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Future of user/subscriber go-everywhere & do-everything (GoDo for short) computing would include communications (GSM, WiFi 802.11x, Bluetooth, and IR/RF capabilities included). Still ... I would select Transmeta code-morphing processors as the technology edge for that future not Intel, Motorola, or TI ... though TI does now have a chip set that comes closer to the above stated goal for digital transmission systems. Transmeta code-morphing processors provide the ability to redefine operational spectrum requirements as you travel locally and globally with (I suspect, don't know?) less complex circuits/chip sets. The technology is known as Software Definable Radios (SDR). The future looks good to me ....

Related Links:

SDR.org - http://www.sdrforum.org/sdr_primer.html

TI DR Chip Set - http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020109S0063

Transmeta - http://www.transmeta.com

Airship - http://wireless.iop.org/articles/feature/1/1/3/1

http://www.airship.com/prod/uses_telecoms_frames.h tm

OldHawk777

Reality is a self-induced hallucination.

EETimes has a teardown of the hiptop... Engineers will get a chuckle out of finding the part that won't die!! There's also a block diagram.

(hint: it's a national part on the same side as the processor)

China's 64bit Homegrown CPU
Posted by
michael
in The Mysterious Future!

from the enter-the-dragon dept.
An anonymous reader writes: "EE Times is reporting on China's BLX IC Design Corp nearing the completion of their first 64-bit CPU. Based on the MIPS instruction set the 500-MHz Godson-2 microprocessor is aimed toward distributed grid computing. To avoid MIPS patent issues, several instructions (unaligned loads and storeds in the 32 bit version) have not been implemented but with the support of over 60 software providers such as Red Flag Linux and the ability to tweak compilers to not use these instructions this should not be a problem. The Godson-1 processor (also patent free) was announced last year and was aimed at the embedded market." The Godson processor line has generally been called Dragon by the Western press.

China's 64bit Homegrown CPU
Posted by
michael
in The Mysterious Future!

from the enter-the-dragon dept.
An anonymous reader writes: "EE Times is reporting on China's BLX IC Design Corp nearing the completion of their first 64-bit CPU. Based on the MIPS instruction set the 500-MHz Godson-2 microprocessor is aimed toward distributed grid computing. To avoid MIPS patent issues, several instructions (unaligned loads and storeds in the 32 bit version) have not been implemented but with the support of over 60 software providers such as Red Flag Linux and the ability to tweak compilers to not use these instructions this should not be a problem. The Godson-1 processor (also patent free) was announced last year and was aimed at the embedded market." The Godson processor line has generally been called Dragon by the Western press.

China's 64bit Homegrown CPU
Posted by
michael
in The Mysterious Future!

from the enter-the-dragon dept.
An anonymous reader writes: "EE Times is reporting on China's BLX IC Design Corp nearing the completion of their first 64-bit CPU. Based on the MIPS instruction set the 500-MHz Godson-2 microprocessor is aimed toward distributed grid computing. To avoid MIPS patent issues, several instructions (unaligned loads and storeds in the 32 bit version) have not been implemented but with the support of over 60 software providers such as Red Flag Linux and the ability to tweak compilers to not use these instructions this should not be a problem. The Godson-1 processor (also patent free) was announced last year and was aimed at the embedded market." The Godson processor line has generally been called Dragon by the Western press.

Technology is useless in the hands of those that do not use it. The printing press would have been rather silly if it only ever produced letterhead.

In this article, EE Times looks at some of the same issues.

However, some of the same misinformation prevails:

And in an environment of mixed .11b and .11g basestations, Krewell said, clients will automatically default to the lower 11-Mbit/s bandwidth of .11b.

Not true on two counts.

First, the only reason that a/b access points don't do this is because they're basically two different access points in one box! If a b/g access point had essentially two access points - one b, and one g - within itself, it wouldn't need to scale back either! Which brings me to...

Second, g clients don't scale back to 11 when b clients are present. They will get slower, but only because of the way the packets are interspersed. When 802.11b is present on an interface where g is present, everything, including b clients, will slow a little bit; by about a third. But g clients will not slow to 11.

Also, Apple's equipment has the ability to force b or g only, if needed in a particular installation.

Ultimately, one Apple design manager said, chip sets will support all three WLAN standards, eliminating any conflicts. Indeed, Intel intends to initially ship .11b chips for its Banias notebook platform, following that up with .11a/b combo chips within three months, and probably add support for .11g by the end of the year, Krewell said.

Looks to my like it'll be a wash in the end, and I'd rather have g, albeit a draft g, right now (which, if there are any changes, will most certainly be updated to the final g via a firmware update). I can still connect to all b access points, and have increased speed when connected to my g access point (connected via 100mbit ethernet) today.

Note: this was posted wirelessly over draft 802.11g-Draft6.

I found a bit more details here and here. But I guess anybody can google.

Anger over broadband limits

Why's my cell phone melting?

NCTA Weighs In on IP Telephony

FBI Seeks Hacker of eBay Users' Info

Labels battle to hold onto DMCA win

Western Digital to Launch 10,000rpm Desktop HDD 11th Feb

On the trail of a stolen Tablet PC

Game on for cable

Mail-order drug suppliers under gun

Two panels to monitor Pentagon's spy project

In Europe, Microsoft faces tough sell

Intel to discuss Manitoba and GPS efforts at IDF

More unrest seen among tech workers

oh, i'd say right around here

Yeah, they seem sufficiently rad hardened on earth because they are being shielded from most of the cosmic and sun's radiation by the earth's atmosphere and magnetic field. In space, though, it's another matter. The Pentium 4 I'm typing this on would be unreliable at best, and wouldn't work at all at worst

Your ignoring the obvious. If this is such a big problem, then NASA could use some of the billions that they use on the shuttle to overcome it. The fact is that it is no longer a problem

Quoting the article;

"NASA administrator Daniel Goldin said the Pentium will help NASA "plumb the depths of the oceans of [Jupiter moon] Europa, take samples from Mars and explore the outer limits of our own solar system."

Sounds to me that pratical unmanned missions are possible right now. NASA spends all of its money on the shuttle and ISS though.

As for it costing trillions of dollars? I don't think so. But, maybe this time we should just ask NASA, "Ok, how much realistically (i.e. taking into account unforseen problems, test failures, redesigns, etc.) will it cost?" instead of, "Ok, you've got this much to spend. Can you do it?" And then decide if it's too expensive

In the middle of the seventies, NASA was asked how much it would cost to go to mars. There response? $500 billion dollars Knowing that NASA has a history of underestimating everything by a factor of least three (look at the price of all the International Space Station overruns)-- that's 1.5 trillion, and that's 1973 dollars. Today it would cost much more. so yes, it would be trillions of dollars

That wasn't the point of that statement. What I meant was seeing what the earth looks like from space or the moon IN PERSON. I would imagine that no picture in existence could do it justice.

It's only significant for the single astronaut standing there. So we should spend billions of dollars for the view?? So the astronaut can stand there and be awed?? The experience?? The Hubble space telescope takes great pictures of far away places, and an astronaut is not required for this. Unmanned probes have and can accomplish the same thing with the planets.

But the only way we are going to learn how to make space travel safer for humans is by doing it.

That's just it. We aren't learning anything from patching up old shuttle technology and flying it. Nothing is being gained from it. To spend billions on another "safer" vehicle to do exactly what the shuttle is doing makes no sense either

Having a man in space is "neat", but that's all that it is. the cost is not justified

I understand what you are trying to say -- because its the same thing NASA has been trying to say.

In fact though, it's more like a religion, not science.

I certainly hope nobody thinks this is revolutionary?
Set your time travel machine to the 60's. The 1960s. I would have loved to be my age (30) in the 60s. EVERYTHING was already done back then...
TFT history
Just search for 'paper' in that article if you're one of those hyper-active now-now-now-now types.

The EETimes article on this story has (besides a lot more meat) a bit of an insight:

"Having framed the duty of disclosure in the above terms, the court concluded that Rambus did not breach its duty as to the SDRAM standard because none of the claims in its patents and pending patent applications reads on that standard," [legal analyst] Balto added.

SUMMARY: GIBSON GUITAR CORPORATION vs. D.N. CROWE
http://stephengoldin.com/gibson/summary.html

REPORTS OF THESE DEATHS ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED
http://stephengoldin.com/gibson/reports.html

A SETTLEMENT HAS BEEN REACHED http://stephengoldin.com/gibson/

It is also useful to see how Gibson handled the acquisition of Opcode.

Gibson vs. Opcode
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Monitor/645 4/

Somewhere on the Harmony Central website are some sobering remarks on Gibson's rebranding of third-party products as Opcode. I can't find the links at the moment, but the bottom line is that the goodwill associated with Opcode trademark has been squandered; one hopes that the same fate will not befall Gibson's efforts with the Magic platform.

If only they had open-sourced Opcode's software!

If you are technically skilled, you can trade your time for money and get very good sound quality in your recording. Consider Tom Scholz, who put together a recording with a small cadre of people in his basement, which became the self titled album for his band, Boston, and was the greatest selling premier album of all time. Interestingly, Tom was an engineer with a masters from MIT, developed analog technology for recording, and has been a real "perfectionist". Most of the recording was originally done in his basement, at a cost far below what the studios charged. Interestingly, he still records using analog (for sound quality reasons), and claims "Wherever there's a microprocessor, there's trouble.".

It's awfully fun reading desktop programmers commenting on an article in a project management magazine.

Here's a few facts about your new-model car. The BMW is extreme with 70 electronic modules but the typical 2003 vehicle has 20 or 30 microprocessor-controlled modules, and the number is rising every year. These range from a door-switch module with 8K of code, through an engine controller with 256K/32K of ROM/RAM, to a navigation system at 8M/8M. Very few of these modules have a manufacturing cost above $100.

The OS in automotive controllers varies from a simple event loop at the low end through OSEK-compliant kernels in the midrange to QNX and its friends in the most complicated systems. If there's Linux in a controller, it will be as well-hidden as the Linux in Tivo. Engine and transmission controllers are designed for hard real-time operation and emphatically do not use anything remotely resembling a desktop or palmtop OS.

Software development starts with the premise that once it's built, you can't change the it, ever. This has enormous consequences for the way automotive code gets made. Most companies spec the hell out of these products, use a strict waterfall development process, are afraid to venture beyond the C language, and test endlessly. They are scared of agile methodologies and even of RUP. Productivity is pretty low, but on the other hand, the products are reliable.

Now, both the article and /. responses are full of misconceptions. There's not really much question about whether an OS vendor shares its source code. The real concern is reliability. There's not much question about who develops embedded software. Detroit is lousy with contractors. One billboard I see on my commute shows a toy car with the caption "about the only vehicle that doesn't run on our software. -- EDS" The GM guy's comment about 10 year old software has the obvious answer: his teenager's 1993 Chevy.

Win CE gets no respect from embedded software developers for several reasons. Chief among them are poor responsiveness, poor stability and code bloat. Typical comment, from an SAE conference presenter: "If you put an embedded system into a car, you still have a car. If you put a PC into a car, you have a PC with wheels."

Rather than rant any further, let me suggest reading any of the books on Jean Labrosse's site, EE Times and Embedded Systems Programming. And have fun! Embedded is where you can see software affect the real world.

Pace Micro of Saltaire, England are a major manufacturer of set top boxes. A year ago they entered into an agreement with Sega to add dreamcast technology to their STBs. Pace are now all but tits-up (although that is mostly to do with the Football League, ITV digital, Enron and Worldcom).

Under the plan, licensees would pay 25 cents each for MPEG-4 products such as decoders and encoders, with fees capped at $1 million a year for each licensee. It also suggests charging a per-minute rate, with no cap.

Anger meets MPEG-4 licensing scheme

Companies fear costly MPEG-4 licenses

Apple backs MPEG-4 despite fee dispute

MPEG LA claim that Microsoft is blocking progress? As my dear old grandmother used to say, bitch please.

• "AMD will relocate a substantial number of engineers to IBM's silicon development facility in Fishkill, N.Y., and joint development work will start later this month."

That's always a good news/bad news type of thing. Still, the fact that IBM/AMD are going to concentrate on SOI tells me that perhaps the newers AMD's will require less power, which can ONLY be a 'good thing'(tm)

Chuck Bucket

Here's another link to the EE Times: http://www.eetimes.com/semi/news/OEG20030108S0038 (care of [H]ard|OCP)

Hopefully this means that the next CPUs out of AMD won't be able to warm up the apartment come winter.

Generally this means that AMD won't be working with United Microelectronics (UMC) anymore... a contract that was just recently made (January). (EE Times hints that IBM has been "muscling in" on UMC's turf lately - ouch).

The deal apparently marks an end to AMD's arrangement with United Microelectronics Corp., a Taiwan-based foundry with which AMD was to develop process technology and build a 300-mm fabrication facility in Singapore. Asked about that earlier partnership, an AMD spokesman said the two sides "are amicably winding up their joint development relationship."

I'm sure Hollywood will threaten to pull movies from broadcast if no drm is enabled. I believe the real story involves some smart-card-based SmartRight technology that I read about in a print version of EE times

Non Sequitur \Non seq"ui*tur\ [L., it does not follow]
n 1: a reply that has no relevance to what preceded it

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I've lost more data on a live ntfs system than I've ever lost on a powerfailure with an active ext2... Sure the e2fsck often printed lots of messages, but that was just for the large amount of metadata that remained in the cache when the brute poweroff happened, and was usually fixed without losing data except some recent log entries and other such growing or open files. Added to that the journal of ext3 not virtually guarantees no data loss (and eliminates the extreme fsck wait).

While ntfs needs to be more resilient agains crashes for obvious reasons, even in the crash resiliency respect I've never been mistreated by ext2. It's not a cleanly designed filesystem, it's a stack of features upon a hack. ntfs is just a hack on top of vfat, which is a hack on top of fat. Reminds me of Duck Tape Repairs(tm). It's always in the consistent state of of disarray (In this IBM factory, they luckily found that out ahead of time, with windows machines thrashing and needing defragmentations or reinstalls while Linux just chugged along (I think there was a /. story about this fab, but couldn't find it)). The fact that ntfs doesn't have or use the 'filesystem dirty' state isn't something to be proud of, it results in filesystem errors that remain undetected until the whole thing falls apart. On windows, it's wise to force a full fsck after a crash even if the box seems to be back up.

From a system administration perspective, I want a filesystem that keeps its data and stays fast under any load. About losing a whole server, or a random part of it. Actually, I'd rather lose the whole server and switch to the backup while restoring the tapes than get it started back up and thinking I kept all the data, only to realize that I'm missing part two weeks later just after the backups got overwritten...

I'm not impressed until they get it to run on one of these. I'll call it...mini me...

... the same way other digital light technologies do: pulse-width modulation...

Brightness is controllable through pulse-width modulation.

I was inspired enough by the news of this new display technology so as to Google related information.

I encourage fellow Slashdotters to browse these two EE Times articles.
Both articles are very informative.

http://www.eetimes.com/news/97/941news/mems.html

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000717S0071

BEEF.com

I was inspired enough by the news of this new display technology so as to Google related information.

I encourage fellow Slashdotters to browse these two EE Times articles.
Both articles are very informative.

http://www.eetimes.com/news/97/941news/mems.html

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000717S0071

BEEF.com

There are more details at eetimes -- it's a Z80 running at 3 MHz (8 bits, 13k transistors) in a 3 micron process (0.09 micron is the next step in silicon processes). The glass computer works as fast as the original 1970's version did on silicon. They played an old game on the system... I wonder what it was!

Theoretically, this technology would be ridiculously easy to produce, since it should be able to be produced through an inkjet-type printhead. Pretty damn cool. If your screen dies, run to your printer, spit out an new one! (Oh I wish...)

Unfortunately the author failed to mention that one of the reasons Sony went after the author of the Aibo software was that he had copied some of Sony's code.

The author also fails to mention that Sony subsequently opened up the Aibo's API.

From another article:

"To date, LSI Logic has not outlined the company's plan for how and when to introduce silicon capable of handling H.264. Umesh Padval, LSI Logic's senior vice president of broadband entertainment division, acknowledged that Bob Saffari's group - responsible for professional video market - has seen a growing demand for H.264. But as far as the volume consumer H.264 market is concerned, he said: "The actual deployment for H.264 is not solidified at all."

Padval predicted that the volume market for H.264 won't emerge before early 2005."

My big bet is that storage is going to be the interesting area in high-tech next year...and I don't just say that because I happen to work in that area. CPUs, video cards, and memory will all get faster in not-very-interesting ways. Wireless networks will grow in not-very-interesting ways (mostly; see below). But there will be heaps of storage-related news:

• Portable removable storage devices will be a growth market. Wireless versions, probably based on some flavor of wireless 1394 will be particularly handy.
• Someone will start shipping some form of removable storage (probably optical) that offers 50GB or more on something the size of a CD or smaller. Initial versions will be write-once and expensive; lower costs and rewritable versions won't hit until 2004.
• Products and services to synchronize and distribute data will grow steadily as people want to share that data between more and more devices.
• People will continue to ignore distributed filesystems and their cousins as alternatives to the above-mentioned synchronization nightmare.
• iSCSI will continue to be hyped until (about mid-year) people realize that it doesn't give them anything they didn't already have. That plus a continuing soft IT economy will create a wave of rolled-back claims and changed strategies from all the router-company refugees behind the hype.
• The BFDA (Big Fine Disk Array) vendors will continue to pay more attention to lawsuits among themselves than to designing and implementing actual products that meet customers' needs.
• More and more storage-related functionality will be packaged as separate appliances (for reasons see above). People will eventually realize that all this "virtualization" hype is just a bunch of garbage anyway, but will continue to support the appliance approach for other kinds of functionality.

I remember seeing something on TV about this; they demo'ed it at Comdex.

The version they came up with (I checked the link) worked at about 2400 bps. I'd say 10 Mb/s is a substantial improvement.

Years ago, I planned my ultimate personal computer. It would be powered by my shoes, have a PAN to connect a small computing module (in contact with my skin, but discretely located) to a hand-held, tablet-style display (X protocol? something better?), and also use my cellphone to provide wireless WAN/LAM capabilities. I was thinking seriously about Bluetooth for the PAN part of the equation, but it doesn't have enough bandwidth. This might get close.

With that type of system, and some kind of integrated VoIP through the WAN/LAN link, there would never be any reason for me to actually be at my desk. In fact, it could be in my employer's best interest for me to be "on my feet."

take a look

Sanyo & Eastman Kodak

Memory Errors, Detection and Correction (The PC Guide)

IBM experiments in soft fails in computer electronics (1978-1994) (IBM Research)

IBM moves to protect DRAM from cosmic invaders (EETimes)

All big electronic equipment manufacturers have ESD protection measures in place, however consumers (and sometimes retailers too) don't even know what it is. I bought RAM the other day, and the clerck was handling the DIMM's with his bare hands before me ! I was shocked, and even though I tried to explain, he didn't give a shit :/
(fortunatwely for him, the 2 DIMM's worked out fine).

EETimes has a much better article with actual measurements and more technical info.

EETimes has a much better article with actual measurements and more technical info.

EETimes has a sorter article, and Comms design has a more in-depth article covering some of the problems TI may face.

Most people use a 4 chip solution - with each chip's process suited for its use:

- power management (high current)
- baseband/applications processing (good routing)
- memory (high density)
- RF/IF plus power amp (high speed, high voltage)

How expensive/feasable is it going to be to put a high-density ferroelectric EPROM memory along with SDRAM and a 6-volt RF power amp?

Power.

Think about it. You plug a wifi card into your laptop and start surfing. Battery life cuts from 4 hours to 2.

This study examines current 802.11a solutions... chances are there will be some improvements, but it averages 100 microwatts/sec regardless of whether it's in use or not.

OTOH, 3G phones (with their tiny ickle bodies and tiny ickle batteries) consume power at 25 microwatts in TX/RX, and only 1 in idle mode.

This article talks about how 3G power is a challenge for handset manufacturers even now, designing for 3G. You think your phone is gonna be able to cope with 802.11a? You're wrong.

3G and WiFi are both cool. But they are different.

There are DVDs with higher capacities than 8GB. They're compatible with current drives, too. A quick search on Google turned up this article that talks about a 100GB DVD compatible optical disk that was developed. And guess what? It can be read by existing drives. DVD is already in use. It's too late to get rid of it. Maybe better technology will emerge for data storage, but video doesn't need more than 100GB.

That is not entirely true. Only a subset of JPEG2000 will be available royalty-free. Since that will be the subset which mostly everybody will use, it doesn't matter much though. Here's an article about JPEG2000 which covers some of these issues.

This eetimes article includes info on the 5 (non-US) car manufacturers willing to try Wince in some cars.

quoting:

"Microsoft's list is notable, however, for its lack of any North American automakers. Neither General Motors, with its industry-leading OnStar Division, nor Ford employ Windows CE for automotive use.

Microsoft executives said that its successes with European and Asian automakers reflect a higher demand for telematics in those areas of the world. "Telematics started in Japan and Europe," Lansinger said. "In those places there's more demand for navigation systems because the roads are more complicated."

Analysts believe, however, that Windows CE could eventually face difficulties in the United States and Japan because Microsoft is not a member of the Automotive Multimedia Interface Collaboration (AMI-C), which is attempting to create a standard specification for telematics hardware and software. "Windows has laid a fledgling claim to the dashboard, but it's not by virtue of participation in AMI-C," Hansen said. "AMI-C latched on to Java and has continued to go in that direction."

end quote..

Since Nvidia doesn't have a license to develop for the intel bus, this will interface to AMD processors (uh, despite that the xbox is intel-based). A version for the Hammer is "far along" and may merge north and south bridge functions into one chip.

Four Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers, including Asus and Chaintech, will use the chips

A future version for server line cards may include gigabit ethernet, routing capability, and a HyperTransport link to network processors.

Check out this summary of an ipod teardown - pretty pictures! Or you can order the full 60 page report for $1950

EETimes' article is superior if you're looking for just hardware info, but if design process from a management point of view is your thing then the Digital Chain article is better. Either way Portelligent still provided the info for both articles.

Most PC components are built in Taiwan, China, Japan, & Korea. These countries don't trade much with India. .... Lower volume=higher prices.

You must be buying cheap servers. RDRAM is used in more expensive servers, in part due to the high bandwidth it provides (and also, in part due to engineering decisions made years ago.) 8 channels of RDRAM yields 12.8 GB/sec of memory bandwidth which is certainly more than you get with PCs these days, even PC servers. Then again, the 21364 isn't shipping yet. But I don't think Intel plans on shipping that sort of CPU bandwidth by the end of the year.

And back to your point about economics of RDRAM, there is money out there that will pay a premium for performance scalability (at least when combined with reliability). About 11 percent of all servers -- command as much as 60 percent of all server revenue.

I just wonder how it'll stack up performance-wise on this chart versus Power4 and Itanium2.

But the main reason I suspect one would buy one of these is because you want binary compatibility with all your old high-performance Alpha code that you invested so many man-years in.

--LP

...[The XBox's] costs are believed to be higher than Sony's, partly because of the hard drive and a version of its powerful Windows operating system included with each machine.

Don't confuse this with the 802.11b networks BT are setting up, this is the fixed wireless in the ~15GHz range I believe. Anyway, I have cable... but the mesh I'd really be interested in is a mobile P2P Mesh