Sunday, June 1, 2008

Get fit with Wii Fit

Finally I've got this device (I bought it at Best Buy when it had it in stock, I guess not very long would dissapear again). The package is similar to MacBook Pro package with stylist elegant white color and minimalist (not to much graphics but yet still informative to consumers).

The board is quite large, enough to seat my big feet. It's quite heavy (they put some weight for stability, not because of its electronics). I had to add extension (included in the package) to their pegs because carpet in my house is thick enough to make the balance being inaccurate. There is only a single button with a blue color LED at the back for power on switch. As other Wii remotes, it uses Bluetooth to connect hence require synchronization with Wii Console for the first time before use.

The software (called "Wii Fit") has two parts: "Body Test" and "Training". Body Test is all stuff related to measure our weight, BMI, balance and Wii Age. It's really good. It is able to track our daily weight measures and set target to reach our target BMI.

The training section contains 4 sections: Yoga, Strength, Aerobic, and Balance. For yoga, we are guided by an virtual instructor (with preference is set during setup. We can choose to use male or female instructor). It's very easy to follow, although not that easy to do what it is said (I sometimes fidget or wiggle a little and these all are detected with its very sensitive accelerometer in the Wii surve board).

My favorite game is Hulla-hoop, dance (forgot the exact name) and boxing. Similar to other Wii games, some of the games/activities are locked and can only be unlocked by doing more work-out (collecting more minutes over time).

Atom Processor

It's well known, Intel is one of the greatest chip maker in the world. While other companies might have developed mind-bogling processor or SoC architecture, Intel is still on the top of all in the term of fabrication process technologies.

The recent Intel System-on-Chip (SoC) processor called Atom processor reveals the use all new hafnium-infused 45nm high-k silicon technology while packs an astounding 47 million transistors on a single chip measuring less than 25mm².

The power consumption is astounding. While idling, it sucks up only milliwatts of power. In full throttle, it may go up to 2.5 W, which is still far away from the most power-efficient other processors made by Intel. Although a recent news reveals that VIA also is making a competitive processor, yet it is uncomparable to Atom in term of clock and CMOS size (they still use 65nm process).

The family of this processors is named Z5xx series (previously called Silverthorne). With clock frequencies spand from 800 MHz to 1.83 GHz and 533 MHz FSB, this processor is definitely going to compete heavily with it's own elder brother, Pentium4 Centrino.

Te following features are copied-pasted from Intel website:

  • Fastest performance in a sub 3 watt thermal power envelope based on industry leading benchmarks (EEMBC) and web page rendering performance
  • Greater energy efficiency enabled by incredibly low average power (160-220 mW) and idle power (80-100 mW) and scaling performance from 800MHz to 1.86GHz
  • Power-optimized front side bus of up to 533MHz for faster data transfer on demanding mobile applications†
  • Scalable performance and increased power efficiency with multi-threading support²
  • Improved performance on multimedia and gaming applications with support for Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (SSE3)
  • Improved power management with new Deep Power Down (C6) technology state, non-grid clock distribution, clock gating, CMOS bus mode, and other power saving architectural features
  • 10x lower thermal power level enabled by improved power management technologies delivering high performance to run the real Internet and a broad range of software applications³

I'm eager to see a device using this processor. Perhaps next generation iPhone or googlePhone? Who knows.