April 2, 2014, EE Live Conference, San Jose, CA—Andrew “Bunnie” Huang talked about the changes in the industry and the growing openness of consumer systems. Embedded systems are benefiting from the increasing commoditization of the underlying hardware. In the earlier days of consumer electronics, in the 1930’s, products came with schematics, tuning specifications, and other…
March 25, 2014, GPU Technology Conference, San Jose, CA—Jeff Bier from the embedded vision alliance talked about the efforts to enable more embedded vision applications. Humans use about half of their brain power for vision, so this is a very hard function to implement because of the high computational requirements. At the same time is…
February 24, 2014, RSA Conference, Trusted Computing Group, San Francisco—A panel considered the challenges in implementing TPM. Paul Roberts from The Security Ledger moderated the panel. Panelists were Monty Wiseman from Intel, Dustin Ingalls from Microsoft, and Gal Shpantzer from SANS. The industry has reached an inflection point in the technology, moving towards greater adoption…
February 10, 2014, ISSCC, San Francisco—Susie Wee from Cisco talked about the evolution of network technologies and their impact on user experiences. The technologies are changing to offer better user experiences, and defining the needs for the this next generation of equipment is important. The applications drive changes in networks over time. Early networks were…
February 10, 2014, ISSCC, San Francisco—Mark Horowitz from Stanford talked about the need to change our views of computing and energy use. Even though Moore and Dennard promised lower costs and higher performance with every generation, we are hitting some fundamental limits. Computers, or microprocessors are showing up everywhere, even in disposable greeting cards. But…
November 12, 2013, AMD Developer Summit, San Jose, CA—Laurent Betbeder from Sony outlined the considerations for the latest console. The game audio system addresses the need for clean audio within the games. The consoles are moving towards more PC hardware to take advantage of the greater need for performance and lower costs. The major difference…
October 15, 2013, Imagination Developer Connection, San Francisco—Imagination Technologies held one in a series of conferences to address the information needs for their developers. Topics included hardware architectures, explain their ray tracing technologies, development tools, and a market analysis to justify the efforts from developers. Imagination has a number of processors, graphics engines, and software…
September 18, 2013, Storage Developer Coference, Santa Clara, CA—Gerald Carter, EMC-Isilon compared and contrasted platforms as a service and the Newton tablet from Apple. The challenges facing PaaS are similar to those facing the Newton. The problem for Apple was that the Newton was too early for the technology and markets. The technology limits for…
September 16, 2013, Storage Developer Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Laz Vekiarides created a working definition for software defined storage and outlined the capabilities and challenges for implementation. Many systems are moving to decoupled software and hardware, and the hardware is moving towards commodity devices. Starting with the economics, datacenter owners look at the hardware and software…
July 2013 – Motion capture is a big part of the Siggraph conference. It is segmented into a number of different technologies for full body motion both optical and sensor based, coupling to rigging systems and facial capture. Facial motion capture is being used heavily for both film and TV CGI and video games. A…