Sometimes it’s about new technology, and sometimes it’s about something as mundane as pricing or form factor. Last year it was the former; this year it’s the latter.
Mentor has added a new platform to their Veloce Strato emulation family. We saw the basics of Strato last year, with StratoM (there’s an Mi version as well, but more on that in a minute). Now there’ … Read More → "Emulator Infill"
Optimism: Belief that everything will work out well. Irrational, bordering on insane. – K-9, “The Armageddon Factor, Episode One,” Doctor Who, 1977
When Abertay University student and computer science major Gary Taylor found the fried, water-damaged remains of K-9, Doctor Who’s reliable robotic canine companion, in a university lab last September, he made the remote-controlled robot celebrity the focus of his final-year dissertation even before getting the go-ahead from his project supervisor, Dr. Ian Ferguson. As Taylor explains, ““I love robotics, I love programming, I love dogs, and I love Doctor Who.”
The university … Read More → "Rescuing Doctor Who’s K-9"
“Is there in truth no beauty?” – Star Trek episode 60
Vacuum tubes? Seriously? This is 2018.
My newsfeed lately has been filled with advertisements for tiny little headphone amplifiers sporting two shiny little vacuum tubes. You’ve probably seen them: little one-channel audio amplifiers that are supposed to improve the sound quality of your PC or smartphone. I can see the need for improving on cheap little earphones, but vacuum tubes? I thought we’ … Read More → "Engineering as Art Form"
Almost exactly four years ago, at Gigaom Structure 2014, Intel’s Diane Bryant announced that the company would be “integrating [Intel’s] industry-leading Xeon processor with a coherent FPGA in a single package, socket compatible to [the] standard Xeon E5 processor offerings.” It was a bare-bones sort of announcement with zero details, except that she expected the combination would deliver data center customers “a programmable, high performance coherent acceleration capability to turbo-charge their algorithms” and that industry benchmarks indicate that FPGA-based accelerators can deliver >10x performance gains, with an Intel-claimed 2x additional performance, thanks to a low-latency coherent interface … Read More → "Intel Delivers Xeon Scalable Processor 6138P with Arria 10 GX 1150 FPGA"
It’s a well-worn path that’s followed when new technology comes around.
It often starts in universities or large companies with big research budgets and an appetite for taking chances. There the new thing can be sussed out by patient students or engineers not graded on productivity and not facing a tape-out or go-to-market deadline. While they’re willing to struggle along, knowing that they might be on the cusp of something great, at some point, the tedious aspects of making the new technology work become… well… tedious. And so they cobble together rough-and-ready tools that … Read More → "Deep Learning Gets a Foundation"
Richard Feynman, probably the most colourful physicist of the twentieth century, as well as one of the most important, was born a hundred years ago, on May 11th 1918. In a long career, there were some significant highlights. Before he was thirty, he was responsible for running the computing unit at Los Alamos, where rooms full of women working with mechanical calculators carried out the complex calculations behind the first atom bombs. He also teased the military security in place by opening locked filing cabinets and strong boxes, but, … Read More → "Richard Feynman and Quantum Computing"
AI in edge devices is expected to experience mind-blowing growth over the next half decade, with predictions exceeding 100% CAGR. That means our IoT devices are going to be getting smart, and doing it quickly. Most of the applications of AI in edge or endpoint devices centers on sensors. Our devices are equipped with increasing numbers of increasingly complicated sensors, drowning our devices in data. In most applications, however, it isn’t practical to simply push all that raw sensor data up to the cloud for further processing. We need to make some sense of it now, at the edge, … Read More → "More AI at the Edge"
“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” — T. S. Eliot
The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. We know we want wireless, but what kind? We want sensor interfaces, but which type? We need networking, but from whom?
Let me introduce you to a little company from Dallas that solves all those problems at once. Texas Instruments (you may have heard of them) has rolled out a whole slew of MCUs that come with just about every conceivable wired, wireless, and sensor interface known to … Read More → "MCUs For the Indecisive"
Just in case your brain has been working too smoothly lately, it’s time to descend back down into the bizarre world of quantum computing. And, as with each time we’ve done it before, this time we’ll have a completely new angle.
That said, this should be easier on the gray matter than the original one we did. Some of the basic quantum concepts are the same, and I’ll refer … Read More → "Silicon Purification for Quantum Computing"
Computation is entering an era of unprecedented heterogeneous distribution. The diverse demands of IoT applications require everything from heavy-iron, deep-learning data-crunching to ultra-low-latency snap recognition and judgment. Our IoT devices and systems must be simultaneously aware and responsive to their own local context and able to harness the power of massive compute resources for more global issues. A self-driving vehicle can’t afford to send gobs of raw sensor data upstream to the cloud and then wait for an answer on target identification to return before deciding whether to brake or swerve. It needs to decide … Read More → "AI at the IoT Endpoint"
