The Tablet PC at Five

1
The Tablet PC at Five

• Chuck Thacker
• Distinguished Engineer
• Microsoft Corporation
• July 20, 2005

2
Talk outline

• Tablet history
• The Tablet today
• Tablet futures
• Limits on computers
• What Moore actually said.
• Implications for computers.
• Other limits
• What about software?
• Conclusions

3
Prehistory before 2000

• Lots of earlier attempts mostly failures.
• DEC, Go, Newton, Pen Windows
• Technology wasnt ready
• But vertical markets had limited success.
• Needed better UI, better handwriting recognition
  (without relying on it).
• Key Better digitizer (with hover).

4
An earlier attempt -- 1983

• TRS 80 Model 100
• Reporters and students loved it
• Ran for days on AA cells
• Solved most computing needs for its (low
  aspiration) users.

5
Another attempt -- 1993

• DEC Lectrice
• 5.5 pounds
• 1.5 hour battery
• Wireless network
• 5K LCD panel
• VxWorks OS, X11 server optimized for reading

6
Where we started Internal MS (1999)

• Microsoft proof of concept
• Transmeta TM5800
• 256MB DRAM, 20GB HDD
• 10.4 Slate
• Good points
• Proved viability
• Pushed the Power Efficiency Envelope
• 5 Hours runtime, 200 Hours standby
• Provided a development platform
• to get MS to Tablet PC launch.
• On the Other Hand
• It was so sloooooow

7
Todays Market New Slates
Motion Computing
LE 1600
LS 800
Sahara i213 12.1, 1.6GHz Centrino
NEC
VersaPro, 10.4, 1.1 GHz
Fujitsu 5000 10.4/12.1, Indoor/Outdoor 1.1 GHz ULV
Tatung TTAB 10.4, 1 GHz ULV
8
Todays Market New Convertibles
Averatec C3500 AMD 2200 12.1, DVD
Toshiba
M200, 12.1 SXGA 2 GHz Pentium-M
Electrovaya 1.4 GHz Centrino 12.1,
Biometrics Scribbler SC-2200
Fujitsu
T4000
HP tc4200
IBM ThinkPad x41
ViewSonic
12.1, 1 GHz
9
Todays Market New Hybrids Ruggeds
Ruggedized
Hybrid
Itronix 8.4, 933 MHz ULV
HP Compaq TC1100ULV Celeron or Pentium 10.4, 1.1
GHz
Walkabout Hammerhead 10.4, 4.5 lbs 933 MHz P-III
M
Xplore iX104
10.4 1.1 GHz ULV
10
Concept Design New hinge
11
A Concept Tablet for Kids

• Low power
• (7W)
• 8.4 display
• Tethered pen
• Rugged

12
Other Form Factors
Vulcan FlipStart
OQO Model 1
13
Todays Market Forecasts

• Mobile Market Projections (IDC)

2004 Market share
2006 Market share
2008 Market share
Consumers, Mobile Professionals CY08 Market
2.5M, CAGR (04-08) 40
0
1
3
Ultra-Mobile 0 to 1 spindle, 5-8 screen, lbs.
Mobile Professionals, Information Workers CY08
Market 28.4M, CAGR (04-08) 51.4,
Ultra-Portable 1 or 2 spindle,10-12 screen, 2-4
lbs.
8
17
31
Information Workers, Consumers CY08 Market 51M,
CAGR (04-08) 22
Thin Light 2 spindle, 14-15 screen, 4-7 lbs.
63
63
56
Information Workers, Consumers CY08 Market 8.9M,
CAGR (04-08) -11
30
19
10
Transportable 2 3 spindle, 14-17 screen, 7-12
lbs.
Data source IDC
14
Moores Law (1967)

• Not really a law, but an observation, intended
  to hold for ..the next few years.
• (Nt/A)(t1) (Nt/A)(t0) 1.58t1-t0 (t in years)
• Most exponential curves in the real world turn
  out to be S shaped, but Moores observation has
  held for 35 years.

15
The Woolly Bear Book of VLSI scaling

• Scaling requires lithography and process changes.
• Get more and faster transistors in the same area.
• Power per transistor goes down, power per unit
  area goes up (sometimes way up).
• Power CV2f (plus leakage)

16
How to use Moores Law

• Lower cost Same Nt, reduced A (die shrinks)
  used in video consoles.
• More complex chips Larger Nt, same A.
• Lower the voltage and increase frequency
• Add larger caches to overcome latency
• Add architectural features to increase ILP
• Superchips (SOC) Increase Nt and A.

17
Moores Law for Memory

• Capacity improvement 1,000,000 X since 1970.
• Bandwidth improvement 100 X.
• Latency reduction only 10-20 X.
• Dealing with latency is the largest problem for a
  computer system designer.

18
Moores Law for Processors

• More complex designs
• More than one processor on a chip (homogeneous).
• More than one processor, with specialized
  functions, e.g. graphics
• Graphics performance is improving much faster
  than CPU performance.

19
Thirty years of progress
20
Possible Future Limits

• Physical limits
• Atoms are too large, and light is too slow
• Today, the problem isnt making the transistors
  faster, its the time for signals to propagate on
  the wires (latency again).
• Power. Lots of transistors lots of power.
  Cooling is hard.
• Design complexity
• Designing a billion-transistor chip takes a large
  team, even with good design tools.
• The junk DNA problem.
• Economics
• Factories are very expensive.

21
Scaling Limits

• Voltage scaling is about over. Its very hard to
  operate below 1 volt.
• Frequency increases are also difficult.
• Intel runs out at 3 4 GHz.
• Static leakage is also a big problem.
• So, well see more transistors in the future, but
  they wont be better or faster transistors.

22
Future processors

• Well see chips with many processor cores.
• Each core will be simpler than todays
  superscalar machines. Probably hyperthreaded, to
  hide latency.
• Optimized to increase thread-level parallelism,
  rather than instruction-level parallelism.
• The story about caching is very unclear
• See Intels Platform 2015 white papers.

23
Other Limits

• Not all technologies used in computers follow
  Moores Law
• Disks dont
• Displays dont
• Batteries dont
• The bandwidth vs. latency problem.
• See D. Patterson, Latency Lags Bandwidth, CACM,
  October 2004

24
What about software?

• For scientific computing and servers, the future
  seems fine.
• There are lots of important problems that are
  embarrassingly parallel.
• For client software, the picture is more bleak.

25
Many-core challenges for clients

• Windows doesnt use threads well
• Exceptions Kernel, SQL
• Competitors dont do any better
• Applications dont use threads well
• Outlook is the poster child
• Until recently, inking on Tablet was problematic
• Problems
• Writing multi-threaded code is hard
• Threading model and primitives are overly
  complicated
• Threads dont compose
• Debugging multi-threaded code is harder
• Testing multi-threaded code is a crapshoot
• Tool support isnt very good

26
Possible paths forward

• Better language support for parallelism
• C?, Atomic transactions
• Better tools
• Analyze liveness and safety statically
• Model checking
• Dynamic race detection
• Better libraries
• Better education

27
Conclusions

• Popularity of portable devices, including Tablet
  PC, is growing
• Much of the innovation in the industry is in this
  area.
• Energy-efficiency can open up new markets.
• Silicon trends favor the high end
• There are lots of challenges and opportunities
  for new software.