November 2013 – The high bandwidth memory technology recently introduced to the market by Micron – the Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) – has made its way into an early adopter system application – Supercomputers. In a joint announcement by Micron and Fujitsu, it was revealed that a new supercomputer prototype board design for next-generation systems…
October 5, 2013, IEEE Communications Society and Consumer Electronics Society, Santa Clara, CA—Michail Tsatsanis from Entropic talked about the silicon innovations that enable the next generation cable architecture. The cable systems are facing challenges due to the changes in their media mix. Now the cable is not just for delivering video to the TV, but…
January 2013 – The new Neat Receipt Desktop Scanner is a joy to work with. Installation of the software and familiarizing myself with the scanner itself was easy, but the speed of the scanner and companion software was remarkable. Neat desktop scanner I am the type who has typically followed the “shove it a box…
September 24, 2012, IEEE Photonics Conference, Burlingame, CA—A. V. Krishnamoorthy from Oracle defined the need to move to optical interconnects in high-end systems. The drivers of area and energy efficiencies will force changes in computer systems in the near future. The trends and projections for compute systems calls for a continuation of the efforts that…
September 18, 2012, Memcon, Santa Clara, CA—Scott Graham from Micron offered the hybrid memory cube architecture as a way to address the challenges and memory bottlenecks in high performance systems. The memories and their interfaces are inhibiting the ability for servers to improve throughput performance. Application server performance requires reducing latency for networks, while increasing…
July 2012 – The folks at Always On held their Silicon Valley Innovation Summit to discuss trends and bring exposure to new technology in the valley. After an opening discussion on the Facebook IPO and the resulting valuation questions for technology products with large PE ratios entering the market, the trends and detail discussions moved…
January 2012, Las Vegas, One of the big discussions at CES was the prevalence of 4G networks, and the hopeful availability of video conferencing. The promise of 4G networks with their high bandwidth potentials has brought a great deal of excitement to the marketplace. At the CES show, Alcatel was showing an LTE transceiver pair…
August 24, 2011, Hot Interconnects 19, Santa Clara, CA—Greg Papadopoulos, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates and former CTO of Sun Microsystems talked about “The Computer That is The Network: The Future History of Big Systems”. Hot interconnect 19 2011 We are in the midst of a revolution where the cost to connect drops…
June 28, 2011, Creative Storage Conference, Culver City, CA—a Panel looked at Storage for Content Delivery. Paul Rosenthal from CSU-LA moderated the panel. Members included Allan Ignatin from Bitspeed, Michelle Munson from Aspera, David Sallak from EMC Isilon, David Trumbo from Media Technology Market Partners, and Vivian Sultan from CSU-LA. Ignatin opened by discussing big…
June 22, 2011, PCI-SIG, Santa Clara, CA—Richard Solomon from LSI provided a background and history of peripheral component interconnect (PCI) in a talk PCI-SIG developers conference. In 1992, PCI was developed as an alternative to other bus structures to enable plug-and-play of computer peripherals. The first incarnation used a 32-bit, 33 MHz bus and was…