Looking Back on Five Years
During the Christmas break, I took time out from roasting an ox on the open fire, distributing presents to the assembled multitude of staff, chasing foxes across the rolling acres of Selwood Towers and feasting, wassailing and carousing to think about the past year and embedded technology stuff. I managed to overcome the urge and went back to roasting an ox etc, but, now the break is over, it seems worth having another think.
A Memristor By Any Other Name?
Perhaps you’re new to the US and you’re investigating some recipes to make. You’ve resigned yourself to the fact that, here, things are measured more by volume than by weight, and the measurement units have that peculiar non-metric feel about them that forces you to prove you can still do mental arithmetic. But the terms for things are sometimes different too, even if you come from another purported English-speaking country. We don’t do aubergines and courgettes; we do eggplants and zucchini.
Signals and Swats
The Promise and Limitations of Gesture and Motion Technology
You can almost imagine an I Love Lucy caper. Lucy and Ricky are trying to catch someone in the act of something nefarious. They dress up in fake private-eye clothes with a PI hat, turned up collar (pre-bro), and a fake moustache for her. They’re on opposite sides of the room in stealth mode, with only hand gestures to communicate. They’ve worked out an intricate set of signals, including “right hand to the nose means we go in 3…2…1…” and “left hand to the nose means something’s not right; hold off.”
Tough Times Ahead for AMD
Dancing with Elephants, Someone Is Bound to Get Squished
Poor AMD: Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.
The company best known as “that other PC chipmaker” and the firm that serves as a big Get Out of Jail Free card in Intel’s high-stakes game of Department of Justice Monopoly, is about to get squeezed from another angle. Say hello to my little friend ARM.
That’s too bad, because AMD does a lot of things right and makes chips that actually emphasize the characteristics engineers seem to be asking for. So why, oh why, is the company on the skids?
Touched
We've talked about touch technology here before, both in the context of touch controllers and stylus technology. But those don't even begin to cover the gamut of touch -- in terms of both what's happened already and what's going to happen.
There was a recent conference in Austin called "Touch, Gesture, Motion" (TGM for short) that devoted one day to touch technology and one day to gesture and motion. And, to start with, I have to say it was one of the more informative conferences I've been to -- especially because it was the first edition.
A New Angle on Old-School Writing
Atmel is Lining Up to Own Styli
Left-handers have been handed a disadvantage when it comes to Western scripts.
For right-handed people, you get to see not only what you’re writing, but also what you’ve already written, since your writing hand hovers over the blank portion of paper that you haven’t written on yet.
Not so for the left-handed. Their writing hand covers the portion they’ve just written, making visible only the mark being written at that very second. I’m assuming that’s why left-handed writers often position their hand in a way such that the pen comes down from the top instead of leaning to the left – at least you get a couple letters’ visibility.
Low-Power Servers: Opportunity or Oxymoron?
New ARM-Based Server Chips Change the Data-Warehouse Landscape
You knew it had to be about ARM. Everything today is about ARM. So it’s no big surprise that ARM is elbowing its way into the formerly sacrosanct halls of server farms. You know, those big echoing hallways filled with racks upon racks of server blades, all humming along as they power the Matrix—er, the Internet.
Turning Up The Volume To 11
Supercomputing Gets Even Cooler
In this week's Fish Fry, I have a couple of super-cool supercomputing super-stories for you. I look into the Blue Waters Project that aims to solve the world's most complex problems through petascale computing. I also interview Stefan Mohl (Mitrionics - CTO) about how Mitrionics has reorganized this year, how they are shifting the focus of their supercomputing FPGAs to the HPC market, and how Mitrion-C is facilitating that new focus.
Supercomputing
Today, Tomorrow, Whenever
When we hear the term “supercomputing,” each of us probably forms a different image in our head - depending on our age. For my generation, I like to visualize the semi-cylindrical form of the Cray-2, with it’s radical architecture and Flourinert cooling. It looked fast just sitting there. Others may envision anything from IBM mainframes to racks of blades to modern video gaming consoles.
When I’m Sixty-Four
ARM’s New 64-bit CPU Architecture Looks Strangely Old
Will you still need me / Will you still feed me / When I’m 64?
Ah, ARM has finally grown up. Time to join the big kids at the grownups’ table.
Last week ARM began a long striptease by lifting the veil from its newest CPU architecture. The new design doesn’t even have a name yet, it’s just called “ARM version 8,” or ARMv8 for short. The coming months (and perhaps years) will see a series of ever more-revealing announcements as ARM shows us a bit more of what ARMv8 has to offer. For now, we’ll just have to drool and use our imaginations.