That was 2007. I've been on the same gig for a while now.
My job isn't a secret. It's quite public facing in some ways. But some things are not my secrets to give away, even though they are very nice things technologically speaking.
They aren't. Not as far as I can tell. I swim in both seas.
SoCs have some integration issues because they tend to emphasize IP reuse (I.E. dropping in standard designs for things like interfaces) and IP reuse is always more difficult that it looks on the surface. CPUs tend to focus more on build-it-youself architecture. But the distinctions are very blurred these days. CPUs tend to be associated with big core/desktop SoCs tend to be associated with small core/hand held
So I don't think SoC vs CPU is a real distinction any more. They're all SoCs, it's just that the scale is different.
Clearly I made the mistake of posting my throwaway comment that landed as the first post, so people responded to it.
So I will add more detail:
I don't develop process technology, but I get to design logic circuits on this technology and it is indeed rather awesome. After 20 years of gradual and steady feature size reduction, the switch to 22nm and beyond appears feels like a step in improvement way beyond the normal gradual improvement. In that sense it is rather awesome, because things that were previously too expensive to contemplate now start to look cheap and easy.
>Everyone I know with a Wii has it sitting on a shelf collecting dust.
Not mine. The offspring has just diligently worked through the lego starwars trilogy and is starting on Okami.
The right way to view a Nintendo is to accept that it'll be fine for a year or two before you get bored, then you can pass it off to a child who will be delighted with it.
Steam on a PC gets me what I want. My Wii is relegated to the 11 year old's bedroom.
So here's how my purchasing landscape looks:
Xbox : Don't need it. My PC is fine. PS3: Don't need it. My PC is fine WiiU: It's an option to replace the Wii lost to offspring's bedroom.
DS : The offspring already has one. PSVita: Already got one. If I didn't have one I'd get one. No handheld comes close to a Vita.
Tablet: Where's the joystick? Where are the good games?
I suspect many adult gamers with children are in the same position. The details of microprocessors are irrelevant to me, even though I design them for a living.
I didn't say they were wrong about what goes on. I do suspect their numbers are biased high, based purely on my own experience. As noted many times in this discussion, bullies pick on the socially weak. To the extent that social weakness correlates with academic ability, you have a classic confounding variable.
I left that world behind and I work in an area where brains are your most important contribution. It's satisfying to note that my friends who went to college and did science all have had good lives over the past 20 odd years. Many of those who didn't, still live in the armpit of society and have lived what I would consider a hard life. I've discussed this with my former school friends and there's a common thread that we all looked into the pit of despair that was life around us and saw college as an escape from that and worked towards it.
This problem eventually goes away as people are sorted into classes based on their achievement.
Ha. You must be new to modern educational standardized testing.
Try and get ETS to publish statistical reliability and validity data for any of their tests. They won't, because the tests are statistically neither reliable nor valid. I.E. They don't give a consistent result and they don't test the thing they are intended to test for.
An anti bullying organization does a study and finds alarming rates of anti-academic bullying. Oh the surprise!
I went through the UK school system in a steelworks-and-mining area. Being academically successful was not a problem. I had friends up and down the academic scale. There was a palpable mutual dislike between the sports types (rugby mostly) and the academic types. But that was not a 'problem' academically. The teachers were divided along similar lines.
It probably goes on, but 90% is a nonsense number, borne of methodological bias, which is inevitable given who was doing the survey.
Marge in Marketing gets Sharepoint. Engineers get linux, vnc, git and real management and tools.
If you haven't tried it, it is hard to understand how awful sharepoint is, but it is a way of getting the uneducated to put their ms office files somewhere other than their laptop.
There is danger in the period between generating content on the PC and committing the data to SVN (or git depending on the project). I'm not dead yet, and when I am, I will not care about the missing 1 day of work.
>Yep, you've got to have a documented practice to keep track of the recovery keys encryption programs generate.
No. I work in a big corp. If I die, my FDE password dies with me and the data is gone. Real data is held on servers and managed. A PC is just an access device.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought everyone who cared knew what I did. Google RdRand and RdSeed. That's my thing.
That was 2007. I've been on the same gig for a while now.
My job isn't a secret. It's quite public facing in some ways. But some things are not my secrets to give away, even though they are very nice things technologically speaking.
>Is that sarcasm?
Not at all. The technology is awesome in that it is so much better than what went before and that makes it a joy to work on.
I think my comment was misinterpreted because it inadvertently landed as the first post.
>Why are SoCs more complex than CPU designs?
They aren't. Not as far as I can tell. I swim in both seas.
SoCs have some integration issues because they tend to emphasize IP reuse (I.E. dropping in standard designs for things like interfaces) and IP reuse is always more difficult that it looks on the surface.
CPUs tend to focus more on build-it-youself architecture. But the distinctions are very blurred these days.
CPUs tend to be associated with big core/desktop
SoCs tend to be associated with small core/hand held
So I don't think SoC vs CPU is a real distinction any more. They're all SoCs, it's just that the scale is different.
Clearly I made the mistake of posting my throwaway comment that landed as the first post, so people responded to it.
So I will add more detail:
I don't develop process technology, but I get to design logic circuits on this technology and it is indeed rather awesome.
After 20 years of gradual and steady feature size reduction, the switch to 22nm and beyond appears feels like a step in improvement way beyond the normal gradual improvement. In that sense it is rather awesome, because things that were previously too expensive to contemplate now start to look cheap and easy.
One one? There were multiple projects from multiple companies mentioned in the article.
I couldn't possibly comment because they'd fire me.
But it is rather awesome.
I live 200 yards from a tree-hugger supermarket that sells a lot of fancy chocolate including Theo and Kalila.
OMG! Won't anybody think of the chocolate?!
But conventional Hershey's tastes like wax anyway. Why bother?
My preference is Theo or Kalila 85% +
And no two beers could be in the same state at the same time.
We all live with danger. The challenge is to face it like a man.
> I can assure you that no one in this country knows how to use a roundabout.
I do, but I'm a transplant from the UK.
>It depends from which direction you are looking:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YYWUIxGdl4
>Is it just me, or are circles pointless?
Not if you look at them side on.
>Are kids 12 and under really getting iPhones these days?
Not here. The 11 year old gets an IPod + dumbphone. Kids want the games and they can text on an IPod. Paying for a data contract for a kid is insane.
>Everyone I know with a Wii has it sitting on a shelf collecting dust.
Not mine. The offspring has just diligently worked through the lego starwars trilogy and is starting on Okami.
The right way to view a Nintendo is to accept that it'll be fine for a year or two before you get bored, then you can pass it off to a child who will be delighted with it.
Parent of an 11 year old here.
Steam on a PC gets me what I want. My Wii is relegated to the 11 year old's bedroom.
So here's how my purchasing landscape looks:
Xbox : Don't need it. My PC is fine.
PS3: Don't need it. My PC is fine
WiiU: It's an option to replace the Wii lost to offspring's bedroom.
DS : The offspring already has one.
PSVita: Already got one. If I didn't have one I'd get one. No handheld comes close to a Vita.
Tablet: Where's the joystick? Where are the good games?
I suspect many adult gamers with children are in the same position. The details of microprocessors are irrelevant to me, even though I design them for a living.
>When?
1973 - 1988 or thereabout.
I didn't say they were wrong about what goes on. I do suspect their numbers are biased high, based purely on my own experience. As noted many times in this discussion, bullies pick on the socially weak. To the extent that social weakness correlates with academic ability, you have a classic confounding variable.
I left that world behind and I work in an area where brains are your most important contribution. It's satisfying to note that my friends who went to college and did science all have had good lives over the past 20 odd years. Many of those who didn't, still live in the armpit of society and have lived what I would consider a hard life. I've discussed this with my former school friends and there's a common thread that we all looked into the pit of despair that was life around us and saw college as an escape from that and worked towards it.
This problem eventually goes away as people are sorted into classes based on their achievement.
Ha. You must be new to modern educational standardized testing.
Try and get ETS to publish statistical reliability and validity data for any of their tests. They won't, because the tests are statistically neither reliable nor valid. I.E. They don't give a consistent result and they don't test the thing they are intended to test for.
An anti bullying organization does a study and finds alarming rates of anti-academic bullying. Oh the surprise!
I went through the UK school system in a steelworks-and-mining area. Being academically successful was not a problem. I had friends up and down the academic scale. There was a palpable mutual dislike between the sports types (rugby mostly) and the academic types. But that was not a 'problem' academically. The teachers were divided along similar lines.
It probably goes on, but 90% is a nonsense number, borne of methodological bias, which is inevitable given who was doing the survey.
Marge in Marketing gets Sharepoint. Engineers get linux, vnc, git and real management and tools.
If you haven't tried it, it is hard to understand how awful sharepoint is, but it is a way of getting the uneducated to put their ms office files somewhere other than their laptop.
There is danger in the period between generating content on the PC and committing the data to SVN (or git depending on the project). I'm not dead yet, and when I am, I will not care about the missing 1 day of work.
>Yep, you've got to have a documented practice to keep track of the recovery keys encryption programs generate.
No. I work in a big corp. If I die, my FDE password dies with me and the data is gone. Real data is held on servers and managed. A PC is just an access device.
That's not what makes it different. This has been answered elsewhere in this thread. Get over it.