Cinnamon Bay SBC for Intel® Atom Z5XX processor platform

ADI Engineering announced (Mar 03, 2009) Cinnamon Bay SBC (Single Board Computers) based on the new options for the Intel® Atom™ processor Z5xx platform, which include industrial temperature products. Cinnamon Bay SBC measures a mere 88x110mm, and is available in three SKUs targeted to a wide range of deeply embedded applications such as industrial controls, digital signage, interactive kiosks, general-purpose embedded computing, IP media display and processing, military, medical, gaming, and point of sale (PoS) terminals. ADI offers a -40C to +85C extended temperature range SKU of Cinnamon Bay SBC to meet the rigorous demands of harsh industrial, military, automotive and outdoor applications.

Cinnamon Bay SBC can be used standalone in many applications, since common interfaces and connectors are included on the single board. When expansion is required, application-specific daughtercards can be added quickly and easily to meet unique requirements for HD or SD video, audio, networking, and other features.

ADI has created Cinnamon Bay SBC from the ground up to bring a number of significant new capabilities to the market:

• At 88 x 110mm, Cinnamon Bay is the smallest full-function, expandable Atom Z5XX-based SBC
• First Atom SBC offering 802.3at Power over Ethernet (PoE+)
• First Atom SBC offering true -40C to +85C extended temperature operation that is crucial to military, outdoor, automotive, industrial and other harsh applications
• First Atom Z5XX SBC offering DDR2 scalability from 128MB to 2GB via SO-DIMM
• Low power, fanless operation
• Only Atom SBC backed by ADI's distinctively strong engineering and customization offerings and uniquely open IP model. ADI eliminates single vendor lock-in inherent with other SBC and COM suppliers and ODMs, putting you in complete control.

ADI also offers off-the-shelf daughtercards serving SD and HD IP media applications. Development kits for Cinnamon Bay SBC are also available to enable rapid evaluation and application development.

“Cinnamon Bay SBC specifically targets deeply embedded applications not well served by existing COM or SBC approaches,” said Steve Yates, President, Founder and CTO of ADI Engineering. “With Cinnamon Bay SBC, ADI enables OEMs to take full advantage of the new options of the Intel® Atom™ platform in a flexible, low cost, extended temperature, long life single board computer line that greatly accelerates time to market and reduces the cost of easily differentiated embedded solutions.”

Cinnamon Bay SBC Block Diagram :

Software Support

• Linux
• Microsoft Windows XP and XP Embedded
• Insyde Software H2O and DIY BIOS

Cinnamon Bay SBC is currently in alpha validation and trials. Full production will commence in July 2009.

Related Post :
http://zackyza.blogspot.com/2009/03/intel-atom-processor-z5xx-for-vehicle.html

2008: The Year In Pictures

InformationWeek , January 3, 2009 07:00 AM
By Cora Nucci

The year was notable for high-profile security breaches -- Obama, McCain, and Palin got hacked -- NASA's big news from Mars, and the comedic gifts of Bill Gates.

NASA Finds Martian Ice

Two Big Science stories gave us remarkable images this year. The first was the discovery in June of ice on the Martian surface and analysis of soil samples retrieved by the craft gave NASA scientists hope that life may have once existed on the planet.

The agency's Mars news was tempered by a setback to its space shuttle program. A revised budget announced in August is delaying the first next-generation Constellation space shuttle launch until 2014, a year later than planned. With Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavor expected to retire in 2010, the shuttle program will go four years without a launch. That should give NASA's IT department time to put anti-virus software onto all its laptops.

Particularly Smashing: CERN's Large Hadron Collider

The other big story with great visuals came in the Fall when scientists powered up the world's largest particle accelerator, a massive underground device designed to conduct particle physics experiments. Scientists working in a 17-mile tunnel 300-feet beneath the French/Swiss border hope to use the LHC to test the Big Bang theory and other beliefs about how matter and mass formed. The massive project is expected to produce roughly 15 million GB of data annually for analysis by scientists around the globe.

Reassurances from scientists notwithstanding, the tin-foil hat brigade railed against the search for the so-called "God particle," fearing researchers would form black holes large enough to bring on doomsday.

But we'll have to wait and see if they were right.

Just as scientists began testing the LHC, hackers made a mockery of the European lab's network security. Days later, a liquid helium leak brought research to a halt until at least next spring when repairs are completed.

So how big is this the biggest science device on the planet? Big enough to have its own rap video.

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Goes For The Funny

The biggest software company on the planet made some cringe-worthy videos of its own in 2008.

To "reintroduce Microsoft to viewers in a consumer context" it brought in funnyman Jerry Seinfeld and paired him with company co-founder and video veteran Bill Gates in two ads.

The first ad featured Seinfeld and Bill Gates shopping for shoes. The second ad found the two men living with a "regular" family, prompting Dave Methvin to write, "we've finally found something that's much worse than Vista: Vista commercials."

Twittering Terrorists?

Gates fared much better in this star-studded farewll video shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, his last as a fulltime Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) employee:

In October Microsoft previewed its next operating system, Windows 7, seen in this image gallery. The OS is due late next year; a trial version was recently leaked to the Internet.

First Internet Presidency

President-elect Barack Obama made his way to the White House using a combination of television, the Internet, and social media tools such as Facebook to recruit volunteers and supporters, and cement relationships with them.

But the path to Washington was marred by sophisticated cyberattacks on computer systems used by the both the McCain and Obama campaigns over the summer. In September, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin'sYahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Mail account was hacked and selected information from the account was posted online by hackers.

Tweet Me To Your Leader

Obama's use of Facebook was no campaign quirk. The tool spread wildly in popularity despite widespread concerns about privacy. In 2008 Facebook fought spammers and a malicious worm, and a hacker who exposed a privacy hole in the social network -- and private photos of Paris Hilton.

If a recent Army intelligence paper is right, Twitter poses an even bigger security threat. In a number of scenarios the report contemplates how Twitter might be used by terrorists.

Whether social networking tools are a bona fide security threat remains to be seen. "Terrorists can use credit cards and can openers, so they can probably use Twitter too," said Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists. "But that doesn't make it a national security concern."

If 2008 taught us anything, it's that, social networking is pervasive, still spreading, and apparently unstoppable. Even the Phoenix Mars Lander used Twitter to tell 40,000 of its tweeps that it found ice on Mars.

To see a gallery of images from 2008, click here.

Buying Your Computer Equipment from an Office Supply Store

You can buy computer equipment from a number of places, including

mail order catalogs, Web sites, local computer retailers, electronics "superstores," and office supply stores. Each source offers its own advantages and disadvantages. When you order directly from a Web-only manufacturer such as Dell or Gateway, you get competitive prices as well as the ability to specify exactly how the vendor should configure your computers. When you buy from a local retailer, on the other hand, you might get better service and support from a company with whom you have a personal relationship.

Where do office supply stores fall on this spectrum? In many cases, you'll find a reasonable selection of computers at a good price. Many office supply stores have their own computer service and support departments, along with special services such as extended warranties and training classes. Most stores offer other types of office equipment, such as cash registers and copiers, giving you the luxury of one-stop shopping.

On the downside, many office supply stores treat computer sales as just one part of a much larger business that includes everything from PCs to paper clips. You may find that a store sells most of its systems in fixed configurations, which means that you'll pay more if you want to buy customized equipment — or have to pay for features you don't really want. In addition, some office supply stores can't offer the same level of service and support that you'll get from other sources.

When you decide where to buy your computers, remember that in today's intensely competitive market computer prices and configurations change almost weekly. Don't buy a computer anywhere until you've had a chance to shop around.

Semantic Sense for the Desktop

A project brings Semantic Web technology to personal documents.
By Erica Naone
http://www.technologyreview.com/
Tuesday, December 16, 2008

People naturally group information by topic and remember relationships between important things, like a person and the company where she works. But enabling computers to grasp these same concepts has been the subject of long-standing research. Recently, this has focused on the Semantic Web, but a European endeavor called the Nepomuk Project will soon see the effort take new steps onto the PC in the form of a "semantic desktop."

Those working on the project, coordinated by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), have been toiling for three years to create software that can spot meaningful connections between the files on a computer. Nepomuk's software is available for several computer platforms and now comes as a standard component of the K Desktop Environment (KDE), a popular graphical interface for the Linux operating system.

The idea of a semantic desktop is not new. The Open Source Applications Foundation and SRI, two nonprofit organizations, have both worked on similar projects. But previous efforts have suffered from the difficulty of generating good semantic information: for semantic software to be useful, semantic information needs to be generated and tagged to files and documents. But without useful applications in the first place, it is hard to persuade users to generate and tag this data themselves.

Nepomuk is distinguished by a more practical vision, says Ansgar Bernardi, deputy head of knowledge management research at DFKI. The software adds a lot of semantic information automatically and encourages users to add more by making annotated data more useful. It also provides an easy way to share tagged information with others.

The software generates semantic information by using "crawlers" to go through a computer and annotate as many files as possible. These crawlers look through a user's address book, for example, and search for files related to the people found in there. Nepomuk can then connect a file sent by a particular person with one related to the company that person works for, making Nepomuk a particularly useful way to search a computer, Bernardi says.

While most operating systems let users search on their computer by keyword alone, Nepomuk can uncover more useful information by focusing on the connections between data; it can locate relevant files if they don't mention the keyword used to search. And peer-to-peer file-sharing architecture built into the system also makes it easy to share files and the associated semantic data between users.

"This might be the semantic desktop that actually survives," says Nova Spivack, CEO and founder of Radar Networks, the company behind Twine, a semantic bookmarking and social-networking service. "There's a lot of potential to build on what they've done."

Spivack notes that other efforts to bring semantic technology to the desktop haven't succeeded in reaching end users. "Nepomuk is designed for real people and developers," he says. For this reason, Spivack sees the inclusion of Nepomuk in KDE as particularly important, since KDE software is widely distributed and can easily be modified by software developers.

Although funding for the official Nepomuk project ends this month, Bernardi expects it to continue as an open-source software effort. A spinoff company is also in the works, he says, and a newly founded legal body called the Open Semantic Collaboration Architecture Foundation will help coordinate continuing work on the technology created by Nepomuk.

Nepomuk's software is available in several platforms besides KDE. Users can download the basic software for free for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. It is also possible to use Nepomuk in a more limited way--just for Web pages viewed through Firefox, for example--with a limited installation.