Something similar has been around for a while in the form of Habbo Hotel, where you can wander around a virtual hotel in shockwave and interact with other people.
The design process for motherboards in my experience seems to depend on the manufacturer. Some take a more sloppy approach where the first version is riddled with bugs - take a look at Via's KT133 and subsequent KT133a for example (in some ways reminiscent to me of Redhat's notorious.0 releases). In general I'm more in favour of a rigourous approach when designing hardware - bugs in software are easy to fix (download a patch), but with hardware you expect what you're buying to work.
All in all a motherboard is a complicated piece of electronics so it isnt surprising that bugs sometimes creep in. As with software I expect it is the quality of the engineers working on it that is the ultimate deciding factor in the quality of the final product.
"People who are serious about software should make their own hardware" - Alan Kay
This seems like a situation where a hardware accelerated approach is pretty sensible. I'm guessing there is large amounts of signal processing involved in speech recognition. With a custom chip like this it probably helps greatly to offload some of that onto a dedicated chip in the same way as GPUs are used on graphics cards. The only problem I can see is that there might not be much market for it. GPUs have an obvious market (games), but there is less demand for speech processing. Star-Trek style interfaces are nice to dream of but for most common tasks a keyboard and mouse will probably give you a faster and more accurate interface.
This is fairly impressive, althrough really with chips written in high level hardware description languages it probably isnt very difficult to just add more cores. I'd certainly like to see what the power and heat requirements are for this thing (forgive me if this is mentioned in the article, it appears to be slashdotted so I cant read it). I guess one of the advantages of the SPARC architecture is that the relative simplicity of the instruction set (compared to x86) makes it possible to do things like this.
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All in all a motherboard is a complicated piece of electronics so it isnt surprising that bugs sometimes creep in. As with software I expect it is the quality of the engineers working on it that is the ultimate deciding factor in the quality of the final product.
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This seems like a situation where a hardware accelerated approach is pretty sensible. I'm guessing there is large amounts of signal processing involved in speech recognition. With a custom chip like this it probably helps greatly to offload some of that onto a dedicated chip in the same way as GPUs are used on graphics cards. The only problem I can see is that there might not be much market for it. GPUs have an obvious market (games), but there is less demand for speech processing. Star-Trek style interfaces are nice to dream of but for most common tasks a keyboard and mouse will probably give you a faster and more accurate interface.
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