April 22, 2014, Data Storage Innovation Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Mark McKinnon from Grand River Conservation Authority in Canada described the changes in their systems to address the data backup issues of TB-sized volumes. Fortunately, the systems change was coincident with a network upgrade. The Grand River Conservation Authority is responsible for flood control, recreation, nature…
February 11, 2014, ISSCC, San Francisco—Mobile devices are growing in complexity and performance while being driven to reduce power to allow for longer battery lives. The challenge in connecting radios, computers, sensors, and other interface circuits calls for very aggressive power management techniques, even in systems with large power budgets like automobiles and smart buildings….
February 10, 2014, ISSCC, San Francisco—Erik Heijne from CERN talked about how chips pave the road to the Higgs particle and the atto world beyond. Fundamental research on elementary constituents of matter need more sophisticated tools with greater performance and resolution. Researchers working in high energy physics are taking advantage of microelectronics trends for smaller,…
February 10, 2014, ISSCC, San Francisco—Ming-Kai Tsai from MediaTek presented his vision of the next generation cloud and how it will call for new technology to overcome the many challenges. Cloud 1.0 has seen the construction of major infrastructures, and now we will soon see how this system of systems will evolve. Taiwan has changed…
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…
January 29, 2014, DesignCon, Santa Clara, CA—Perry Keller from Agilent and the chair of the JEDEC JC 40.5 committee talked about the market and technology drivers facing memories. The industry can expect ongoing turmoil and change over time. Memories are appearing in more applications, leading to consumer expectations for greater performance at lower cost. This…
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…
November 13, 2013, AMD Developer Summit, San Jose, CA—Brendan Iribe from Oculus VR postulated that the drivers for more immersive man-machine interfaces is changing gaming. The pieces for a full virtual reality interface are falling into place. Through time, hardware has driven and enabled software innovations. These developments then create a demand for better hardware,…
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 19, 2013, SNIA Analytics and Big Data Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Muthukumar Murugan from HP Storage talked about big data from a storage systems perspective. The trends and issues associated with big data call for an evolution of the whole storage paradigm. The storage concerns for big data include the obvious volume of data, the…