Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear microchip
Happy Birthday to you

There, that’s better. Yes, the microchip is celebrating half a century since it was born. Or at least since it was first demonstrated by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments on the 12th of September 1958.

Who would have thought that the strip of germanium with a single transistor, along with the other components, glued to a glass slide and measuring a whopping great 7/16ths of an inch by a 16th of an inch, would go on to be used in, well, just about everything?

Probably not Jack Kilby, after all he invented it because had was a newbie with time on his hands. Having not long joined Texas Instruments Kilby was not allowed to go on holiday like everyone else, so he spent his time attempting to solve a problem that had been bugging him. That problem was how to efficiently, in terms of both application and cost, connect a large number of components in elaborate circuits.

Of course, Kilby was not only the inventor of the microchip, he also invented the first hand-held calculator. I guess it should also be mentioned that he won the Nobel Prize for Physics back in the year 2000.

The humble, if that is the right word considering the statistics, microchip has gone of to truly great things. The semiconductor industry looks like producing in excess of 267 billion integrated circuits this year alone, rising to more than 330 billion within 3 years.

Not bad going for a fifty year old…

You know something, I am huge fan of those little ASUS Eee PC mini-laptops. Anything that helps to bring affordable mobile computing to the masses has to be a good thing in my book. But like my mother always said, you can get too much of a good thing.

And that, unfortunately, is the situation ASUS has found itself in.

C’mon guys, this is just getting silly. How many Eee PC variations are there now? Good question, but difficult to answer. I’ve pretty much lost count it has to be said.

Heading over to the Eee PC Comparison List at the ASUS website I am informed that there, in fact, no less than 12 of the little buggers.

No less, but I would venture to suggest quite a lot more. That list does not include the 900XP and 901XP for example. These newly announced models appear to be pretty much the same as the 900 and 901, funnily enough, but come complete with flowers on the lid.

I kid ye not. What next, the 900SB (SpongeBob) or 901HM (Hannah Montana) editions?

You could argue that the figure for different Eee PC products is already way higher thanks to the number of colour options alone that are available already, everything from pearl white (how original) to blush pink and lush green (how awful.)

Of course, I can appreciate that ASUS must be getting a little edgy now that there are so many of these mini-laptops flooding into the market. I mean, head over to the Lilliputing Database and there are 44 different models listed in glorious detail.

But surely it would be better to focus on getting one or two models out there to satisfy the market, and getting them right rather than spreading the technology love across a whole host of slightly different products?

Apart from anything else, if it can confuse a technology journalist then where will it leave the average punter looking to buy into the budget titchy computer market?

Gartner has been coming out with some seriously big figures over the last week or so. I mean huge, even by Gartner standards. Take, for example, the little gem revealed in the “Market Trends: Worldwide PC Market Scenarios, 2Q08” report that says some 297 million computers will be shipped worldwide this year. That’s up 12.5 percent on the 264 million that were shipped last year if you believe the Gartner numbers.

The rise being predominantly down to the strength of the mobile market, causing a revision of the 10.9 percent growth that was being touted around by its analysts as recently as March.

“Mobile PC shipments exceeded our expectations in the first quarter of 2008,” said George Shiffler, research director at Gartner. “Mobile PCs continue to have strong momentum and the global economic environment is proving to be less punishing than we expected. Even so, it’s a bit premature to say PC shipments won’t be impacted by a weaker global economy, especially if oil and food prices continue to soar.”

Gartner also says that emerging PC markets will remain a key shipment growth segment, forecast to grow 17.1 percent in 2008 compared with 6.3 percent for mature market shipments. The emerging market mobile PC growth will do even better, 39.4 percent versus 19.1 percent in 2008.

“PC shipments should continue to maintain double-digit growth so long as emerging markets remain strong,” Mr. Shiffler said. “Emerging markets appear less imperiled by the economic slowdowns taking place in the United States and other mature markets than we once thought. However, rising oil and food prices are accelerating inflation in many emerging markets and this could begin to squeeze PC demand in those markets, especially if local policymakers respond by curbing GDP growth to cool inflation. Even so, it is unlikely that emerging market PC growth would slow so much that global PC growth would slip into the mid-single digits.”

But even those numbers pale into insignificance when Gartner rolls out the real big guns in its “Forecast: PC Installed Base, Worldwide, 2004-2012” report which claims that there are no less than a billion PCs installed around the world. Jump ahead to 2014 and Gartner suggest the figure will double to 2 billion.

That’s an awful lot of computers. Trouble is there is an awful lot of churn when it comes to computer hardware. Which means that, again if you put your faith in the Gartner research, some 180 million computers will be replaced in 2008 alone.

However the most troublesome number as far as I am concerned is also one of the smallest: 35 million.

That is the number of computers which will head straight for landfill, no recycling, no environmentally friendly stripping of toxins, just straight into the ground. Call me an old hippie (actually I am an ageing punk, truth be told) but that just seems an awful sad state of affairs…

How many cores do you need in a graphics chip? The answer, according to AMD, would appear to be at least 800. That’s how many it has managed to stuff into the ATI Radeon HD 4850. The world’s first teraFLOPS graphics card.

Unlike many of these cutting edge ‘wow’ announcements that reach my ears, the 4850 is actually also available to buy right now. Trouble is, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I guess I could whizz through my open folders using that flashy Vista control/tab system. I could probably fly around in Second Life at new heights, well maybe not.

Like all things, the need for such speed will arrive eventually. And there are those who will argue that getting aboard the teraFLOPS graphics bus now makes for a sensible ride to cushion the bumps ahead. Me, I’ll stick with my slow old graphics chips from a couple of years ago. You know, the ones that somehow manage to allow me to get through a full day working at the screen without once feeling the need to scream “for goodness sake, I wish my graphics card was more powerful than my computer itself.”

Odd that. But I bet I am not alone.

“The ATI Radeon 4800 series represents a 2X performance jump over the ATI Radeon HD 3800 GPU, the biggest generational increase since the game-changing launch of the Radeon 9700 in 2002,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. “AMD made a strategic decision to focus on GPU designs that maximized our efficiency and allowed us to provide enthusiasts, performance and mainstream users with the most compelling value proposition at every price point. The ATI Radeon 4800 series sets a new industry standard in key metrics such as performance-per-watt, performance-per-mm2 of chip die size, and performance-per-dollar.”

Great, well done lads, that’s really good to know.

“It is remarkable that we are now able to build high performance gaming PCs with over one teraFLOPS of compute power inside,” said Patrick Cooper, director of Product Planning, Alienware. “With that kind of performance and the addition of visual enhancements made possible by DirectX 10.1 and tessellation, gamers can now achieve cinema-quality realism. It’s an incredible step forward in gaming and Alienware is looking forward to introducing the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series in the near future.”

Right, so it’s a game thing. I see. I have an Xbox Elite for that, does HD gaming really, really well. As does my PS3 funnily enough…