And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time
‘Til touchdown brings me ’round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh, no, no, no, I’m a rocket man
Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone
– Elton John and Bernie Taupin, “Rocketman”
I was just chatting with the chaps and chapesses at Macronix, which is a leading integrated device manufacturer in the non-volatile memory (NVM) market, providing a full range of NOR Flash, NAND Flash, and ROM products.
For reasons that will (or may, or may not) become apparent, our conversation reminded me of the French astrologer, physician and reputed seer, Michel de Nostredame (1503-1566), whose name is usually Latinized … Read More → "NOR Flash is Sexy Again!"
After DSP’s annus mirabilis in 1948, another three decades would pass before actual, practical DSP chips would appear. DSP bits and pieces like TRW’s MPY016H hardware multiplier and TI’s TMC0280 LPC speech chip teased – real, integrated DSPs were just around the corner – but it was not until the 1980s that semiconductor technology advanced enough to make programmable DSP chips practical. The number of single-chip DSPs exploded during the 1980s and 1990s. Then, after 20 years, the era of the single-chip DSP came to an abrupt end. (Note: This article is the second half … Read More → "A Brief History of the Single-Chip DSP, Part II"
DSP dates back to the very beginnings of the digital age, perhaps even a little bit before. If the construction of the first digital computer, ENIAC, in 1946, marks the beginning of the digital age in 1946, then DSP popped up a scant two years later. The IEEE published a monograph in 1998 titled “Fifty Years of Signal Processing: The IEEE Signal Processing Society and its Technologies 1948-1998,” which marks the start of the DSP age in 1948 … Read More → "A Brief History of the Single-Chip DSP, Part I"
As I’ve mentioned on occasion, I was born in the city of Sheffield in the county of Yorkshire in that paradise on Earth known to the bards as Albion. Sheffield has an international reputation for metallurgy and steelmaking. In fact, it was this industry that established Sheffield as one of England’s main industrial cities during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
You may recall from my blog about my mom — The Times They Are a-Changin’ — Part 1 — that, following WWII, she started … Read More → "Secure Your Data at Rest, Stupid!"
Data center architecture must change because the applications running in data centers have changed. Several factors are forcing these architectural changes, including some key trends:
I love words. I wish I knew more of them. I like to believe that I have a reasonably extensive vocabulary at my disposal, but I also recognize that I know only a subset of all the words that are out there. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that new words are popping up like mushrooms, while the meaning of existing words can evolve over time.
There are many different aspects to words, including the way in which we write them down. As I mentioned in my recent column — </ … Read More → "Just Call Me an Indexing Fool"
The news is grim. The number of cyberhack attacks and database breaches mounts with each passing week. It’s costing companies and people some big money and a lot of pain. Here are some scary stats from a recent Intel White Paper titled “Intel Agilex FPGAs target IPUs, SmartNICs, and 5G Networks”:1
“CSO, an online publication for chief security officers, recently estimated that about 3.5 billion people saw their personal data stolen in just the top two of the fifteen biggest breaches during the 21st century. These breaches involved databases at some of the … Read More → "The Bad Guys are Winning in Cyberspace. Here’s One Way to Beat Them"
A few days ago at the time of this writing, the crème de la crème of the world’s technical press were welcomed to an invitation-only virtual event that many people would have given their eye teeth to experience — Intel’s Architecture Day 2021.
Due to some strange oversight on somebody’s part (or possibly because I have friends in low places), I was summoned to join these distinguished journalists and attend this august occasion (my mother is so proud — she will be “dining out” at the hairdressers for weeks on this, regaling her friends with … Read More → "Will Intel’s New Architectural Advances Define the Next Decade of Computing?"
Part 1 of this article discussed the similarities and differences between the well-known processor memory hierarchy and the FPGA memory hierarchy. Although similar, the FPGA memory hierarchy lacks the multiple cache levels now common in microprocessor design. Similarly, the processor hierarchy lacks some of the more specialized memory structures and interfaces developed to satisfy an FPGA’s unique memory needs. Part 2 discusses these specialized FPGA memories.
About a quarter of a century ago, the FPGA vendors started to add larger … Read More → "You Must Remember This: A Bit is Just a Bit, A Byte is Just a Byte – Part 2"
