Back to the hard-core tech stuff ...

Here are three pointers that are (hopefully) as interesting to you as they were to me:

1. Over at Real World Technologies, David Kanter has posted this great writeup of Intel's latest mobile-oriented microprocessor platform: Medfield, Intel's x86 Phone Chip

   Medfield is a credible SoC for smartphones and is good enough to begin the process of building vendor and carrier relationships for Intel. This is particularly true, given Intel’s attractive roadmap. In 2013, Intel will ship a 22nm FinFET SoC with the new, power-optimized Silvermont CPU and the recently announced PowerVR Series 6 graphics. The rest of the world will ramp 20/22nm in 2014 at the earliest, a gap of 6-12 months. Judging by Intel’s plans for 14nm SoCs based on the Airmont CPU core in 2014, this process technology advantage is only likely to grow over time. Whether that advantage will yield a significant smart phone market share for Intel is uncertain, but Medfield clearly demonstrates that it is possible.

   Even if Intel doesn't succeed, their continued presence in the marketplace and competition for market share will spur the big players (Qualcomm, TI, ARM, etc.) to improve their own systems, not just rest on their laurels.

2. The HTTP Working Group, which is (I think) a joint effort of the W3C and the IETF, is considering a new effort to try to define a HTTP 2.0 specification.

   Why here? This mailing list is the best approximation of the HTTP community; it has participation (or at least presence) from most implementations, including browsers, servers, intermediaries, CDNs, libraries, tools, etc. I firmly believe that as HTTP evolves, it needs to accommodate the entire community, not just the selected needs of a subset, so rather than creating a new WG or having a private collaboration, it should happen here.

   This won't be easy, but it's great to see them trying. I suspect that these topics are some of what they'll be talking about.

3. And if you don't have enough to read yet, here's a very nice, compact, and well-rounded Distributed Systems Reader. As it turns out, I was already familiar with all but two of these papers, but hey! Two new papers on the foundations of Distributed Systems; what's not to like!