$6 System-On-A-Chip Mimics Human Vision

Brian McLaughlin writes "This article in TechWeb describes a Visual Perception Processor (costing $6) that can automatically detect objects and track their movement in real time, according to Buereau d'Etudes Vision (BEV). They claim that a full-blown vision processing system/application could be built for less than $50 that rivals current state-of-the-art $10,000 systems. Sounds pretty cool. " Heck, with my vision, I could tear my eyeballs out and simply use these, at a fraction of the cost of new glasses.

Comments

You guys are all missing the point

[Digital11]

Ok, now before I get kinda pissed about this, think about what you're saying first guys. This isn't some awesome new vision system that will allow blind people to see. It is just a method of emulating the way the brain processes signals from your eyes, and using that information to track objects.

The brain-eye system uses layers of parallel-processing neurons that pass the signal through a series of preprocessing steps, resulting in real-time tracking of multiple moving objects within a visual scene.

Get it now? So please guys, don't get any *SMART* ideas and jab your eyes out so you can buy a nice new $6 dollar replacement. (I know no one was actually serious about that, but you guys did still miss the point. Its not the camera thats important, and it would do no good to put xray or a zoom lense on there because you're not looking for the output of what its seeing. Its a TRACKING device. So its not used for monitoring either... geez.) \rant

We wouldn't need this kind of specialized hardware

[TheDullBlade]

...if the general-purpose hardware wasn't so stupid. Of the millions of transistors on a modern chip, most of them are wasted in maintaining the illusion of sequential operation, while the OS writers go to considerable trouble to create the illusion of parallel operation.

Furthermore, there are the huge (in terms of transistor count) banks of flip-flops which just sit around most of the time, and the costly layers of cache all working their hardest to maintain the illusion that it is RAM. Meanwhile, software optimizers make sure to access memory sequentially to avoid upsetting this illusion, which would ruin the performance.

You can justify all this nonsense with the argument that software is written for sequential machines with RAM. It's a circular problem. If somebody would just release a cheap massively parallel system, the programmers would learn to use it efficiently.

You can make a complete processor in a few thousand transistors (as this guy has done, though he goes a bit off the deep end...), and you can add a bit (a few K) of high-speed RAM and network them easily enough to make a (dare I say it?) Beowulf cluster on a chip. Each might only run at one tenth the speed of a modern CPU, but you could have hundreds of them for the same cost, giving you bips and gflops for the price of mips.

It would also make the whole design process a lot easier and faster. One simple processor, repeated hundreds or thousands of times. Every advance in production would bring a direct and proportional improvement in performace, with a tiny added design cost. Forget special graphics or sound processors, just plug in more processor banks like you would add memory today and watch your system fly.

C'mon hardware guys, we software guys aren't that stupid! We don't need your illusion of a 386!