September 23, 2013, Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, San Jose, CA—Mark Horowitz from Stanford described the steps needed to increase analog design reuse and facilitate greater design automation. As ICs grew from simple SSI chips to today’s SoCs, the tools for digital design enabled much higher levels of abstraction, which allowed for greater automation and design…
September 18, 2013, Storage Developer Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Julia Palmer and Justin Richardson from Go Daddy described their efforts at incorporating best practices in storage infrastructure implementation and validation. They have moved from ad hoc and incremental changes to full validation practices. The drivers in the storage spaces are bigger, better, and faster, all at…
August 13, 2013, Flash Memory Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Zahid Hussain from EMC talked about the datacenter moving to more solid-state storage. The evolution to hyperscale datacenters is driving changes in architecture and equipment. Adding flash into the storage mix is not the same as adding another tier of memory and storage. The hyper-scale datacenter requires…
July 24, 2013, Siggraph, Anaheim, CA—We met with Imagination to look at their latest software and acceleration hardware for graphics. The Caustic tools can use the ray-tracing accelerator card, has a simplified user interface, and has visualization links to other tools. The ray tracing technology is moving into the professional markets for some parts of…
July 24, 2013, Siggraph, Anaheim, CA—John Peddie from JP Research provided a market overview and held a panel discussion on the democratization of CG tools. One difficulty for the industry is that the Siggraph conference is declining over the past decade, for both exhibitors and attendees. At the same time, the value of CG apps…
May 14, 2013, Uptime Institute Symposium, Santa Clara, CA—Matt Stansberry from the Uptime Institute shared the results of an on-going survey of data center managers. The available results represent one thousand responses, mostly from the US. Other areas are being added as the survey is translated to other languages. Respondents indicated that 82 percent are…
April 7, 2013, National Association of Broadcasters, Las Vegas—We talked with Avid about their latest tools. The latest creative tools start with Media Composer 7 for nonlinear editing, now available starting at $999 USD. The new version features accelerated and simplified file-based workflows including optimized HD delivery from high-res source material and automated media operations….
April 6, 2013, National Association of Broadcasters, Las Vegas—A panel moderated by Tom Scott from OnStream Media considered the issues for more immersive audio. Panel members included Jeff Levison from Iosono, Stuart Bowling from Dolby Labs, Wilfried Van Baelen from Auro Technologies, John Kellogg from DTS, and Kimio Hamasaki from NHK. The audio industry has…
March 19, 2013, GPU Technology Conference, San Jose, CA—Mathew Gueller from Harley-Davidson described the changes in their workflows and the resulting improvements in turn around time for new motorcycles. The new modeling and visualization tools enable better designs. Harley started making motorcycles 110 years ago and had a design flow that started with drawings, progressed…
Game Developers Conference, San Francisco—This conference had many technical sessions presenting at the Dev Days. The usual suspects included Intel with their perceptual computing and UltraBook groups, Google, Facebook, Unity Technologies, Imagination Technologies, Microsoft, Samsung, Amazon Web Services, Xsens, ARM, Sony Entertainment, Autodesk, AMD, Nvidia, and Adobe. In these sessions, the sponsors talked about the…