Slashdot Mirror

Announced a few days ago, nanotech research currently in the quarter billion dollar US range is set to be doubled by the Federal Government over the next few years. The Feds are recognizing the immense possibilites of nanotechnolgy and want to set up a "peer review process" (Sound familiar?) to allocate the funds best.

EngrBohn writes "According to the EE Times, Toshiba has developed paper-thin IC packages, getting ICs down to 50microns thick. First marketed product is to be ultra-thin flash memories stacked into a SmartMedia card. Envisioned applications include mounting a circuit on a curved surface and, for the conspiracy theorists, a postage-stamp-sized transmitter & antenna that can be pasted to any surface. "

KoNfUzEd writes "EETimes has this artcile about how 2 artists have possibly solved, cheaply, how to display 3D images without glasses and with almost no additional cost to existing LCD screens. " I'm pretty sure we mentioned this before, but this is a nice followup piece. I think this would be great. But I think I have a 3d fettish.

Intel and HP have been awarded 2 patents which reveal more about Merced. Speculatively executing both code paths originating at a conditional branch wastes resources which could be better used concentrating on one path. By applying speculative execution only when branch-prediction will probably fail, speculative execution is minimised to the cases where it will really help. In pretty much unrelated news, Intel's selling toys which might actually teach kids something.

Anonymous Coward writes "I must remain anonymous for fear of job security, however... Sprint is a client of ours and we have been given a contract to sign that includes (among other things) a bit that goes like this: Supplier warrants that no GNU, FSF, or copylefted software shall be used in the production of services for Sprint. I'm still trying to figure out if this means that I have to uninstall gawk, apache, sendmail, BIND, etc., from my (non-linux) UNIX systems.... Afraid I can't include a link to the exact contract verbage, but it's 100% factual, I just read the contract myself. "

I also received an email from an EE claiming that Synopsys had informed him that they would be porting their tools to Linux. This would be an important step since Linux is ideal for large simulation/synthesis farms: cheap hardware and stable OS that can be left in a computer room. In related news, Green Mountain Computing Systems has released their VHDL compiler for Linux, with a demo available for download. It is slightly faster than the NT version, with better memory performance.

TDO writes "According to this story, developers are trying to work around the $1 per port apple tax on fire wire.Check it out.. " The gist is that developers are going to create a backwards compatible version without Apple Intellectual Property. But it'll take a few years.

At the moment there's a high demand for programmers in the US, especially female ones (why would an employer pay a higher recruiter's fee for a woman? Is this a "team-work thing"?) And with only 25-30 thousand new BSc's a year in IT, it may last. However, I wonder how much of the demand is temporary, related to fixing Y2K or in Europe the conversion from national currencies to the Euro. What do you think?

schwantz writes "Head of Transmeta spills a few more nuggets... Sounds like Linus may be writing compilers..." Enough hype! Draw us a diagram already!

pHil_3iEM dropped us a line pointing out an EETimes article talking about the rise of GNU EDA tools for use within that industry. The first tools are a VDHL simulator, and schematic and board-design tools.

Jeff Foust writes " This press release from JPL states that the ion engine of NASA's Deep Space 1 is back online and has been running continuously since Tuesday evening.". In other science news, EETimes is covering what IBM has been up to in its R&D labs... focussing on projects that deliver products quickly. One of the developments is a 200 dpi colour 16-inch diagonal paperlike screen. I'd like one of those please ;-)

Stradivarius writes "San Francisco based BitJazz Inc. has developed a lossless compression technology derived from quantum thermodynamics, which it calls "condensation". Unlike many other approaches which work one scan line at a time, their algorihm finds implicit patterns in the entire image, yielding an average compression ratio of 2.5. "

Sun is opening up the Java API design process. It only took them a kick in the teeth to realise they had to do something, but hopefully the lesson has been learnt. I hope the Linux-membership discount will be the full $5000.

Stradivarius wrote in to say "New developments in computing theory suggest that analog computing may be more powerful than its digital counter part. The latest thesis claims that some computational problems can only be solved by analog neural networks. Since neural networks are essentially analog computers, the work suggests, on a theoretical level, that analog operations are inherently more powerful than digital."

While Merced is on track for 2000, it's role will be limited to that of a launch vehicle for IA-64. Indeed, the next generation x86 (Foster) will deliver similar performance to native IA-64 code on Merced for most apps. Only apps requiring 64 bit addressing would benefit from Merced. However this picture will change in late 2001 with McKinley which should be twice as fast. In 2003, a derivative of McKinley in 0.13 micron may be cheap enough to ship for high-end PCs. A big headache for Intel will be how to convince software developers to migrate. S: My personal opinion is that the next really large leap in computing requirements will be driven by Artificial Intelligence software, for tasks such as natural language processing and integrating knowledge into a model of the world... but within 5 years? What do you think will be the next CPU-power sink? Games? In related news, ST's new PC on a chip will run Linux.

EETimes interviewed Linus recently. Nothing terribly new, but nice to see more mainstream press attention.

As most of you probably already know, the number of H1-B visas has been increased for the next three years. This will be associated with a program to produce more American IT workers. Even today many more students are enrolling for computer science majors. Apparently however, they're not natural born hackers.

Alledgedly Transmeta technology is in IBM's latest multicore PowerPC chip In related Transmeta news, I have heard from a second source that Transmeta's x86 has legacy features such as real mode taken out... unlike Merced that will contain x86 compatibility, giving Microsoft the opportunity to add more thunking! (just what was needed to build a stable OS). And for those that argue that anything published in The Register is wrong, perhaps they should cast their eyes on to this C'T article.

Linux' support of EDA is improving as Avant! Corp. prepares to port its Polaris Verilog simulator and Design Acceleration Inc.'s recent port of SignalScan (a debugging environment), Verilog simulation is marching toward the forefront of the Linux EDA movement. Other vendors, such as Fintronic USA are reporting a sudden upsurge in demand for Linux versions of their products. Other vendors such as Novas Software are rethinking their plans given Engineers' preference for Linux. One of the main interests appears to be simulation farms on PCs running Linux which fits better than NT into Unix networks. Indeed even Wellspring whose "decision to drop Linux support" was big news last week revealed that this decision was taken over 2 years ago.

Although processor vendors have been touting increased MHz for higher performance, this source of speed is almost tapped out. For instance in the 1GHz speed range, the number of gates that can be used for each stage of the pipeline is severely limited. Instead processor vendors will have to turn to exploiting parallelism to gain power: Intel, HP and AMD are targeting instruction level parallelism with EPIC and macro-ops/deep pipeline buffering respectively. Alpha and IBM are targeting both instruction level parallelism and thread level parallelism with either a very fast on-die communications protocol with other cores (Alpha) or multiple cores on a single die (IBM). This EETimes article also reveals how IA32 will be supported on Merced (IA32 to IA64 translation, like x86 to RiscOps in the PII/K5/K6).

What if we no longer had to depend on the whims of the ISPs? What if, instead, for $500, we could get free unlimited lifetime Internet? Sounds like a dream, but self-employed Timothy J. Shepard wants to put his PhD thesis into practice His idea: a network of personnal radio transceivers capable of 200 Mbits/second. However, two problems lie on his path: cost reduction and routing. Sounds like good material for a free hardware project to me.

Apparently Sun has scrapped its plans for a family of Native Java chips. Despite that, other manufacturers are building Java Chips. Remains to see whether IBM (a MicroJava 701 licensee) will do, given its Java strategy

Daedalus writes "The first detailed block diagram of Intel Corp.'s upcoming Merced microprocessor has been summarized by EE Times online here. "

A new study in the EE Times is talking about how necessary reuse of chip design will be needed. This reflection comes after research into how to keep chip costs down. Interesting to see financial models applied to design strategies.

A new study in the EE Times is talking about how necessary reuse of chip design will be needed. This reflection comes after research into how to keep chip costs down. Interesting to see financial models applied to design strategies.

The H-1B visa bill has easily passed Congress, increasing the quota of H-1B visas for the next 3 years. Some of the revenue generated from H-1B application fees will go towards improving education. Personally being in the US on one, and hoping my wife can get a job, I'm relieved. But, many of my colleagues worry that other more desperate foreigners who have more to lose by being kicked out from their jobs will work 18 hour shifts not to loose the opportunity of getting a Green-Card. Obviously, that decreases the bargaining power of US workers to work no more than 40 hours a week. Seems to me that the problem lies in the absolute power the companies wield over H-1B workers, rather than H-1B workers themselves. What do you think? Being from Europe, I was somewhat surprised when people told me that it was hard for Americans to get visas to work in Europe. Anybody have similar experiences?

talon wrote in to send us a link to an EETimes article about the debaate over the term 'engineer'. Apparently a recent plane crash might have been caused by a software glitch, so now Software Engineer Certification might start getting more important.

talon wrote in to send us a link to an EETimes article about the debaate over the term 'engineer'. Apparently a recent plane crash might have been caused by a software glitch, so now Software Engineer Certification might start getting more important.

Daedalus writes "EE Times Online has a feature article on the future of different display technologies. " All I know is that I want my next screen to be about 1 inch thick.

Bill Rugolsky writes " A research compiler environment is available from HP for an architecture with EPIC features. It does predication, etc. Maybe somebody wants to look at how the techniques used fit into the GCC framework? " Update This page gives an overview of the inner workings of Trimaran.

Some new information has emerged about Katmai's new instructions (aka MMX2). Apparently, the details of Clive Turvey's KNI page are essentially correct. Moreover the KNI instructions will allow the use of 4 (versus 2 for 3DNow!) 32 single precision FP numbers. Since 128 bit registers will not fit into the 80 bit space allocated for saving the FP registers, OS's will have to be updated for them to switch between 2 KNI tasks, but a doubling of the FP bandwidth makes that very worthwhile. (Ok... I goofed confusing it with integer 16bit stuff, so I updated the article. Thanks for pointing that out.)

This article at eetimes goes into the architecture of Deep Blue's special purpose chess chips. As more and more functionality (3d graphics, wavetable synthesis) is moved off the CPU, I wonder how long it will be until we have AI chips performing various kinds of search for games such as Chess, Go, but also Command and Conquer. In related news, IBM is presenting its G5 to the HotChips conference: a chip that has totally duplicated instruction and execution units to garantee reliability and availability. (Gets rid of those nasty kernel-compilation sig 11s ;-))

This article at eetimes goes into the architecture of Deep Blue's special purpose chess chips. As more and more functionality (3d graphics, wavetable synthesis) is moved off the CPU, I wonder how long it will be until we have AI chips performing various kinds of search for games such as Chess, Go, but also Command and Conquer. In related news, IBM is presenting its G5 to the HotChips conference: a chip that has totally duplicated instruction and execution units to garantee reliability and availability. (Gets rid of those nasty kernel-compilation sig 11s ;-))

The US Department of Commerce has unveiled a new web site, dedicated to IT training programs across the US. This site was made in response to the projected shortfall of IT workers in the near future. If you recall, there was a big hubaloo about allowing more tech worker immigrants in to combat this same issue, and the arguement is still raging over whether or not more workers will be needed. Certainly seems that way to me.

talon wrote in to tell us about this story where you can read about the Bell Lab scientists latest wacky experiments. This time they're running electricity through bacteria, which seems to cause them to change color. The article says this could be used for thin screens. I'm sure there are a thousand silly bacterial jokes that I can make, but I'm bigger than that.

Cyrix has disclosed some news on the "Jalapeno" P2 killer No release date is available, nor is any mention made of the chip itself on their homepage, but expect to hear more at the Microprocessor Forum. Where Cyrix is differentiating itself from the rest of the pack is its emphasis on the system performance (no need to put a Porsche engine into a Trabant). With complete control over the whole system (graphics core integrated), they should be able to squeeze more out of their motherboards. But then Intel has also joined them on the integration war-path. In other news, more companies have announced what their current research into SOI has achieved. Many are targetting the embedded world. For instance, Sharp has a 15mW SOI 50Mhz ARM chip. Thanks, Scott Lewis.

Despite the slew of companies that appeared to rush to embrace Windows CE, they may have only been hedging their bets. Psion's EPOC-32 OS is doing rather well in the telecomunications industry, and most of the consumer electronics companies still feel their own OS's are in the running. And don't forget Java... I wonder whether Microsoft will be able to play the various competitors off each other or whether the consumer electronics business will realise that they'll lose brand differentiation if they go along the CE path.

Despite the slew of companies that appeared to rush to embrace Windows CE, they may have only been hedging their bets. Psion's EPOC-32 OS is doing rather well in the telecomunications industry, and most of the consumer electronics companies still feel their own OS's are in the running. And don't forget Java... I wonder whether Microsoft will be able to play the various competitors off each other or whether the consumer electronics business will realise that they'll lose brand differentiation if they go along the CE path.

Compaq's 200 Digital engineers are busy working on two new Alpha designs: the 21364 (aka EV 7) and 21464. The 21364 is being designed for symmetric-multiprocessing boards holding up to 64 CPUs... and will a pretty enormous chip with 100 million transistors on-board. Speeds are expected to range from 750Mhz to 1.2Ghz. In the mean-time, more details of Merced have come to light: it will include a "prefetch to branch mechanism (I assume an explicit instruction: preload addresses x into the cache) and register windowing since the way predication and speculation use the registers may require more that the 128 of them Merced has. Furthermore, to optimize effectively, compilers' code generators will need a more global view of the code than the local view they currently are given, which will require significant rewrites of compiler back-ends.

In what may prove a significant blow to low cost x86 manufacturers and embedded processor developers such as MIPS, Intel has been working on a ARM 110 and media DSP combination, code named StrongArm 1500. This is also good for Corel Computer's Netwinder. In related news, the price of copper manufacturing is higher than expected. A good round up of the last two weeks events can be read at C'T.

According to EETimes, Intel will integrate its new 3D graphics chip i740 into Whitney, its Mendocino chipset, following a path pioneered by Cyrix in its MediaGX processors. Unlike the Cyrix solution, OEMs have the option to use a separate memory or system memory to store the frame-buffer. It will be interesting to see by what percentage system speed differs. Since other chipset vendors (SIS, VIA) are on the same attack vector, the days of low end graphics card vendors may be numbered. Let's hope that the integrated graphics vendors will not be so NDA happy that Xfree/fbcon become limited to a few systems: these moves spell cheaper systems at the cost of lower choice.

EETimes has coverage of last week's "Future of Linux" conference. This one recognises that Merced support should be simple (the 64 bit hurdle is long past). What really interests me is that Intel seems to have noticed us: 36 bit physical memory support, MMX support (what does that mean? auto-SIMD in gcc from C code like Metroworks can???), fast system calls (Appendix H stuff?). High profile players like Intel and Oracle and good press from the EDA media like EE-Times may also encourage the EDA vendors to support Linux.

EETimes has coverage of last week's "Future of Linux" conference. This one recognises that Merced support should be simple (the 64 bit hurdle is long past). What really interests me is that Intel seems to have noticed us: 36 bit physical memory support, MMX support (what does that mean? auto-SIMD in gcc from C code like Metroworks can???), fast system calls (Appendix H stuff?). High profile players like Intel and Oracle and good press from the EDA media like EE-Times may also encourage the EDA vendors to support Linux.