Slashdot Mirror
Domain: eetimes.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to eetimes.com.
Comments · 730
-
Linux clusters are a perfect example of this
If you look at the disruptive growth of Linux HPC clusters, you will find that there are no IP agreements. I actually wrote about this: Why Linux On Clusters?. The absence of IP agreements allowed the HPC community to work together and grow faster than anyone imagined. On the famed Beowulf mailing list (started by Don Becker BTW) their is a free exchange of ideas and no one claims ownership of any IP. I call it a "Lawyer Free Zone" similar to what was proposed in Scotland back in the late 90's.
-
Oh Salaried Tech Employees
Someone needs to tell the Apple 'Slaves' that this was already tried by IBM workers about a year and a half ago. IBM responds to overtime Demands
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it!
-
Re:What Charging Infrastructure?
"The real problems with hydrogen are as follows: It has to come from somewhere, and you have to distribute it to people somehow. Every other problem (even embrittlement!) can be solved with existing technology. We still have no cost-effective way to produce and distribute hydrogen."
2008 called, 85% efficient electrolysis with the promise of 97% 'by the time hydrogen cars roll out' is here now, i'll forgive you for missing it, as it was a roland p
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206801669
now, you were saying? 85% energy efficiency makes hydrogen combustion look tasty, because of a number of things. 1. hydrogen, like gasoline can quickly refuel a vehicle, with a LOT of power 2. there are very few fueling stations, so making grids that can handle high voltages to make hydrogen is easy, doing this to each house is HARD. that's why we have 110 or 220 at home, not 6000 volts.
http://www.hybridcars.com/electric-cars/power-of-pump.html
a really nice summary of why electric cars that plug in at home never panned out.using the numbers in that article filling up a hydrogen car at 85% efficiency 4660 kilowatt hours. for the equivalency of 120 gallons of gas. or $466 for the equivalent energy of 120 gallons of gas, this assumes that hydrogen combustion/fuel cells is at the same efficiency of petroleum, sorry i'm bad at math so someone else will have to post a correction if they know the efficiencies of fuel cells/hydrogen combustion. BTW that's $3.88 a gallon. at 97% efficiency that's $3.20 a gallon.
battery based hybrids get better mileage, "In general terms... 1 kilowatt-hour--will move an electric car about four miles down the road." so $.10 for 4 miles, if 1 gallon gets you 33 miles, then $0.82 per gallon for an electric vehicle
but that doesn't compare the real story either, and this guy is comparing a household battery charger, compared to a plug in electrics hybrid charger. in his article, so i don't know how fast 19 amps at 110 V can charge (plug in will use charging arrays duh) or 39 amps at 220 v if you wire a special plug, then we have to consider if you have 2 plug-ins or not, and if you ran separate lines for them or not... well i won't do the math...
the point being, electric cars get great economy, hydrogen i don't know where it falls, but it doesn't make sense to promote hydrogen if battery tech has evolved to the point where electric cars are better for the pocket book, and don't take forever to store that power..
-
My money is on OLEDS
OLEDS have made surprising progress recently in term of efficiency. They are especially interesting because they offer completely new form factors like 'lighting tiles'.
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209100587
-
there is no real market for neighborhood solar
"Solar market grew 62% in 2007".
Falcon
-
Re:yes, go cheap, that's the way
Basically he's trying to create business for ASIC design houses by telling people that putting a bunch of licensed IP onto a chip is rocket science and they shouldn't try to do it in house.
Is it really? I honestly don't know. I suspect it depends a lot on the quality of the in house people and the quality of the ASIC design house.It is true. You should not unnecessarily muck with VHDL/Verilog and 3rd party cores even if you work with an FPGA. This will not kill you, but it will make you poorer. HDLs are notoriously kludgy, and it takes a lot of effort to do it right. Proprietary cores rarely work as documented, and you have no visibility into them. When multiple cores are used, it's one large fingerpointing game between vendors. And you need to have good, experienced HDL coders. And you need to have all the tools, they cost big bucks.
But that's with mere FPGAs, where you can update your design whenever you wish. However here they are talking about ASICs - where all the wiring is done with masks when the IC is made. You'd have to be certifiably mad to even think about a casual design like this. ASIC designs are done by very competent teams, using "10% coding / 90% verification" time allocation, because you can't afford
I know companies that are a lot smaller than Microsoft who've done ASICs and it has worked.
So Microsoft risked a lot when it went for an in-house design. I am not surprised that they failed. They should have counted all the successful 3D video companies on the market and asked themselves why there are so few, and why top gaming cards cost so much.
But if you're a cash rich company then the bias will be to try to do as much as possible in house, because that gives you more freedom to value engineer later.
I am not MS, but I don't really see much business value in rolling your own video controller. More likely the NIH syndrome kicked in, or some people were overly concerned about their job security.
Yeah, but they didn't. They licensed the IP from ATI. Whether it was VHDL or a hard core I don't know. But the whole Xenos chip is an ATI design. Microsoft had the chip layout done in house and talked to TSMC directly.
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=IB2CS0JQTKT1SQSNDLOSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=199902345
Lewis pointed to the example of Microsoft which licensed for its Xbox 360 a graphics design from the former ATI Technologies and had it made at TSMC. The company considered a similar move for its Xbox 360 processor designed by IBM, but at the last minute decided to have IBM assume overall responsibility for making, packaging and testing the chip rather than buying raw wafers from Chartered Semiconductor.
When that didn't work they got ATI to do the layout.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208403010
To fix the problem, Microsoft went back to an unnamed ASIC vendor based in the United States and redesigned the chip, Lewis added. (Based on a previous report, the ASIC vendor is most likely the former ATI Technologies, now part of AMD.)
But now they presumably know the secret. Which will come in handy whem they want to start reducing the chipcount so they can cut the losses they make selling the things and/or cut the price.
So ASIC design is risky, but it means that XBox360's are no longer sold at a loss -
Re:yes, go cheap, that's the way
Basically he's trying to create business for ASIC design houses by telling people that putting a bunch of licensed IP onto a chip is rocket science and they shouldn't try to do it in house.
Is it really? I honestly don't know. I suspect it depends a lot on the quality of the in house people and the quality of the ASIC design house.It is true. You should not unnecessarily muck with VHDL/Verilog and 3rd party cores even if you work with an FPGA. This will not kill you, but it will make you poorer. HDLs are notoriously kludgy, and it takes a lot of effort to do it right. Proprietary cores rarely work as documented, and you have no visibility into them. When multiple cores are used, it's one large fingerpointing game between vendors. And you need to have good, experienced HDL coders. And you need to have all the tools, they cost big bucks.
But that's with mere FPGAs, where you can update your design whenever you wish. However here they are talking about ASICs - where all the wiring is done with masks when the IC is made. You'd have to be certifiably mad to even think about a casual design like this. ASIC designs are done by very competent teams, using "10% coding / 90% verification" time allocation, because you can't afford
I know companies that are a lot smaller than Microsoft who've done ASICs and it has worked.
So Microsoft risked a lot when it went for an in-house design. I am not surprised that they failed. They should have counted all the successful 3D video companies on the market and asked themselves why there are so few, and why top gaming cards cost so much.
But if you're a cash rich company then the bias will be to try to do as much as possible in house, because that gives you more freedom to value engineer later.
I am not MS, but I don't really see much business value in rolling your own video controller. More likely the NIH syndrome kicked in, or some people were overly concerned about their job security.
Yeah, but they didn't. They licensed the IP from ATI. Whether it was VHDL or a hard core I don't know. But the whole Xenos chip is an ATI design. Microsoft had the chip layout done in house and talked to TSMC directly.
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=IB2CS0JQTKT1SQSNDLOSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=199902345
Lewis pointed to the example of Microsoft which licensed for its Xbox 360 a graphics design from the former ATI Technologies and had it made at TSMC. The company considered a similar move for its Xbox 360 processor designed by IBM, but at the last minute decided to have IBM assume overall responsibility for making, packaging and testing the chip rather than buying raw wafers from Chartered Semiconductor.
When that didn't work they got ATI to do the layout.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208403010
To fix the problem, Microsoft went back to an unnamed ASIC vendor based in the United States and redesigned the chip, Lewis added. (Based on a previous report, the ASIC vendor is most likely the former ATI Technologies, now part of AMD.)
But now they presumably know the secret. Which will come in handy whem they want to start reducing the chipcount so they can cut the losses they make selling the things and/or cut the price.
So ASIC design is risky, but it means that XBox360's are no longer sold at a loss -
Re:yes, go cheap, that's the wayI don't think you're getting it. Cutting costs is one thing. Cutting corners is another. Cutting costs is fine, but cutting corners implies the product is worse off because of it. Few engineers would say "It'd be cheaper to roll our own graphics chip," because they realize the immense technical challenges involved. They didn't "roll their own graphics chip" from what I can tell. They licensed the IP (the VHDL code or a synthesized core) from someone else. The plan from the start with the XBox360 was that they would do this and try to integrate it all eventually onto one chip. That's the reason they moved from x86 to PPC, because neither Intel or AMD would license their IP and let Microsoft make their own chips. Actually this is the difference between Risc and x86 these days - x86 vendors don't license their IP but Risc vendors do. Since consoles are sold at a loss initially and subsidized by games it's really important to reduce the build costs by doing this. Back in the XBox days most people thought that Microsoft lost out because they couldn't integrate the design into once chip in the way that Sony did with their console. And that was because they didn't own the IP for the processor.
The mistake seemed to be to let Microsoft's in house group do this rather than outsourcing.
But you've got to remember this is an article in EEtimes from an analyst with an agenda
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=51TYZYXYRWUZUQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=208403010
"System OEMs have no business designing ASICs any longer," said Lewis. The reality is that system companies are finding it hard to do enough ASIC designs to keep in-house design teams employed.
Basically he's trying to create business for ASIC design houses by telling people that putting a bunch of licensed IP onto a chip is rocket science and they shouldn't try to do it in house.
Is it really? I honestly don't know. I suspect it depends a lot on the quality of the in house people and the quality of the ASIC design house.
And it depends on what you're trying to do. In the embedded area lots of companies much smaller than Microsoft put an processor and a bunch of their own peripherals onto a chip and it works. I guess that console or PC graphics cores use a lot more power than that. But I don't know if "an ASIC design house" would have done a better job than Microsoft's ASIC group.
Or more to the point, maybe a $1B recall is the price you pay for learning about this stuff. Microsoft can afford it obviously and it will influence how the successor to the XBox360 is done. Whether they hire more engineers and do it in house or outsource it is a business decision it seems. I guess the in house people and the design house will both try to argue for the best option from their point of view and some manager will decide.
But if you're a cash rich company then the bias will be to try to do as much as possible in house, because that gives you more freedom to value engineer later. -
Re:Change in paradigmall BlueGene CPUs were running at less than a GHz. And it seemed those low power cores were key to HPC (high performance computing). Supercomputing is on its way to a water cooled infrastrucure.
IBM is already selling a product under the name bluefire
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207100873
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Infrastructure/IBM-Ships-First-WaterCooled-Supercomputer/
I hope we see more water & less air in the future -
Re:Just a tad over the top? No ECC = NO buy
-
Re:Dumbing down
Blah, both TFA and the Wiki are pretty sparse on details.
This article is a bit better. The third page talks about some real-world applications that are benefitting from CUDA. -
Blog spam. Link to actual article. Nvidia loss?
Avoid the blog spam. This is the actual article in EE times: Nvidia unleashes Cuda attack on parallel-compute challenge.
Nvidia is showing signs of being poorly managed. CUDA is a registered trademark of another hi-tech company.
The underlying issue is apparently that Nvidia will lose most of its mid-level business when AMD/ATI and Intel/Larrabee being shipping integrated graphics. Until now, Intel integrated graphics has been so limited as to be useless in many mid-level applications. Nvidia hopes to replace some of that loss with sales to people who want to use their GPUs to do parallel processing. -
The EETimes article is much better
-
Technical Explanation
A more technical description is available here.
-
Re:I'll admit I don't understand the classificatio
between flux and voltage. (charge as an integral of current, flux as an integral of voltage over time)
According to EETimes, flux is "change in voltage", rather than an intergral. From the article:The hold-up over the last 37 years, according to professor Chua, has been a misconception that has pervaded electronic circuit theory. That misconception is that the fundamental relationship in passive circuitry is between voltage and charge. What the researchers contend is that the fundamental relationship is actually between changes-in-voltage, or flux, and charge.
-
Another link with yet more information (EETimes)
-
Re:Apple will ditch intelDuh. Doughnuts! But that's not answering why they bought PASemi. That's an argument for why they bought a chip design firm. They didn't choose this one out of the phone book. It wasn't a random phone book pick. Apple was looking into using PA Semi's PPC core, but chose to go with Intel because PA's chip wouldn't be ready in time.
One puzzling piece of information is that "P.A. Semi informed its customers it was being acquired and it could no longer guarantee supplies of its chips." Some customers are DoD contractors and are quite upset about this. That at least implies that Apple isn't interested in using PWRficient in upcoming products. -
Re:Low risk acquisition with lots of possibilities
P.A. Semi doesn't have a significant revenue stream
It does however have Department of Defense contracts.
Falcon -
Re:a bargaining chip (pun) for negotiating with In
Apple is buying itself a bargaining chip (pun) for negotiating with Intel on their pc line. They were able to tell Mot/IBM to f off using Intel. Now they will be able to repeat the same thing to Intel if Intel does not do their bidding. In fact they are in a stronger position since they will be in the CPU business themselves.
There are at least two problems with this argument. One is that Apple didn't need to acquire another company to put pressure on Intel. If Apple wants to pressure Intel all they need to do is tell Intel they're in discussions with AMD. Second, it wouldn't be a good idea to risk having the US Department of Defense veto the buyout.
Falcon -
Re:odd.
I think it does, but not where you are thinking. This could be a good fit for Airport, Apple TV, or other devices that may be in Apple's roadmap we don't know about. There might also be something in PA's roadmap that will make perfect sense when they release it in a few years. Another idea that I think makes sense: Apple is just after the people. PA doesn't have any Fabs, so it isn't completely unreasonable to end their product line. The people have a lot of experience with ARM, which Apple is currently using for mobile products.
I think that this is a bad reason for Apple to risk a Department of Defense veto of the deal.
Falcon -
Bigger Ego in the room than JobsAs you can see in this EETime story, DoD may quash the whole deal because PA Semi makes a CPUs critical for some DoD contractors.
OT:And you thought *IAA was heavy handed, at least they don't have the powers of DoD or The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay (HBC was allowed to raise armies and make war...).
-
I won't take his word for itthere is an equally significant problem with patent applications that are improperly rejected. This is one silicon valley CEO whining his patents are being rejected.. His company, parimics does intellectual property only (but of course you need to sign an NDA if you want details).
So i asked google patents about it and got several patents by him (in previous companies), and only 1 by this company.
So here comes claim 1 of patent application: "Method and apparatus for image processing" 1. An image processing system adapted to process image frames and comprising:
an image processing engine adapted to perform object-independent processing corresponding to a first layer of the image processing system, said image processing engine further adapted to include a plurality of processors each associated with a different one of pixels of the image frame;
a post processing engine adapted to perform object-dependent processing corresponding to a second processing layer of the image processing system, said post processing engine further adapted to include an N-way symmetric multi-processing system (SMP) having disposed therein N DFT engines and N matrix multiplication engines; wherein N is an integer greater than 1, and
a processing engine adapted to perform object composition, recognition and association corresponding to a third processing layer of the image processing system.
To me this sounds exactly like the kind of over-general claim that a good patent examiner should strike out, even if there is some worth in the patent as a whole. -
The issued patents aren't the whole problem
As we have discussed before, there is an equally significant problem with patent applications that are improperly rejected. Since issued patents enable one to obtain funding to bring new technology to market, this is as least as serious a problem for our society as the more well-known "junk patent" problem.
-
Re:EETimes
Indeed they not only published articles about the terrorist=engineer meme but also about the fact that US engineers aren't involved in the political process as much as their international counterparts.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207001226
In this article they also give a good example of political involvement in the form of a Chinese engineer who worked as a spy for china in the US.
I'm not sure what they want to say with that. Do they want to go mainstream by pissing off all the engineers. There are already a number of Timeses swimming there.
Do they honestly want to encourage US engineers to play a bigger role in society with that kind of reporting? -
Re:I agree, but...
The Blue LED patent story is very interesting - not the typical david vs goliath situation.
The article is a bit old, it is my understanding that Nakamura did prevail.
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010824S0051 -
Toshiba preps 128GB solid-state notebook drive
Toshiba preps 128GB solid-state notebook drive -- "While manufacturers plow ahead with notebook-targeted SSDs, questions are arising as to whether they deliver a performance boost significant enough to justify the higher cost."
So...
There's also an issue related to ROI. -
USB 3.0 desperately needed here...
USB 3.0 or *something faster* will be required for devices this large in portable storage capacity.. USB 2.0 is ~480Mbps (theoretical max) and it would take forever to transfer a terabyte over USB 2.0.
http://www.usb.org/usb30
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201807389 -
Actual Product Available NOW!
Note: I posted this earlier as a reply, but no one seems to have noticed it. Hence this repost. I'm a long-time-reader-very-rare-poster, so sorry if this is not the right way to go about it.
Although the study quoted by the OP got a lot of media attention because of MIT involvement, what is more interesting is this actual product that has been released last month: "One AAA battery! The boss must be kidding..."
This company (Silicon Labs) has managed to put a DC-DC converter in a microcontroller and have managed to do this on an actual product that you can buy now (not just a research project!). They claim to be able to run for years (even >15 years) on typical low-power applications such as data loggers that wake up for a short while take a measurement and go to sleep. This is also the first microchip that can run on one battery... if you think that adding an external DC-DC converter would do the same trick, you have to remember that the external DC-DC converter needs to be ON even during sleep mode so the micro can wake up again, which burns quite a bit of power. They claim to have eliminated this by putting the DC-DC converter on chip.
More articles on this micro: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206801775 http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2008/02/26/43201/silicon-labs-microcontroller-features-integrated-dc-dc-for-portable-uses.htm -
Re:Cutting to the chase
Although the study quoted by the OP got a lot of media attention because of MIT involvement, what is more interesting is this actual product that has been released last month: "One AAA battery! The boss must be kidding..."
This company (Silicon Labs) has managed to put a DC-DC converter in a microcontroller and have managed to do this on an actual product that you can buy now (not just a research project!). They claim to be able to run for years (even >15 years) on typical low-power applications such as data loggers that wake up for a short while take a measurement and go to sleep. This is also the first microchip that can run on one battery... if you think that adding an external DC-DC converter would do the same trick, you have to remember that the external DC-DC converter needs to be ON even during sleep mode so the micro can wake up again, which burns quite a bit of power. More articles on this product:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206801775 http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2008/02/26/43201/silicon-labs-microcontroller-features-integrated-dc-dc-for-portable-uses.htm -
Cheap Bastards.
Rick Merritt, who wrote the lead article also posted an opinion piece in EE Times lambasting Wintel for their lackluster funding efforts in parallel programming. I thoroughly agree with this guy. To quote:
Wintel should not just tease multiple researchers with a $10 million grant awarded to one institution. They need to significantly up the ante and fund multiple efforts. Ten million is a drop in the bucket of the R&D budgets at Intel and Microsoft. You have to wonder about who is piloting the ship in Redmond these days when the company can afford a $44 billion bid for Yahoo to try to bolster its position in Web search but only spends $10 million to attack a needed breakthrough to save its core Windows business. -
Re:Yeah, whatever.
-
its happened before on a grander scale..
NEC - yes thats right the major international corp. - found a entire fake NEC outfit working in China, complete with factories, hundreds of employees, using the same logo, letterheads and even staff ID badges. They found out when kit started coming back for repair that they had not even made. its still one of my favorite China fake goods stories, because you just could not make it up.
Think I'm joking? I assure you I am not, here are some references...
http://www.eetindia.co.in/ART_8800416910_1800007_NT_5c0424e2.HTM
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187200176
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/technology/01pirate.html
http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/slick-pirates-seize-entire-brand/2006/05/29/1148754904830.html
The hardest thing is sometimes to persuade people that what they are doing in actually wrong in the first place, I guess this is the case with Shareaza. -
Re: This is old news!
This move is part of setting up a new joint venture between Toshiba and Sony that will be in effect next fiscal year (from 1. april 2008). They allready operate a similar joint venture today, where Toshiba owns 51% and Sony 49%. But since the current joint venture deal expires this fiscal year (31. march 2008), its just a continuation.
So this has nothing to do with the lost HD DVD battle. It was actually announced back in october of last year :
http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206800618 -
The man behind Modu
Is called Dov Moren http://www.eetimes.com/disruption/profiles/moran.jhtml who is the man behind, among other things, the Disk On Key.
This has been his top secret project for the past 2.5 years. I think that there are great things to expect from it (and no, I do not work at Modu). -
Re:Two Billion Transistors on Their Latest ChipI've never heard of an alternative to SRAM for internal processor caches. AMD seems to be taking interest in Z-RAM for that purpose.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196601127 -
Print version
Here is the one page verision.
-
Re:Rejected yesterday, accepted today?
That is because you linked to the original paper. We here at Slashdot prefer that all stories be removed by a few degrees so that we can argue without RTFA, and even if we do RTFA, it is still just one persons impression of what the original source said. Welcome to the (dis)information super highway. It may sound like I am trolling with an ant-Slashdot sentiment. Actually, I'm trolling against the internet in general. Blogs, forums, etc are a great thing in many ways, but they are terrible for finding news. It is like a world wide version of the telephone game with none of the stories actually representing what is said. For example, take this story about the McDonalds CEO blaming video games for obesity. http://games.slashdot.org/games/08/01/11/1543201.shtml. The actual quote (at http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205920319) lays things out quite differently than what the linked article "quotes" Easterbrooke as saying. The problem is that people won't bother to find the original source because we trust that the summary is correct. The problem is that it often isn't.
-
Re:monkey business
TFA is not very clear about the most important part of this, but other reports spell it out more clearly: "The most stunning finding is that when we stopped the treadmill and the monkey ceased to move its legs, it was able to sustain the locomotion of the robot for a few minutes -- just by thinking -- using only the visual feedback of the robot in Japan."
The reason for using a robot rather than an animation is that they wanted to prove that neural signals could actually be used to drive real motors. I also think it's interesting that they worked out how to interpret neural signals in the brain by correlating neural impulses with the monkey's own leg motions, this was not a case of intercepting signals traveling along muscle-control nerves. I agree there seems to be no particular reason other than showmanship to do this intercontinentally, though! And in fact the monkey was able to keep the system working through a 250 ms delay, which is an interesting finding because it means that such systems don't need to respond to controls instantly but can tolerate some delay. However, they didn't really need to be on different continents to test that.
-
Re:Any work on the flip side?
Several items are coming to a head in the laptop market that will drastically reduce power usage.
1) SSD Hard Drive. The hard drive is one of the biggest power consumers in the laptop today, by changing to an SSD, this can be drastically reduced. Yes, they are more expensive and they are smaller capacity than a HD, but in addition to being less power hungry, they are also much faster, smaller, and lighter.
2) Digital Paper Displays. The back lighting required by current LCDs is very expensive to run power consumption wise. They also require power 100% of the time to maintain the image itself even though this is much less than the back light power requirements. As the digital paper displays become more commercialized, we will see them start to take over the laptop market. Digital paper does not use back lighting and does not require power to maintain the image, only to change the image. Thus drastically reducing the amount of power required for the display.
3) Wireless network adapter. There are several changes coming in the Wireless world in the near future that will reduce the power requirements of wireless networking. As 802.11n moves from draft to production standards and the equipment become inter operable, we will see more usage of the N mode networking which will allow for most network cards to run at lower power for the same connectivity we see today. WiMax and other similar technologies will also bring lower power consumption for wireless networking.
4) Sub 40nm chips. As we shrink circuits smaller and smaller, we are finding that they, in general, require less power to operate. In addition, new materials, such as the new High-k materials, are required to allow circuits to operate correctly at this smaller scale and these new materials are also introducing power savings. As RAM, CPU, and main chipset chips are moved to the smaller die size we will find they use less and less power.
5) Non-Volatile MRAM. Another power consumer is main memory. Even if the system is idle, RAM requires power just to maintain the data stored in it. New technologies are just coming to fruition that will create RAM that does not require power constantly but will be just as fast as current RAM offerings and not have the life span problems that Flash RAM has.
Combine all of these changes with the fact that we may see Li-Ion batteries that have 3-5 times the capacity of today's Li-Ion batteries on a size to size or weight to weight ratio, I expect that over the next 5 years we will see personal electronic devices shrink to down to the point where they are practically non-existent -
Yeah -- so what?If a protocol is released in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
I've read a variety of posts about the problems with FireWire (see here and here from what I found on Google), and the big problem is that FireWire didn't become a de facto standard seven or eight years ago when it was really needed. These days, it seems like few computers other than Macs ship with FireWire standard, and I've never seen a laptop in the wild outside of Macs with a six-pin FireWire 400 port, let alone 800.
I've heard this is chiefly due to Apple's initial intransigence regarding licensing; they demanded $1 per computer to use the "FireWire" name, making other device makers really angry. Considering how slim hardware margins are, no one was going to go for it. FireWire 400 is still technically superior to USB 2.0 in many ways, even today, but it's never reached the market penetration it needs, and now USB 2.0 is "good enough" for most purposes.
I use a Mac and so do many family members, and I've long counseled them to get only FireWire drives for backups. When Leopard came out, some were shopping for drives, and I found that I could not find FW400/USB 2 drives for as little as plain USB 2.0 drives. In other words, the FireWire premium for HDs appears to be at least $30. Not a good sign for market penetration.
Now FW 3200 is being discussed when FW 800 already seems dead on arrival in consumer land, and only supported to the limited extent it is by Apple. Not making it backwards compatible with FW400 was an idiotic decision that ensured whatever chance it had in the market was gone. In the meantime, eSATA and the like have come along and perhaps obviated the need for many FireWire applications altogether.
-
10G over copper
Why bother digging up all those trenches when you can keep the copper and get your 10G, so they say.
-
Even Microsoft tried to push for ECC RAM
The perils of RAM just seems to be one of those open secrets. Apparently even Microsoft has tried pushing for ECC RAM in all machines (including dekstops) as memory errors have risen to the top 10 causes of system crashes according to their crash analysis.
Earlier this decade I was living with strange, random crashes when booting Linux that would only seemingly only occur when booting from cold (but not every time!). It was only years later when running a memtest on someone else's sticks (which turned out to be fine in their machine) that I learned that the motherboard was unhappy with the timing settings even though the RAM was rated as being compatible with said settings.
A few years later on a different machine I was MD5summing a big file locally and the sum turned out to be different to what was expected. For whatever reason I tried doing a MD5sum of the same file over a network filesystem (as the server was running Samba) and was surprised to find that the sum came to the expected result. Upon reruning the MD5sum locally the sum was again incorrect...
I have also seen a not inexpensive system throw up SCSI errors and effectively make the disks disappear from the operating system while doing RAID 5 with a hardware SCSI RAID controller after a single disk failure. Apparently if a SCSI disk fails in a particularly rare manner it is possible for it to keep the bus busy and thus disable communication with any other drives on same bus. Thankfully the backups worked (the filesystem had been corrupted) but if your data is important you can never be too careful. As disk and memory sizes go up along with the rates that data are transferred the chances of rare circumstances like bit flips happening only increase. The question is - will you notice the problem before it's too late and are how much are you willing to pay (in terms of money and performance) to reduce the odds? -
Re:Solar system escape velocity!
Actually it sounds like it might be both. http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201804852 This article mentions a centrally located spacecraft that provides the laser and is also kept in place by the laser it generates. "Our approach to photonic laser propulsion is based on forming an active resonant optical cavity between two high-reflectance mirrors located separately in two space platforms," in other words, it seems to be beam riding, not an independent thruster you can mount on a spacecraft and turn around. This means to get to Mars in less than a week an expensive infrastructure of laser platforms would have to be built.
-
Re:Waste of time
Of course you would think that but these were the facts back then if you didn't work for Microsoft. I have to ask you how long it will be before Microsoft offers an unstandardized extension to VC-1 to the studios. If anyone could speculate, you could and I'm thoroughly curious. I've long since stopped believing that all this technology is for fantastic image quality, ease of use and achiving digital nirvana. No, it's about getting royalties. The rest is a side show.
VC-1 and the road it took is now history subject to interpretation. However, I was on several news groups as a fly on the wall with some very connected people where all this was under daily discussion. A lot happened between 2002 and 2006. It was a group I had known during the early days of the ATSC and my ITS affiliations with people coming and going. Also in the group were people I didn't know who appeared to crystal ball what was going on in SMPTE. The proof was what I read in these groups is what actually occurred and was publicly known a few days later. There was no reason to doubt what was being said or what constantly changing pressures were occuring. There were more political hurdles with adoption than technical ones. A fascination for the process is what kept me engaged.
The statements that H.264 outperformed VC-1 were from them and I've confirmed it myself with my own tests. Not in the 2002 DVD Forum era but in 2007 with present day hardware. (yes, H.264 is still a pig to compress) There were plenty of fans of VC-1 as well but standardization was the biggest roadblock to acceptance. The holdup with MPEG LA was real with their onerous licensing terms which would make H.264 unaffordable. That went on for a long time. Microsoft created their own controversy over licensing terms for VC-1 but that ony slowed ratification. The delay the MPEG LA created was the only reason VC-1 had time to get standardized for final inclusion in Blu-ray. Otherwise, Blu-ray would have been finalized much earlier without VC-1 - back when Microsoft was still stonewalling and filibustering SMPTE. VC-1 was apparently in, out, then in again.
If you don't remember the Microsoft announcement about VC-1 entering Final Committee Draft (and a rubber stamp away from ratification) before the actual vote, that occurred when a trigger happy PR person extended an upcoming vote to mean Final Committee Draft Status had occurred and told the trade rags. It was later retracted but not for a week. There was intense pressure to get VC-1 ratified by NAB'06 and someone jumped the gun.
Microsoft had a big booth with lots of partners which would be irrelevant at NAB if VC-1 wasn't at least in FCD. I no longer have these references and you're welcome to doubt me if you like. You can also read this which has been roundly refuted by Joe Kane but encapsulates most of the chatter I was witnessing in real time.
-
Better information on this
There is an article about discrete track recording that explains it pretty well. Using materials with different magnetic properties they are able to map channels onto the platter (hence the 'discrete'). Presumably this might would be cumbersome to manufacture for larger discs, but less so with smaller disks.
-
Re:The moderator thinks you r informative
Indeed. The line-edge-roughness is becoming a bigger and bigger issue as the lithography industry searches for what to use for next-generation patterning technology. Based on the talks I've been to (I do research in a related field), the large efforts that were put into developing "extreme-ultraviolet lithography" (EUV), which would use 13.5 nm illumination, are not working out. The technology is not ready (e.g. they still don't have a light-source operating at that wavelength that generates enough light...) and is very much more expensive than anything we're using today. Many in the research end are now thinking that we cannot depend upon EUV to fill the future roadmap nodes.
I agree that there are going to have to be some big changes. Some sort of disruptive technology is going to be needed. One promising area is the rather simple concept of "nanoimprint lithography": where instead of using light to shine through a mask and pattern a polymer resist (which is then used to etch patterns into the silicon), you physically press a single (reusable) high-fidelity (high-cost) mask into a polymer, at a temperature where the polymer is liquid-like. The patterned polymer resist can then be used to etch Silicon in the usual way.
This physical embossing has been shown to generate pattern fidelity way beyond what you would naively expect: sub 30-nm feature accuracy has been demonstrated. Nanoimprint is a comparatively simple and cheap methodology. When combined with the other recent advances in lithography infrastructure (like high-precision registry alignment systems), it seems quite plausible that nanoimprint will be able to deliver the features required for next-generation chips. Of course, many details need to be worked out, but it's a very promising, and rather disruptive, new technology (and has been added to the ITRS roadmap). -
Re:More Like....
But do they have more to gain from selling the hardware, or from their cut of the revenue? Estimates of profits on the hardware are anywhere from 23% ($138) to 55% ($329) of the cost of the phones (for the $599 iPhone, not sure about the $499 one). According to your links, Apple gets either $3 per contract ($72 over 2 years) or $11 ($264 over 2 years), depending on whether the AT&T customer is new to AT&T or not.
Depending on the balance of new customers to old (and 4GB iPhones to 8GB iPhones), Apple may just make more money by letting people buy the phone and use it with any provider, especially considering that the legal fees to try to enforce the locked phone policy would probably wipe out any difference in revenue from lost AT&T customers. That's provided that AT&T doesn't make too much of a stink with Apple about it. In any case, I'm sure the number of people who actually will end up unlocking their phones will be relatively small, so even AT&T doesn't have much to worry about, and Apple can enjoy those few extra sales that they'll get from it. -
Re:An additional note, if you're curious...
"I'm not counting Registry as part of what I want, because as far as I can see, the Registry sits on top of the Filesystem itself -- in the *.reg files. (System.reg, User.reg, etc.) To me, the Registry is just another database sitting on top of the filesystem, an alternate API to the filesystem API itself." - by SanityInAnarchy (655584) on Thursday August 16, @10:43PM (#20256775)
The things I noted, are kernel subsystems, in IOManager, Cache Manager, Memory Manager, Configuration Manager,& one I omitted earlier in Object Manager.
(They're not API calls exported from a library, they're literally part of the OS kernel itself & subsystems (in windows' case, libs = dll's (dynamic link libraries), where ONLY the portion of what needs to be loaded is called from the dll, & loading INTO THE CALLING APP's MEMORY SPACE (thus, dynamically "linked"))...
The REGISTRY "HIVES" (flat file tables linked to one another, not like a typical relational database though) not called SYSTEM.REG/USER.REG by the way... the hives are called:
SYSTEM
SAM
SECURITY
DEFAULT
UserDiff
AND, Everything does "sit on" (use) those subsystems mentioned above, that performs I/O... IF I were to draw it? It'd look something like this:
----
1.) Application (performing a read operation NtReadFile) -> I/O Manager (fielding a read Interrupt Request Packet (IRP))-> FileSystem Driver
(Gets "trickier" here, because a read can be marked 'cached' OR 'non-cached', & thus, you have a possible branch here to) ->
2A.) Cache Manager (if cached & if cache miss, off the Memmgr below, because of page faults)->
OR
2B.) Memory Manager (if non-cached)->
3.) Then, lastly, off to the Disk Driver (actually talking to disk)
----
& that's pretty much how IO is governed by Windows NT-based OS... on reads.
"When writing a program, it helps to know about things like page cache, and yes, I would like to see filesystems/OSes implement this better. But the actual filesystem API itself -- the open/read/write/sync library calls -- is too limiting/low-level to let the OS/filesystem do the kind of optimizations I'd like, without risking corruption" - by SanityInAnarchy (655584) on Thursday August 16, @10:43PM (#20256775)
AMD is releasing kits for multiprocessor systems, for JUST THAT VERY THING (the ability to meter cache hits/misses to help optimize an app's I/O, by optimizing how it uses the cache pretty much by letting a dev analyze this himself (supposedly, it does not require OS lib/dll API functions, OR, a filtering driver either, though I don't know HOW they could do this, without that):
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml;jsessionid=TZEX4EJZT3L1CQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=20 1500201
"See, the Registry may just have an API that lets it do that" - by SanityInAnarchy (655584) on Thursday August 16, @10:43PM (#20256775)
On deferred/lazy writes? Well, so does other diskbound I/O, albeit, via the cache manager subsystem... noted above, in my Application READ "illustration", & like you are describing, here below next (quoting you):
****
"On a desktop or server, where the disk is always spinning and you want max performance, you just defer the write till there's not many reads happening, then write immediately, everything you can, till someone needs to read." - by SanityInAnarchy (655584) on Thursday August 16, @10:43PM (#20256775)
****
"Is this possible from a user perspective? For example, can a non-admin create a complete or partial copy-on-write copy of a file?" - by SanityInAnarchy (655584) on Thursday August 16, @10:43PM (#20256775)
Copy on write (COW) occurs ONLY if say, you & I are chasing the same file on disk to make edits of somekind to it... I get a COPY (or you) -
Re:Just wipe out the Exif?Interesting. I did find a few papers on the subject, but also ran across this:
Additional analog-signal-processing circuitry located in the periphery of the array permits suppression of both temporal and fixed-pattern noise. While fixed-pattern noise was an issue with early CMOS active-pixel image sensors, recent sensors have no discernible fixed-pattern noise induced by circuitry and are instead limited by dark current in the pixels. Dark currents of less than 1,000 electrons/second per pixel at room temperature are routinely achieved.
I'm hardly an expert, but perhaps advancements in CMOS cameras might render foresnic sensor noise pattern analysis redundant. -
Old news?