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T-Engine Enables Ubiquitous Computing

Posted by timothy on from the does-not-stand-for-turbo dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A Japanese-government sponsored research consortium that include five chip makers and 17 other Japanese high-tech firms, has announced that the T-Engine, a ubiquitous computing platform is ready for prime time. The engine is featured in a IEEE Computer Society article (PDF) and discussed more on Windley's Technometria. The system is based on the iTron real-time OS and includes multiple boards for different applications."

8 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. wtf mate? by inkdesign · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "With any luck your 2007 Toyota Camry and your Mitsubishi food processor will be exchanging recipes in the not too distant future."

    I'd prefer my car stick to driving, thank you.

  2. Re:um? by torpor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is this just better because it's newer or?

    its better because its older, not newer. i-tron, and its descendants, are the results of 30 years of computer-science research on ways to get collaborative computing systems into operation.

    the ARM core scenario is derived from the desire to have common platforms being used by multiple, different vendors. it was i-tron which prompted the industry to adopt ARM and similar initiatives, and it is the i-tron philosophy of common cores and platforms which have allowed ARM to flourish in the embedded world in the first place.

    JAVA was an 'Americanization' of the i-tron initiative, only it hasn't had as much success in the embedded world because of the lack of hardware adaptation that i-tron has prompted; at least, with the big Asian chip foundries, anyway, this is true, and we all know that the embedded space is dominated by the Asians ...

    this latest instatnce of the T-Engine is the realization of some very old, honored traditions in the embedded space. the dream of having your microwave oven use your cell phone for that little extra calculation power it needs to get your meringue fluffed right is just one step closer ..

    --
    ; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
  3. hmmmmm... by new+death+barbie · · Score: 5, Funny

    if there aren't security and privacy implications, you're probably not doing anything very fun.


    I think I used to date this guy...
    --

    It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.

  4. Re:Embedded Development by torpor · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't think they will be able to get everyone to hew to the party line; there will be too many economic reasons to deviate.

    umm .. take any single Asian-produced cell phone, and at its heart you will find pieces of the i-tron initiative. it has already been proven in this space that there are far, far greater reasons to comply with the party line than to deviate. insta-deviation for the sake of it is anathema to the i-tron initiative; it is this very powerful fact that has resulted in such growth in the Asian core and embedded mfr. market in the first place.

    american electronics/semiconductor giants ridiculed i-tron, and its resulting policies, in the 80's, and Asia has been eating the carcass of former US' manufacturing prowess for lunch. if it weren't for i-tron, philosophically, we wouldn't be buying EUro 5,- MP3 players, made in Taiwan instead of Kansas, at the Aldi checkout lines ..

    if you're a US comp-sci person, and you haven't boned up on i-tron, you've got some history lessons ahead of you. quick, before its too late.

    --
    ; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
  5. Finally, I can use my microwave from my PC.... by darksider415 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been waiting for a system of this calibre to come along for quite a while. To me, the T-Engine specification, along with iTron, is a tool that can revolutionize how we look at our daily life. For some, it means that they may not have to worry about having to leave their PC to make coffee during a Gentoo install. This specification can and will change the way we look at how we view computers in our daily lives. This is the age of the computer, plain and simple. This system will make computers an even more important, and more critical part of our daily lives.

    --
    And they wonder why I left Windows.....
  6. Commerical and criminal abuse of this by G4from128k · · Score: 4, Interesting
    When everything is networked, the potential for commercial and criminal abuses becomes that much higher.
    1. A phisher sends a small worm to your stereo, the stereo asks the user to re-input the password on the DRM system, the phisher collects that password and uses it to re-sell all your music (possibly making you lose the right to listen to it). Even at $0.02/song and a 5,000 song collection, the phisher gets $100 per cracked stereo.
    2. Phishers attack one, low-level device hoping that the phished password from that device is also used on other, more important devices. How many people might use the same password on their stereo's DRM system, their refrigerator's automatic reordering system, their car's ignition system, or their bank's online account access?
    3. Spams starts arriving on ALL audio devices -- audio pop-ups ("audiups"?) start intruding on iPODs, VOIP phones, stereos. Worse, the infection could attack anything with a sound chip. Imagine suggestive Viagra ads coming from your pop-up toaster oven.
    4. A sleazy marketer buys access to or plants spyware in your vehicle's navigation system. You start getting pop-ups for oil-lube places or the database of locations of competitors becomes corrupted misleading the driver on their location.
    5. Digital cameras become spam-sending zombies. Anyone who walks within bluetooth range of you suddenly finds an image file on their device that contains an ad for whatever is the latest spam du jour.
    6. ...... I'm sure there are a million other scenarios, but its early and my coffee hasn't sunk in.
    The point: Cool technology, but I wonder if the core OS has needed security layers to prevent exploits like these. I wonder if the systems designers have embedded a strong sense of permissions on processes and interfaces.
    --
    Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
  7. What's actually come out of the TRON project? by argent · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I've been hearing about the TRON project for something like 20 years now, starting with the TRON microprocessor... the ultimate CISC. We're talking about a processor that has "insert a record into a doubly linked list" as a fundamental instruction. And they're still pushing this super-CISC as an improvement over RISC.

    Has anyone outside MITI actually done an objective comparison of TRON with any contemporary RISC? The examples I've seen are ludicrous... comparisons "proving" that TRON is faster than RISC by comparing individual highly specialised TRON instructions with a straightforward unoptimized translation of the same code to an unspecified RISC processor. They don't even do any common subexpression elimination... who would write code like this?
    MOV @(RDQ_TBL+4,R2*8),Rn
    MOV R1,@(RDQ_TBL+4,R2*8)
    MOVA @(RDQ_TBL,R2*8),@(R1,FOR)
    MOV Rn,@(R1,BACK)
    MOV R1,@(Rn,FOR)
    http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/tronvlsicpu.html
  8. Nobody cares about TRON outside of Japan by heli_flyer · · Score: 4, Informative

    I used to work at Hitachi America so I know about TRON/iTRON/microITRON/etc. It's this weird, baroque API that's non-POSIX and not standard C library compatible. Kind of like an extreme example of Not-Invented-Here syndrome. For some reason Hitachi Japan thought everyone wanted it without realizing that nobody outside Japan cared about it. We kinda tried to humor them..."sure, we will distribute microITRON if customers ask for it".