PC sales grew just 1.9 percent during the first quarter of 2012, according to a new report from Gartner.

The research giant had predicted sales would decline 1.2 percent during the quarter. It said sales in Europe and the Middle East were better than expected, offsetting slowdowns in India and China.

"While the PC industry has high expectations for strong growth in the emerging markets, the slowdown of these countries in this quarter provides a cautionary notice to vendors that the future growth for the PC industry cannot heavily depend on the emerging markets even though PC penetration in these regions is low," Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, said in the release.

Fellow research giant IDC followed with its quarterly report, pegging PC sales at 2.3 percent, up from its forecast of a 0.9 percent decline.

IDC said hard-drive shortages from last year's flooding in Thailand continue but the large PC makers had better access, managed inventories and absorbed price increases. As a result the big vendors kept PC shipments moving while smaller PC makers saw the expected declines.

PC makers should see bigger gains later this year. PC sales historically rebound after slow periods, driven by new technologies and need to replace aging systems, IDC's Loren Loverde said in the release.

"As a result, we expect PC shipments to pick up significantly by the fourth quarter and beyond as HDD supply and pricing are normalized, Windows 8 is launched, and replacements pick up," he said.

The news foreshadows upcoming earnings reports from Microsoft -- next Thursday -- and Intel on Tuesday.

There were a few bright spots in Gartner's report.

Hewlett-Packard emerged from its internal funk and grew nearly twice as fast as the overall market and held its global lead on the PC business. Its sales grew 3.5 percent, Gartner said.

Lenovo posted a 28 percent gain, driven by sales in Europe and the Middle East and sales of business systems, according to Gartner.

Dell's sales fell along with overall sales of lower-end consumer systems as consumers were lured by Web tablets and other gadgets in the same price range.

IDC estimated HP's global growth was 3.2 percent and Lenovo's were 43.7 percent during the quarter.

In the U.S., HP sales were up 6.6 percent, Dell's were down 3.6 percent and Apple's were up 3.8 percent, according to Gartner. IDC's numbers for HP and Dell were the same, but it said Apple's PC sales were up 5.1 percent.

IDC said sales in the U.S. were slow for several reasons. Businesses are "still cautious" and consumers are evaluating different prodocts and may be waiting for Windows 8 to arrive, perhaps in the fourth quarter.

That fourth quarter - the holiday season - "will likely determine if there is any growth at all in the U.S. market in 2012," Loverde said.

In other words, it's up to Microsoft and its PC partners to deliver with the Windows 8 wave.

A few charts from Gartner's report:

I thought the prospect of quad-core tablet computers was exciting.

Then I saw Intel's latest -- a 1 teraflop chip, with more than 50 cores, that Intel unveiled today, running it on a test machine at the SC11 supercomputing conference in Seattle.

That means my kids may take a teraflop laptop to college -- if their grades don't suffer too much having access to 50-core video game consoles.

It wasn't that long ago that Intel was boasting about the first supercomputer with sustained 1 teraflop performance. That was in 1997, on a system with 9,298 Pentium II chips that filled 72 computing cabinets.

Now Intel has squeezed that much performance onto a matchbook-sized chip, dubbed "Knights Corner," based on its new "Many Integrated Core" architecture, or MIC. (Earlier I referred to it as "Knights Ferry," which is its development kit.)

It was designed largely in the Portland area and has just started manufacturing.

"In 15 years that's what we've been able to do. That is stupendous. You're witnessing the 1 teraflop barrier busting," Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of Intel's technical computing group, said at an unveiling ceremony. (He holds up the chip here)

A single teraflop is capable of a trillion floating point operations per second.

On hand for the event -- in the cellar of the Ruth's Chris Steak House in Seattle -- were the directors of the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge Laboratory and the Application Acceleration Center of Excellence.

Also speaking was the chief science officer of the GENCI supercomputing organization in France, which has used its Intel-based system for molecular simulations of Alzheimer's, looking at issues such as plaque formation that's a hallmark of the disease.

"The hardware is hardly exciting. ... The exciting part is doing the science," said Jeff Nichols, acting director of the computational center at Oak Ridge.

The hardware was pretty cool, though.

George Chrysos, the chief architect of Knights Corner, came up from the Portland area with a test system running the new chip, which was connected to a speed meter on a laptop to show that it was running around 1 teraflop.

Intel had the test system set up behind closed doors -- on a coffee table in a hotel suite at the Grand Hyatt, and wouldn't allow reporters to take pictures of the setup.

Nor would the company specify how many cores the chip has -- just more than 50 -- or its power requirement.

If you're building a new system and want to future-proof it, the Knights Corner chip uses a double PCI Express slot. Chrysos said the systems are also likely to run alongside a few Xeon processors.

This means that Intel could be producing teraflop chips for personal computers within a few years, although there's lots of work to be done on the software side before you'd want one.

Another question is whether you'd want a processor that powerful on a laptop, for instance, where you may prefer to have a system optimized for longer battery life, Hazra said.

More important, Knights Corner chips may help engineers build the next generation of supercomputing systems, which Intel and its partners hope to delivery by 2018.

Power efficiency was a highlight of another big announcement this week at SC11. On Monday night, IBM announced its "next generation supercomputing project," the Blue Gene/Q system that's heading to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory next year.

Dubbed Sequoia, the system should run at 20 petaflops peak performance. IBM expects it to be the world's most power-efficient computer, processing 2 gigaflops per watt.

The first 96 racks of the system could be delivered in December. The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration uses the systems to work on nuclear weapons, energy reseach and climate change, among other things.

Sequoia complements another Blue Gene/Q system, a 10-petaflop setup called "Mira," which was previously announced by Argonne National Laboratory.

Here's a video interview with Hazra that was posted by EE Times:

A few images from the conference, which runs through Friday at the Washington State Convention & Trade Center, starting with perusal of Intel boards:

Take home a Cray today!

IBM was sporting Blue Genes, and it wasn't even casual Friday:

A 94 teraflop rack:

The big two PC research firms both said first quarter PC sales were awful. Gartner and IDC had predicted it would be a slow quarter and it turned out to be worse.

Events in Japan and the Middle East were factors, as were the economic situation and Apple's iPad. But mostly people are doing fine with the PCs they have and aren't in a rush to upgrade, apparently.

"While it's tempting to blame the decline completely on the growth of media tablets, we believe other factors, including extended PC lifetimes and the lack of compelling new PC experiences, played equally significant roles,'' Bob O'Donnell, IDC vice president, said in the release.

IDC said global PC sales fell 3.2 percent compared with the first quarter of 2011, much worse than the 1.5 percent growth the firm had predicted. In the U.S., shipments fell 10 percent from the high demand seen in recent years.

Gartner said global sales fell 1.1 percent, below the 3 percent growth it had predicted. It blamed the decline on weak demand for consumer PCs.

"Low prices for consumer PCs, which had long stimulated growth, no longer attracted buyers. Instead, consumers turned their attention to media tablets and other consumer electronics," Mikako Kitagawa, Gartner principal analyst, said in its release. "With the launch of the iPad 2 in February, more consumers either switched to buying an alternative device, or simply held back from buying PCs."

Corporate spending on replacement PCs kept the market from "one of the worst declines in recent history," Gartner said. It expects the corporate replacement sales to continue into late 2011 or the start of 2012.

IDC said spiking fuel and commodity prices were also a factor -- you may hold off on that new PC when a tank of gas costs $75 -- and sales in China cooled after big growth in 2010.

Both firms said HP held its position as the world's biggest PC company. IDC puts Dell in second place, followed by Acer, Lenovo and Toshiba. Gartner puts Acer in second place, followed by Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba.

In the U.S. market, Lenovo is bumped from the top five by Apple, which is fourth or fifth place with 8.5 percent to 9.3 percent market share depending on which research firm you ask.

Here's Gartners rank of the top global PC makers:

President Obama's Friday visit to Intel's research factory in Hillsboro, Ore., will be streamed live starting around 11:30 a.m., The Oregonian reported today.

Obama's meeting with Intel Chief Excecutive Paul Otellini at the D1D research factory and they'll talk up Intel's efforts to support science, technology and math education.

Intel's the prime example of the investment in innovation that Obama called for in his state of the union address.

The company announced last October that it's spending up to $8 billion on a new chip factory in Oregon and upgrades to other plants as it moves to 22 nanometer chips. It said the expansion will create 1,000 new, ongoing jobs in Oregon where it's already the largest private employer.

In a speech at the University of Washington last night, computer pioneer Carver Mead shared all sorts of anecdotes about early days in the microelectronics industry that led to the PC revolution and today's pocket computers.

Mead - who coined the term Moore's Law - told of having one of his regular dinners with his friend Gordon Moore in 1967 when Moore told him about plans to start Intel.

Mead talked about how he later observed the slow, manual lithography techniques Intel first used to create semiconductors in the 1960s. He then learned a better approach from aerospace companies that were using a computerized approach to produce circuit boards.

Later Mead started a foundry service for researchers to share the cost of manufacturing prototype semiconductors, a program that inspired the UW's new "OpSIS" silicon photonics foundry service. The service will be used by researchers and companies developing chips with lasers that transmit digital signals with light at phenomenal speeds.

Mead spoke at a kickoff event for the OpSIS foundry, which is led by Assistant Professor Michael Hochberg. Hochberg studied at Caltech, where Mead is Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science.

Intel's contributing $250,000 to start OpSIS. Also supporting the effort are the Air Force and BAE Systems, which will produce chips for OpSIS at its semiconductor fabrication facility in Manassas, Va.

Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said during the event that OpSIS is "going to train a generation - or several generations - of designers and it's going to catalyze an entire industry to embrace photonics."

Hochberg said OpSIS will produce its first run of chips this summer and should make three or four runs a year going forward.

Researchers can pay for a slice of the production wafer, on which a number of different experimental chips are produced. Instead paying perhaps millions for a full batch of chips, they'll pay $20,000 to $30,000 to have their test chip produced alongside others.

"The idea is to make it accessible for the entire community to make these complex circuits," he said.

Here's a video of Mead's speech, provided by a UW spokeswoman. A professionally produced version will be broadcast later on the UW cable TV channel. In the meantime this one works pretty well as a podcast:

Video streaming by Ustream

Drawing on the expertise of new faculty members and industry support, the University of Washington is starting a new foundry service for researchers developing silicon photonic chipsets.

The idea behind OpSIS - "optoelectronic systems integration in silicon" - is to help engineers and researchers working on different projects to share the cost of fabricating chip-scale systems.

It's modeled on a prototyping service called MOSIS that began operating at the University of Southern California in 1981 and has been widely used by students, companies and government labs working with microprocessors.

Leading the venture is nanotechnology researcher Michael Hochberg, assistant professor of electrical engineering and director of the UW's Institute for Photonic Integration.

Here's how the photonics lab describes its work:

We're interested in using the silicon photonics platform both to build interesting and important optical devices, and to explore new physical phenomena. Our projects span the space between very applied work on devices like ultra-low voltage electrooptic modulators, to interest in chip-scale nonlinear and quantum optics for novel light sources and all-optical logic circuits.

A kickoff event for OpSIS is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. Tuesday at the UW. In addition to Hochberg and engineering dean, Matt O'Donnell, speakers include semiconductor pioneer Carver Mead and Justin Rattner, Intel chief technology officer.

More details are available at the OpSIS Web site.

Here is a video we produced from the annual science fair held at Intel Labs Seattle research center near the University of Washington.

Talk about an economic stimulus package. Intel today announced plans to spend $6 billion to $8 billion to expand its U.S. manufacturing, including Oregon's first new chip factory since 2003.

The company's building a new research and development facility in Hillsboro and upgrading others to start manufacturing 22-nanometer chips next year, according to Mike Rogoway's report in The Oregonian.

Intel's expansion in Oregon and Chandler, Ariz., will create at least 800 new manufacturing jobs, support 6,000 others and provide a boost to construction employment. It's already Oregon's largest private employer with 15,000 employees in the state.

Time to get going on a new bridge over the Columbia.

The U.S. Department of Justice this afternoon sued six high-profile tech companies for making anticompetitive moves to protect employees from poaching.

Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Pixar and Intuit made agreements "that restrained competition between them for highly skilled employees," the department said in a news release.

They agreed not to cold-call each other's employees, which "distorted the competitive process," Molly Boast, deputy attorney general in the antitrust division said.

Starting as early as 2005, the companies agreed to create "do not call lists" of each other's employees and lists of companies that were "off limits" for recruiting.

An example listed in the release:

Beginning no later than September 2007, Google and Intel executives agreed not to cold call each other's employees. In its hiring policies and protocol manual, Google listed Intel among the companies that have special agreements with Google and are part of the "Do Not Cold Call" list. Similarly, Intel instructed its human resources staff about the existence of the agreement.

The companies were named in a civil antitrust complaint filed today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Simultaneously, a proposed five-year settlement was filed that would end the suit.

From the release:

Although the complaint alleges only that the companies agreed to ban cold calling, the proposed settlement more broadly prohibits the companies from entering, maintaining or enforcing any agreement that in any way prevents any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees. The companies will also implement compliance measures tailored to these practices.

The suit came out of a larger, ongoing investigation into high-tech firms' employment practices.

Google acknowledged the settlement with a blog post, in which Amy Lambert, associate general counsel, still defended the company's behavior. An excerpt:

In order to maintain a good working relationship with these companies, in 2005 we decided not to "cold call" employees at a few of our partner companies. Our policy only impacted cold calling, and we continued to recruit from these companies through LinkedIn, job fairs, employee referrals, or when candidates approached Google directly. In fact, we hired hundreds of employees from the companies involved during this time period.

The TV platform that Google is developing with Sony, Intel and Logitech will debut in the U.S. this autumn, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told reporters at a Berlin trade fair.

Schmidt also said Google will be announcing deals with computers makers to use the company's Chrome operating system on tablet computers, according to a Reuters report.

A number of tablets have already appeared with Google's Android operating system, which was designed primarily for phones, but the Chrome OS has been mostly vaporware so far.

It's a little confusing because Chrome is also the name of Google's browser.

Samsung is mulling whether to add Google software in its TVs, according to a Bloomberg report from Seoul. Samsung is already selling TV sets with similar capabilities, including an application platform for developers.

Google is having a press event Wednesday in San Francisco but it sounds like an update to Google search technology and not the Chrome tablet announcement Schmidt previewed.

The Reuters report said Schmidt declined to comment on the music service Google's expected to announce soon. He did say he was "angry" that Google Street View camera vehicles collected private data from WiFi networks, prompting action by German regulators.

"I was very angry about that," Reuters quoted Schmidt as saying.

A few people have asked me about Dell's Streak, the minitablet/maxiphone that surfaced in Seattle in May.

You could say it's the latest version of the Origami ultramobile PC that Microsoft and Intel began developing about five years ago, but it runs Android software on Qualcomm hardware.

The company Tuesday finally announced that the Streak will be available to the general public on Friday for $549, or $300 with a two-year AT&T contract. It's a few weeks late and $50 more than Dell said in June.

Like most big phones today, it's based on a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm with 3G, Wi-Fi (b, g and n) and Bluetooth radios. It works with HSDPA networks (such as T-Mobile's) that provide up to 7.2 Mbps downloads. It has a 5 megapixel still and video camera with a dual LED flash, plus a front facing VGA camera.

Here's a Dell video showing it in action:

One of the fathers of the PC industry, Microsoft researcher Chuck Thacker, won the industry's highest honor, the A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.

Thacker, 67, was among the founding members of the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he designed the Alto system that gave shape to the personal computer in the early 1970s.

"Charles Thacker's contributions have earned him a reputation as one of the most distinguished computer systems engineers in the history of the field," ACM President Professor Dame Wendy Hall said in the announcement. "His enduring achievements--from his initial innovations on the PC to his leadership in hardware development of the multiprocessor workstation to his role in developing the tablet PC--have profoundly affected the course of modern computing."

He's the second person to receive $250,000 award for his contributions designing and building computing machinery; it usually goes to computer scientists for conceptual or theoretical work, a writeup at Microsoft's press site noted.

"I was extremely surprised," Thacker said in the release. "I never expected to win this one. There are several other nice awards that I've won that I thought were within the realm of possibility, but this one I never even thought was possible."

Thacker was nominated by Butler Lampson, another computing pioneer now working at Microsoft Research. The company provided an excerpt of his nomination letter:

"Chuck is surely one of the most distinguished computer-systems engineers in the history of the field. Chuck is an engineer's engineer. His skills span the full range, from analog-circuit and power-supply design through logic design, processor and network architecture, system software, languages, and applications as varied as CAD and electronic books, all the way to user-interface design."

The award was sponsored by Google and Intel. Intel Labs vice president, Andrew Chien, said in the release that "Charles Thacker's design of the Alto computer embodied the key elements of today's personal computers, and is at the root one of the world's most innovative industries that empowers individuals around the world. We applaud Chuck's clarity of insight, focus on simplicity, and his incredible track record of designing landmark systems that have accelerated the progress of both research and industry for decades."

Google research vice president, Alfred Spector, praised Thacker "for his far-reaching role in the birth of one of the most important technologies in the 20th century."

(Today's column looks at the online broadcast of the Vancouver Olympics and how it may preview cable TV business practices coming to the Web. This version also includes some images from my testing.)

You'd think the Vancouver Olympics would be a great time to shift from viewing the games on TV to viewing them online.

NBC is delaying broadcasts of major events until prime time, and Canadian TV coverage is largely unavailable here this year.

Networks instead are delivering live event coverage online, plus on-demand replays, in high-definition video using a special Web player built by Microsoft.

This comes as all sorts of new gadgets are making it easier to display Web video on a TV.

Some 52 million people watched 600 million minutes of the Beijing Olympics online in 2008, and Vancouver's Web video will be even better, streaming in 720p high-def with better controls to pause, fast-forward and rewind.

It sounds terrific, and some may find it's the best way to watch the Games.

But don't expect an online utopia, free from the shackles that networks, cable companies and the Olympics organizers put on event coverage.

Although the technology for streaming video is getting better, it's also enabling content owners to apply more restrictions and controls to online video.

In some ways, online broadcasts of the Vancouver Olympics preview what's coming from media companies, as they explore ways to charge for online content that used to be free.

This will be apparent when you try to watch a Vancouver event live online at NBCOlympics.com, the Games' official, exclusive broadcaster in the U.S.

For the first time, viewers will have to prove that they subscribe to premium-cable service to access "live and full-event replay video."

During previous Olympic Games, you only had to provide a Zip code to identify yourself as a cable customer.

This time, you've got to register for access through your cable or satellite company, which checks to see that you have a cable package that includes MSNBC and CNBC.

People without cable or those who subscribe only to limited basic cable can watch video highlights, commentary and feature stories at the site, but not live events or full replays. The delivery system has progressed from a ski jump to a bobsled course.

It's basically the cable model extending to the Web, where improved authentication systems enable broadcasters to limit the really good stuff to paying subscribers. If this is what NBC does now, I can't wait to see what it's like after Comcast finishes acquiring the network.

Maybe I'm being crotchety.

The vast majority of people still prefer to watch the Games on TV, and most online viewers watch only the highlights that are available to everyone, according to Perkins Miller, digital-media senior vice president at NBC Sports and Olympics.

NBC's research after the Beijing Olympics found that 93 to 95 percent of people would rather watch the Games on a TV than a PC.

"Given a choice that's what they want ... they've got the big screen, they've got the couch, they've got the fridge," Miller said.

Miller believes the online broadcast is complementary - something people do when they can't get to the TV - as opposed to competing with regular TV broadcasts.

But he's not stuck waiting until prime time to see events happening earlier in the day in Vancouver. For those who can't wait, or who want to see more than NBC chooses to broadcast, online video becomes must-see TV.

The exclusive Olympics broadcaster in Canada, CTV, appears to be a bit less strict about checking whether you have premium cable. But its live video and full-event replays are restricted to people whose computers have Canadian Internet protocol addresses.

If you're willing to fudge during the sign-in process and spoof your IP address, you may be able to connect through a proxy server in Canada, but you'll have to find one that's fast enough to handle the video.

The easiest part may be connecting your TV to the Web. Most new PCs have powerful enough graphics and outputs for connecting directly to a TV, and you can buy a tiny home-theater PC for under $400 nowadays.

One option is the new "WiDi" wireless display technology that Intel, Netgear and Best Buy announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

In preparation for the Olympics, I've been trying an $899 bundle from Best Buy that includes a Toshiba laptop with built-in WiDi and a hand-sized Netgear "Push2TV," which fits behind the TV.

The wireless system is a breeze and a nice feature to have on a new PC. After connecting the receiver with an HDMI cable, it connects by pushing a button on the laptop. Whatever is on the laptop screen then appears on the TV, with audio.

Watching videos streamed from NBCOlympics.com worked pretty well over my slow DSL broadband. There wasn't buffering but there were some jagged edges during fast action.

But the Olympics' "full-screen" playback isn't quite as promised.

I was hoping for a true full-screen display, as you would get from YouTube and Hulu.com. Olympics videos are shown inside a PC-like media player frame, with a banner ad permanently appearing on the upper right corner of the screen.

Here's a screen shot of what appeared on my TV when using the WiDi setup:

NBC is trying to strike a balance between entertaining users and making sure companies paying for the coverage get exposure, Miller said. He's hoping the quality of video is so good the "frame won't be a distraction."

You'll get a similar frame if you find a way into CTV's Olympics video stream.

I'm stubborn about not paying for premium cable so maybe I'll just keep the WiDi pointed at Hulu.com until it starts charging, and hope for the best from the London Games in 2012.

LAS VEGAS -- If you thought news was getting too touchy feely, wait until you see this awesome CES display in Intel's booth.

It's an enormous touchscreen that displays news feeds from sources such as Google News and Flickr, which you can call up by walking up to the display and touching or dragging the shapes that appear.

It started out as an attempt to show off the power of Intel's i7 processors, but the demo built by engineer Elie Jamaa turned into a big hit in Intel's booth.

An i7 PC powers the 7.5-foot by 7.5-foot "double HD" touch display with 1920 by 1920 resolution.

A majority of the Federal Trade Commission is in favor of filing an antitrust complaint againt Intel, according to a Reuters scoop:

Three of the four commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission, which opened a formal inquiry in June 2008, are in favor of filing a complaint against Intel, the sources said.

"They're close," one source said. "They said it could be a matter of weeks or a matter of months when the vote happens."

In case you missed Intel's upbeat earnings report Tuesday, research firm IDC today is saying global PC sales rebounded in the third quarter, posting a 2 percent gain.

PC sales met or beat sales expectations in every region but Japan during the quarter. Maybe the Japanese are holding out for Windows 7.

Bob O'Donnell, IDC vice president, said in the release that the growth "underscores the value that both consumer and corporate buyers place on PCs. With the forthcoming launch of Windows 7 and expected commercial refresh beginning in 2010, the prospects for future PC market growth are very solid."

The firm also said HP now holds the largest share of the U.S. market - 25.5 percent - after a 3 percent sales gain in the quarter. Dell's share fell to 25 percent, after a 13 percent decline.

Acer's netbook sales helped the company grow sales 48.3 percent in the quarter, making it the third biggest PC seller in the U.S., ahead of Apple and Toshiba.

Apple sales grew 11.8 percent during the back-to-school quarter, giving it a 9.4 percent share in the U.S. Toshiba sales grew 37.4 percent, giving it an 8.1 percent share.

Globally, the top PC sellers in the quarter were HP, Acer, Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba.

Researchers from Intel's Seattle lab affiliated with the University of Washington are showing up in more of the company's lighthearted ads showcasing scientific advancements.

But the lab's biggest celebrity has to be Marvin, a one-armed robot built on a Segway chassis that scoots around, does tricks and steals the show during public events. Marvin even cut the opening ribbon at the CeBit electronics show in Germany this summer, alongside Intel Chairman Craig Barrett, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Marvin was at it again today during the lab's annual open house, where he showed off his latest trick: finding an available electrical outlet and plugging in his own power cable.

The robot senses the energy given off by an outlet, then homes in for the plug. It has to be accurate to within 2.5 millimeters to work, according to researcher Brian Mayton. So far Marvin's about 93 percent accurate, and celebrates a connection with chirps, whirs and other electricity sounds.

It's more than a parlor trick, though. Mayton explained that domestic robots of the future will need to be able to recharge themselves, especially robots expected to monitor and assist people with minimal maintenance and human control.

Other projects displayed today included the latest version of a wireless power experiment that transmits both sound and electricity to truly wireless speakers, building on the lab's research into various methods of wireless energy transmission. Researcher Emily Cooper showed how the system can now adjust itself to restore a signal.

A related project sending small amounts of electricity wirelessly to sensor units is now being used in a series of devices designed to detect neutrinos underwater in the Mediterranean Sea.

Other projects displayed includd "Bonfire," a system for projecting a secondary laptop interface onto an adjacent tabletop, giving it capabilities similar to Microsoft's more costly Surface computers.

Built with under $300 worth of Webcams, projectors and other hardware, the gadget displayed by UW Ph.D. student Shaun Kane displayed widgets for applications such as Facebook and a stock tracker that could be launched by tapping the icon beamed onto the tabletop.

Elsewhere in the lab, scientists were showing off new materials they are experimenting with to build solar power cells, systems for monitoring physical activity and security applications that monitor and disclose "data leaks" when using Wi-Fi.

IDC's latest PC market report said second quarter sales fell less than expected -- down 3.1 percent vs. the 6.3 percent it had predicted.

It's a great followup to Intel's blowout earnings that goosed Wall Street today, and a setup for Microsoft's earnings report next week.

IDC said "portables," including netbooks, helped, as did consumer demand for new computers in the U.S.

The U.S. PC market appears to be stabilizing or improving -- "a hint of recovery" that's tempered by the growth in lower-end systems that will drag down the market's overall value, Bob O'Donnell, IDC vice president, said in the release.

"The market continues to rely on consumer purchases, with a substantial weakness in the commercial space. We expect to see more of the same as we enter the busy shopping season of the second half of the year. In the longer term, an expected recovery in the commercial segment should boost growth in 2011."

Globally, Hewlett-Packard is still the largest PC maker with a 20 percent share. It's followed by Dell, Acer, Lenovo and Toshiba.

In the U.S., Dell's sales fell 19 percent but its 26.3 percent market share was just ahead of HP's 26 percent.

HP sales rose 2.3 percent, while third-place Acer's sales leapt 51 percent and fourth-place Toshiba saw a 34 percent jump.

Apple's sales fell 12 percent and its U.S. market share fell to 7.6 percent, from 8.5 percent.

Finally, Intel is clarifying the jumble of brands used for its PC processors. Sort of.

During the Windows Vista era, Intel's brands became pretty confusing, forcing consumers to choose between "dual core" and "Core 2" processors, for instance.

Changes announced today will take effect in coming months and could make it easier by the time Windows 7 launches in October.

The biggest change is coming to the "Core" brand, which is going to come in three flavors: Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7. Core i3 will signify entry-level systems, i5 to mid-range and i7 to high-end. (The current vPro tag used on business-oriented systems will still be added to i5 and i7 systems).

Intel's Atom processor -- the one designed for mobile devices and now used in all sorts of budget netbooks and some desktops -- will keep the Atom name.

Also sticking around for a while is the last generation of Intel CPU names -- Celeron and Pentium. They'll be used on lowest-end systems, with Celeron designating the base models, Pentium a step up and Core (in its various flavors) "representing the best we have to offer," Intel's Bill Calder said in the blog.

Centrino -- an Intel term referring to a set of components, including a CPU and wireless module -- is being dropped from the PC lineup next year. But it will be used on WiMax products starting in 2010.

To simplfiy, here's Intel's new PC brand lineup, in order of good to best. (Insert Atom where you like -- it's relatively wimpy, but very power efficient ...):

Celeron
Pentium
Core i3
Core i5
Core i7

(Microsoft has said Windows 7 runs even on Atom processors, but my guess is that the message this fall will be that you'll want a Core system to get the best experience.)

Here's a video of Intel researcher Joshua Smith "harvesting" electricity from digital TV broadcasts, as described in Monday's column.

He's showing the setup - a standard TV antenna and kitchen thermometer - on the deck at Intel's lab near the University of Washington, where we took a photo for the paper.

Lots of additional information is here at Smith's Web site.

(A reader also wrote to say I should have given a nod to Nikola Tesla ....)