hard drive, and the first time I ever used a GUI to interact with a computer. Oddly enough, despite the huge leap in capabilities the Mac Classic had over the Apple IIe, we spent half of eighth grade using the Mac to learn how to type. I guess I should be thankful I learned to touch-type way back then, but spending several months on typing tutor software was a hard sell after spending the previous year doing actual programming.

After that first year with the Mac, my experiences with Apple’s computers went through some rollercoaster-like ups and downs. Click “read more” to find out why.

Some time in the early 90’s, my dad dumped his KayPro for a custom-built, unbranded, 386-based PC running Windows 3.11, which I inherited from him after he upgraded yet again. It was the first computer I had all to myself. After learning my way around the Mac’s interface, learning Windows 3.11 took all of five minutes. The PC also had color graphics, which was a definite improvement over the black-and-white Mac Classics at school. I didn’t get much actual work done on the PC, though, because nothing I produced on it was compatible with my high school’s Macs; I mostly used the PC for games.

My high school actually had two computer labs: one full of state-of-the-art Macs for basic computer training and programming, and one full of ancient, DOS-running IBM PCs used for business-related classes. I spent ninth and tenth grade learning how to program in HyperCard, which I used to create a couple of graphic adventure games complete with an X-Y navigation system that took quite a while to code properly. One program I developed in tenth grade on the Mac LC III was an Aliens vs. Predator adventure game, with graphics taken straight from the Dark Horse comic series and audio from both the Aliens and Predator films. I also created a HyperCard-based trojan to mess with the other kids in the lab. It was basically just a HyperCard stack that, once launched, would auto-generate new cards until the RAM filled up and the Mac crashed. High school was a high point in my experiences with Macs, but for the rest of the 90s and the first few years of the 2000s, it was all downhill.

Once I got out of high school, my long relationship with the Mac went on an extended hiatus. After joining the Navy in 1995 I hardly used computers of any kind for several years, to say nothing of Macs or the Internet. For almost four years I barely touched a PC for anything other than playing video games. Macs didn’t register on my radar at all, and the few times I came across one, I had the same reaction that a lot of today’s Mac haters still have: “For as much as they’re charging, I can’t even get any decent games for this thing?”

In late 1999 I finally started using the internet on a regular basis via a 56k dialup connection through my roommate’s ancient and thoroughly crappy Performa. I don’t know which model Performa it was or even what OS it was using — it was either OS 8 or System 7 — but I was not impressed with that machine at all. When my roommate offered to give me that Mac in exchange for me paying his part of the rent for a couple months, I turned him down, because I hated almost everything about that Performa. When I moved in with my girlfriend of the time, she had two computers: some anonymous box from HP running Windows 98, and an iMac with OS 9. Since the iMac didn’t have any games for it, wasn’t compatible with our cable modem, and had that horrible piece of garbage hockey puck mouse, I wouldn’t go near the thing. I preferentially veered toward the HP machine for everything I did.

From mid-2000 to early 2003 I once again barely even saw or used a Mac except for the handful of times I visited a Mac zealot friend of mine who lived in Seattle. I inherited yet another ancient computer from another friend of mine for my home use, one even older and less capable than the Performa: some Gateway box running Windows 95. Unable to even hook that machine up to the internet or run 3D games of any kind, the Gateway saw little use for the two years I had it.

After almost ten years of using computers solely for internet access and the occasional bit of gaming, I’d become sort of a luddite. Beyond basic word processing and web browsing, I really had no clue how to use a computer anymore. I ended up becoming a Mac switcher in early 2003, completely against my will, when I moved in with my wife. She had a dual 1GHz G4 Power Mac running OS X, and for the first couple of months using it, I had no idea what I was doing. I think my ignorance showed through enough that my wife got paranoid of letting me use her Mac at all. I eventually got the hang of it, but it was a painful process; I insisted on using Internet Explorer, stayed well clear of OS updates, and didn’t even attempt to do anything out of the ordinary with her Mac.

It was only after buying a used PowerBook G3 off of eBay for $200 that I really started figuring the Mac out. In the process of upgrading the processor to a G4, upping the RAM, swapping out the hard drive, and hacking the thing to run OS X Panther and Tiger (the model of PowerBook I bought was supposed to max out at Jaguar), I quickly gained an appreciation for the ins and outs of OS X. In the process, I reached the point where I flat-out refused to use Windows unless I absolutely had to for some reason. Within the space of a year, I also went from being completely ignorant about computers to being free tech support for all my friends; and for the few of them still using Windows, my first bit of tech advice is almost always to stop using Windows. OS X may or may not be inherently “better” than Windows, but over the past several years I’ve figured out that I only get the urge to throw my Mac out the window once or twice a month versus once every five minutes with the average Windows box.

My wife upgraded to a MacBook in 2007, so I inherited her Power Mac — just in time, as it turned out, because even after all its upgrades, my PowerBook was definitely showing its age, particularly in the way it liked to chew through hard drives. In February of 2008 I bought the 17″ MacBook Pro I’m still using today — the first brand-new computer I’ve ever owned.

It’s been a long, weird ride — BASIC programming, typing tutors, HyperCard programming, then close to ten years of neo-Ludditism — to where I am now, in a house full of Apple-branded gadgets, most of which would have sounded like science fiction when I sat down in front of a Mac Classic for the first time twenty years ago.

TUAWMy on-again, off-again Apple relationship originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Online Retail Thriving: 8% Growth Expected This Holiday Season

Yesterday we reviewed the past decade in online retailing. Today we look at some forward-looking statistics about e-commerce. In particular we analyze the upcoming holiday season and how online retailers can expect to fare.

Amazon.com was founded in 1995, but it famously didn’t make its first annual profit until 2003. Those days of struggle for e-commerce vendors are long gone. In its State Of Retailing Online 2009 report, Forrester Research reported that the vast majority of Web retailers were not only profitable in 2008
- in a recession – but also that their overall level of profitability grew.

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The e-commerce market is expanding, due to a combination of factors. One is that consumers are no longer afraid to buy things online, as they once were. Also brick-and-mortar businesses are migrating more of their operations online. We also have technology advances to thank: better recommendations technology, social media, the emergence of mobile commerce.

E-commerce Continues to Grow, Despite Economy

E-commerce has ridden the ups and downs of the general economy over the past decade, but it has continued to grow throughout. In the State Of Retailing Online 2009 report, Forrester Research reported that retailers saw their Web divisions grow by 18% in 2008. Given that Forrester described 2008 as "one of the worst years ever" in retail, that’s significant growth in online retail activity.

Holiday Season Predicted to Grow 8%

Online shopping always been a seasonal market and there are promising signs for the upcoming holiday season. The latest comScore statistics show that toy web sites grew 9% in October, which comScore claimed was due to some parents getting in early for holiday gifts. The retail apparel segment also grew by 9% in October.

Overall, Forrester Research predicts that online holiday retail sales (over November and December) will grow 8% this year to $44.7 billion.

Brick-and-Mortar Stores a Success on the Web

A noticeable trend over the past decade has been the slow but steady flight of ‘brick-and-mortar’ retail stores to the Web. In the early days of online retailing, Web operations were typically isolated from the main sales channels. But nowadays, Forrester notes that Web operations are a strategic part of the entire organization.

Two recent stories from industry website Internet Retailer show how traditional retailers are not only adapting online, but thriving. Best Buy’s traffic has grown 18% over the past 12 months according to Nielsen Online. Meanwhile for the quarter ended October 31, 2009, Gap’s Web sales increased 4.9% to $298 million. The web accounted for 8.3% of sales at Gap in Q3 09, compared to 8.0% in Q3 2008.

Forrester outlined a number of reasons why online channels are appealing during a "challenging" economy – including enabling consumers to find products online that they can’t find elsewhere, offering comparisons on product features and pricing, avoding holiday crowds, and more.

All of this data is very encouraging to online retailers. Even during a down economy, the Web has come through for most of them. Web entrepreneurs, if you’re looking for opportunities then look no further than online retailing!

Photo credit: Sⓘndy

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EA’s Need for Speed racing games cross 100 million sold

Electronic Arts said today it has sold more than 100 million units of its Need for Speed racing video games since 1993. Gamers have raced cars in the game for more than 279 billion virtual miles.

Full told, Need for Speed has generated more than $2.7 billion in revenue for EA. But the racing game has gone through ups and downs through 15 different versions, and EA is still trying to reinvent and refresh the game, said Keith Munro (below), vice president of global marketing for the franchise.

On average, Need for Speed has sold some 12 million units per year in the last five years. As a video game franchise, Need for Speed ranks No. 4 on a worldwide basis. The No. 1-selling title of all time, The Sims, managed to hit 100 million sold in just eight years in April, 2008. Need for Speed took twice as long, but the achievement is still nothing to sneeze at. After all, in the time it took Need for Speed to sell 100 million units, there were only 93 million real cars sold in the U.S.

Over the years, the franchise has evolved through 15 different major games on 14 platforms. It used to focus on super cars racing through the Italian countryside. With the groundbreaking Need for Speed Underground game in 2003, the game shifted toward the pop culture interest in street racing, born from the 2001 movie The Fast and the Furious. It had more “accessible” cars that you could actually buy. You could trick them out and race them through city streets and evade cops. It was an open world, not a race course, and you could drive all over the place. The Need for Speed Underground game led to a major revival of sales, but it peaked in 2005 with Need for Speed Most Wanted with 16 million sold.

In recent years, sales of the franchise declined, hitting a low with Need for Speed Pro Street in 2007. EA had one studio working on the games and it was over-taxed. Last year, EA split the franchise up and brought in another studio. Now it has split the franchise into three different product lines: an action game for mass market fans, a simulation game for hardcore racing fans, and an arcade version for casual fans.

EA introduced Need for Speed Shift (above and right) in the simulation category this September. And it is about to release an arcade game, Need for Speed Nitro for the Nintendo Wii (pictured bottom), and the handheld Nintendo DS. The Nintendo game keeps the edgy attitude of the franchise but is much easier to drive, using a motion-sensing Wii controller. It has cars such as Lamborghinis, but also Volkswagen vans and Nissan Cubes for a goofy racing experience. The funny cars are a must on the Wii, where the top racing game of 2008 was the goofy Mario Kart game from Nintendo.

John Riccitiello, chief executive of EA, called this a “three pillar” strategy for Need for Speed. It is aimed at reviving the franchise and targeting the tastes of different crowds. EA is also extending the franchise to new platforms such as the iPhone. It remains to be seen if it will work. Odds are good that this will be an above average year, since there are two major releases. Next year, EA is expected to launch an action version of the game.

Also, in perhaps the biggest experiment of all, EA plans to launch Need for Speed World Online in the fall of 2010. This online-only game will be a free-to-play game, where players can play for free but pay for upgrades via micro transactions.

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Star Trek Online game gives Cryptic Studios a chance at a mass audience

Cryptic Studios is one of the few companies that has made a living at making massively multiplayer online games and lived to tell about it. Since 2000, the company has created three successful MMOs: City of Heroes, City of Villains, and Champions Online.

But now it has a chance for the big time with Star Trek Online, a new MMO set for release in 2010. It is the first major online game based on the Star Trek franchise, and it’s a small miracle that it landed in the hands of the game developers at Cryptic Studios, a subsidiary of video game publisher Atari.

Los Gatos, Calif.-based Cryptic is a scrappy company that has survived ups and downs in an industry where dozens of MMO makers have vaporized over the years. But the timing is good. Star Trek fans, known as Trekkies, have been waiting for an online game where they could play by the millions forever. And the Star Trek movie that came out in the summer was a blockbuster, reawakening interest in the aging franchise. Now all that Cryptic has to do is finish the game at warp speed and it will have a chance at something that doesn’t happen often: a hardcore online game that is accessible enough to have broad mass market appeal.

Making a game for Trekkies and gamers alike

Building the game is a huge responsibility, since Trekkies and sci-fi gamers alike will have high expectations, said Craig Zinkievich, executive producer of the game, in an interview.

“The good thing is that the team is really excited about making it,” said Zinkievich (pictured). “It is such a stories franchise, such an exciting universe to work in. It really is a chance of a lifetime for us to be able to work on this product.”

The property has been cursed in a way. The previous game developer that worked on it went belly up. Making a success out of a brand like Star Trek might seem like a no-brainer. But it’s not so easy to make an MMO.

“One of the hardest thing to do is to create an MMO because there are so many pieces to it,” said Zinkievich. “Companies keep failing because the technology kills them. We’ve got an engine for our games that is mature. Once you’ve shipped one MMO, your chances of doing another are much better.”

Cryptic’s humble beginnings

Cryptic is not a company that you would have bet on as a survivor in the game industry. It was founded in 2000 with some serious bubble money. Michael Lewis, a graphics and chemistry expert, founded Stellar Semiconductor, a 3-D graphics company that he sold at the height of the bubble to chip maker Broadcom. He came out of that deal with millions of dollars. Then, by chance, he met some former Atari game developers at a New Year’s Eve party. Since he was a game fan, he decided to use his money to start Cryptic with his friend Rick Dakan and the ex-Atari guys: Bruce Rogers, Matt Harvey, and Cameron Petty.

They went to work on an online role-playing game, hiring comic book fanatic and role-playing game designer Jack Emmert. In 2002, they convinced NCSoft, a South Korean online game publisher looking to break into the U.S. market, to agree to publish their game, dubbed City of Heroes. Although Lewis was wealthy, Cryptic had to get by on a shoestring budget. And despite its relatively tiny team, it launched City of Heroes in April, 2004.

City of Heroes proved addictive. You could create your own superhero and play with others in a huge city where bad guys roamed. Friends had to team up against the bad guys to defeat them. The game took off and quickly got more than 100,000 subscribers. That was enough to generate profits for Cryptic. It wasn’t a huge game in terms of numbers, but the fans were loyal because Cryptic kept churning out new missions and adventures.

The profits gave Cryptic enough money to do a second game, City of Villains. And since City of Villains used the same fundamental technology, or engine, as City of Heroes, it wasn’t that costly to make. Through NCSoft, Cryptic was able to launch City of Villains in October, 2005. Cryptic earned a reputation for getting things done.

That was more than what could be said for other online games. NCSoft got into trouble with its agreement to publish Tabula Rasa, a sci-fi online game being created by game guru Richard Garriott. Garriott spent tens of millions of dollars and six years making the game. But it flopped when it came out, and NCSoft had to shut down the game in February. Tabula Rasa was perhaps the biggest financial flop of all time. Its big-spending ways were the exact opposite of the way that Cryptic has learned to operate.

A kick in the gut from Spider-Man

Meanwhile, Cryptic’s modest success led to more deals. The superhero games logically led to a discussion with Marvel, the owner of superhero franchises from Spider-Man to Iron Man.

Marvel had long licensed its superheroes for use in console and PC games. But it had never commissioned a successful online game. At first, the game was started under an agreement with NCSoft. Then the license was transferred to Microsoft, which wanted to produce big online games for both the PC and the Xbox. Marvel announced a deal with Microsoft and Cryptic in September, 2006.

Cryptic Studios built its team working on the Marvel game to 70 people. It should have been the company’s shot at a mass appeal game. But, abruptly, Marvel and Microsoft got in a dispute. In 2007, they canceled the Marvel online game. The Marvel Universe license was eventually renegotiated and given to a new developer, Gazillion. Cryptic got the rug pulled out from under it.

“It was like a kick in the gut,” said Emmert (pictured), who is now chief creative officer at Cryptic. “It was canceled for reasons I didn’t know, and I still don’t know.”

That was a period of crisis for the company; it was definitely one of the times when Cryptic was two months away from shutting down. In 2007, desperate for cash after the collapse of the Marvel deal, Cryptic sold the rights to its City of Heroes and City of Villains games to NCSoft. That gave Cryptic enough money to continue development on what would become Champions Online, another superhero game. Cryptic found a publisher for the online game in Take-Two Interactive’s 2K Games division.

Cryptic’s big break

Then there were a couple of pieces of good luck. The Star Trek property broke loose from a game developer that had locked up the rights. Perpetual Entertainment, a startup in San Francisco with funding from Francisco Partners, had been working on a Star Trek online game under license from Paramount Pictures for years. But it failed to make enough progress and had to shut down after a series of layoffs in late 2007 and early 2008. Emmert said his people had been friendly to the Perpetual team and Francisco Partners. It started talking to them about taking over Star Trek Online.

Cryptic put five people to work on a prototype for the game, and they had working code five weeks later which they showed to Paramount. They secured the license in January, 2008. Cryptic made some offers to some of Perpetual’s people, but none of them wanted to leave San Francisco for the suburbs of Los Gatos.

That deal made Cryptic a lot more attractive to game publishers, who have become wary of the MMO market because of all of the failures and because the one major success, World of Warcraft, has vanquished most of its competition. In December, 2008, Cryptic agreed to be acquired by Atari, which was in a regeneration mode after a long period of struggle.

Game developers also came out of the woodwork. Some of them came to Zinkievich’s office, pleading to be assigned to the project while dressed as their favorite Star Trek characters. Under Atari, during the past year, Cryptic has been able to add more than 100 employees.

Cryptic’s Star Trek team huddled and figured out what they wanted to do. They started with a blank whiteboard and wrote down all of the things they thought a Star Trek game had to have. They matched that up against what they had learned from making several other MMOs.

Another piece of good fortune helped Cryptic expand. In the middle of 2008, San Jose, Calif.-based Flagship Studios went under. That company had developed an ambitious game, Hellgate: London. But the game flopped and Flagship couldn’t recover. Cryptic was able to hire a bunch of its developers, including Bill Roper, the founder of Flagship. Roper became design director at Cryptic and he helped direct the team producing Champions Online.

Making Star Trek Online

Cryptic’s designers looked at Perpetual’s concept art for the game. But they quickly decided they had to start from the ground up, Zinkievich said. They didn’t even look at the code that had already been done. Rather, they decided to use their own Cryptic game engine, which had been evolving over the years and was battle-tested.

That allowed Cryptic to work on the game with a smaller team of about 50 of the company’s 250 employees. They gradually built the team up at the same time that they were in heavy development on Champions Online.

The team knew they had to do justice to the franchise that has been around since Gene Roddenberry created the TV series in the 1960s. There were lots of Trek fans already working at Cryptic, but the team also benefited from the lore about Star Trek that is scattered across the Internet at sites like StarTrek.com and Memory Alpha. The team regularly watched episodes of Star Trek in the company’s cafeteria.

Champions Online shipped in September. A smaller team continues to work on enhancements for the game, which is operated much like a service. In that sense, the task of making an online game and keeping it fresh never ends. But some of the employees have now been shifted to work on Star Trek Online.

Emmert and Zinkievich say they have remained true to the Star Trek canon, but have come up with enough original material in the form of missions that will keep fans from getting bored. In contrast to the online game Star Wars Galaxies, they aren’t straying too much from the fun stuff: being a Star Fleet captain running a space ship and fighting with the enemies of the Federation.

Welcome aboard, Captain

Cryptic showed off its first playable version of the game to fans at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, a game fan event where 70,000 people attended. The game starts in the year 2409, after the events of the Star Trek Nemesis movie. Players start in space as the captains of their own starships. You can fight the Klingons in your starship and perform missions on the ground on planets that you visit. Players can team up together in “away teams” as large as five. So the games can be played in a social setting. The idea was to live up to the series’ promise of “boldly going where no man has gone before,” Emmert said.

Emmert has tried to learn from all of Cryptic’s hardships. His main goal is to get Zinkievich’s team to focus on making a great game. That is, they should focus on the fact that this game is all about Star Trek. They should focus on how to make a game that is fun for anyone to play, even non-Trekkies.

Since Atari isn’t the strongest of game companies, there isn’t a lot of marketing money it can spend on the game. That puts all the more pressure on Cryptic to create a game that will spread by word of mouth. Cyptic has another unannounced game underway. But with luck, Star Trek Online will be the game that makes Cryptic world famous.

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The economy changes the course of chip design at Hot Chips conference

The Hot Chips conference that runs Sunday through Tuesday at Stanford University will capture the evolution of the chip industry. This conference offers the first chance to see how the global economic crisis is affecting the leading edge of the design of semiconductors, which are used in all things electronic and are like the plankton of the digital ecosystem.

One palpable trend is the tough economy’s effect on the conference itself. Last year, over 700 people attended, but so far only about 400 are signed up. The conference is aimed at chip engineers, who are affected by industry cutbacks, overseas oursourcing, and tight travel budgets.

Big iron still dominates, but with attention to low power

While chips often take four years today and aren’t tied to economic ups and downs, the permanent changes in the global economy still have effects in on chip design.

During the dotcom bust, enterprise customers shifted away from “big iron” server chips such as Intel’s Itanium to more power efficient and lower-cost Opteron from Advanced Micro Devices. Intel will have details on its latest version of its Nehalem EX high-end server chips, while AMD will talk about its Magny Cours chips for low-end blade servers. The companies will also talk about the advances in their high-end consumer chips.

Chip makers are still designing “big iron” chips that have the highest performance for the most difficult computing tasks. IBM will unveil Power 7, the next version of its high-performance chips for corporate data centers. Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle, with its own chip programs facing an uncertain future) will describe Rainbow Falls, the code-name for its successor to its Niagara chip, which is a many headed beast that can serve lots of web pages to lots of users at the same time.

All of those chips have all sorts of power-saving features that big iron chips once ignored. Even though this low-power shift started many years ago, it is still propagating its way through the chip industry.

The shift to smaller portable chips continues

One of the biggest new categories beyond big iron is the shift to what we might call “little iron.” Intel will talk about Moorestown, a version of its Atom chip, which is aimed at netbooks (smaller than laptops) and web-browsing gadgets that iIntel calls “mobile Internet devices.”

Intel is also evidently going to talk about the trend toward putting graphics and microprocessors on the same chip. Westmere is Intel’s first 32-nanometer chip that is going into production later this year. It is coupled with a companion graphics chip that could eventually be put onto the same piece of silicon as the microprocessor.

Nvidia will show off the latest in its Ion platform, which provides a graphics boost for high-end netbooks and other small devices.

Parallel computing picks up as a trend

In the past decade, other factors have become just as important as better performance. Those new trends are reflected in the rest of the talks, said Ralph Wittig, one of the organizers of the conference, in an interview.

Parallel computing — or doing lots of things at the same time with multiple processors on a chip — is the subject of multiple talks including the keynote speech by Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of graphics chip maker Nvidia. He will talk about Nvidia’s multi-year crusade to use the parallel computing capabilities of graphics chips to handle chores beyond graphics. The so-called GPU computing (graphics processing unit) trend has taken off in the past couple of years and is starting to see mainstream usage in applications such as fixing flaws in video imagery.

It’s also interesting to see computing spread to other devices. NXP will talk about a chip it designed for liquid-crystal display TVs. NEC and Hitachi will both make presentations about sophisticated processors for car navigation devices, which were once so dumb they would hardly merit papers at a chip design conference.

On Wednesday, Rich Hilleman, chief creative officer at Electronic Arts, will talk about the chip needs of game hardware devices and how games continue to push the leading edge of chip design, as games require more realistic imagery and accurate physics.

Startups aren’t shut out of the chip design game yet

As chip design becomes more expensive, it has become the domain of big companies. But it’s encouraging to see startups on the list of talks. SiTime will talk about its designs for high-speed clocks that are used to keep the split-second pace in chips.

Convey Computer will talk about its design for a high-performance server chip. The company’s hybrid chips feature both standard Intel-based computing capabilities as well as customizable features, giving the chip multiple personalities that can be adapted to a variety of uses.

Nallatech will make a presentation about its “field programmable gate array” or configurable chips that can accelerate apps in supercomputers. And Arches Computing will talk about FPGA technology for high-performance computing hardware that can reconfigure itself for different tasks. And Silicon Blue will also describe an effort to create low-power FPGAs to rival market leaders Xilinx and Altera.

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