Carpet Bomberz Inc.

Author: carpetbomberz

  • links for 2009-06-13

  • AnandTech: AVIVO Video Converter

    ATI Avivo Video Converter
    Avivo control panel

    About a year ago I wrote an article about nVidia’s attempt to use it’s video graphics cards to accelerate transcoding. H.264 was fast becoming the gold standard for desktop video, video sharing through social networking websites, and for viewing on handheld devices. In the time since then, Badaboom entered the market and has gone through a revision of it’s original GPU accelerated transcoding software. Apple is now touting OpenCL as the API through which any software can access the potential of using all those graphics pipelines to accelerate parallel operations off of the CPU. nVidia is supporting OpenCL whole hog and I think there is some hope Microsoft won’t try to undermine it too much though it’s standing strong with DirectX as the preferred API for anything that talks to a graphics card for any reason.

    So where does AMD with it’s ATI card fit into the universe of GPU accelerated software? According to Anandtech, it doesn’t fit in at all. The first attempts at providing transcoding have proved a Big Fail. While Badaboom outlcasses it at every turn in the transcoded video it produces. Hopefully OpenCL can be abstracted enough to cover AMD and nVidia’s product offerings with a single unified interface to allow acceleration to occur much more easily as citizen of the OS. Talking directly to the metal is only going to provide headaches down the road as OSes are updated and drivers change. But even with that level of support, it looks like AMD’s not quite got the hang of this yet. Hopefully they can spare a few engineers and a few clock cycles and take Avivo out of alpha prototype stage and show off what they can do. The biggest disappointment of all is that even the commercial transcoder from Cyberlink  using the ATI card didn’t match up to Badaboom on nVidia.

    A few months ago, we tested AMD’s AVIVO Video Converter. AMD had just enabled video transcode acceleration on the GPU, and they wanted to position their free utility as competition to CUDA enabled (and thus NVIDIA only) Badaboom. Certainly, for a free utility, we would not expect the same level of compatibility and quality as we would from a commercial application like Badaboom. But what we saw really didn’t even deliver what we would expect even from a free application.

    via AnandTech: AVIVO Video Converter Redux and ATI Stream Quick Look.

  • links for 2009-06-12

  • Wikipedia edit wars revisited

    Regarding & related to: Replaying history « Jon Udell.

    Did you know that recently Wikipedia banned editing articles on the Church of Scientology? This reminded me of a project where Jon Udell showed an animation of  edits done to a Wikipedia page. Only through animating and visualizing the process did one really understand what had happens to a Wikipedia article over time. Each bit of phrasing, verbiage and links goes back and forth with paragraphs and sentences disappearing then reappaearing. We don’t think of editing words as inherently visual. Compared to film or music recording, writing prose or technical writing is a mental exercise, not a visual one. Yet, when shown a compelling example like Jon Udell’s we inherently just ‘get it’.

    After that article was published by Jon Udell and since the wikiAnimate example coursed its way through the Internet, there hasn’t been much noticeable follow-up action. Lots of good ideas are left to wither in the Internet Archive. I don’t see a lot of Slashdot activity on visualizing wiki edits. The biggest problem Jon points out with the original wikiAnimate solution was that it would do a round trip of HTTP GET for every step shown in the animation. This loads down the network way too much and hits Wikipedia with to many HTTP GET requests. Jon Udell, ever the vigilant writer/researcher decided to revisit the original idea. Jon is a kind of pragamtist who readily adapts what already exists. He suggests a couple of ways existing projects could be adapted to the purpose of visualizing changes in text as it is written.

    The Wave toolkit from Google is one example. Google Wave has the ability to “playback” conversations back and forth over a period of time. Maybe that ‘playback’ feature could be re-used by an enterprising developer using the Wave APIs. Another possible solution Jon Udell gives is FeedSync which is implemented in the Windows Live webservice. My assumption is there is some kind of flight recording like ability to track each step, then play it back. I don’t write software or develop software. I barely do scripting. however Jon Udell is big on prototyping and showing full examples of how a Social Bookmarking service like del.icio.us could be adapted to the purpose of aggregating community calendars and transforming their contents into multiple output formats for re-consumption. And he’s willing to write just enough middleware and glue code to make it work. It’s a kind of rampant re-usableism. I would characterize the philosophy as this: Sure there’s enough good ideas/products out there one must only decompose the problem to the point where you see the pattern fit well with an existing solution. That’s the true genius of a guy like Jon Udell.

  • “Pine Trail”-Intel’s next Atom CPU revision

    In the netbook manufacturing and product development industry, the next big thing is always Intel’s rev of the CPU and chipset. Cue the entry of the Pine Trail CPU and it’s partner I/O Hub chip. Only just this year has Intel shown a willingness to combine functions onto the same processor die. I am very interested to see that the CPU is combining not just the Memory Controller as is the case the top of the line i7 CPU family. Talk about a weight reduction right? The original chipset consisted of no less than 3 processors a North Bridge and South Bridge along with the CPU. Now with the coming of the Pine Trail, it’s a big CPU/GPU/Memory combo and a single I/O hub. I’m hoping the power consumption improves and comes much closer to the proposed specs of the Android based netbooks that will use Smartphone CPUs like Motorola’s or ARM based System-on-Chip custom CPUs. If Intel can combine functions and get battery life for a 3-cell unit to average 8+ hours under even heavy CPU loads, then they will have truly accomplished something. I’m looking forward to the first products to market using the Intel N450, but don’t expect to see them until after Christmas of this year 2009.

    Atom CPU and chipset
    The Intel Atom

    It should use the technology behind Pineview and would be made built on a new, 45 nanometer design that merges the memory controller and graphics directly into the processor; accompanying it would be the new-generation Tiger Point chipset, which is needed for and takes advantage of the N450 design.

    From: MacNN|Electronista

  • More word on Larrabee, the i740 of new GPUs

    Remembering that the Intel Itanium was supposed to be a ground-breaking departure with the past, can Larrabee be all that and more for graphics? Itanium is still not what Intel had hoped. And poor early adopters are still buying new and vastly over-priced minor incremental revs of the same CPU architecture to this day. Given the delays (2011 is now the release date) and it’s size (650mm^2) how is Intel every going to make this project a success. It seems bound for the the Big Fail heap of the future as it bears uncanny resemblances to Itanium and the Intel i740 graphics architecture. The chips is far too big and the release date way to far into the future to keep up with developments at nVidia and AMD. They are not going to stand still waiting for the behemoth to release to manufacturing. I just don’t know how Larrabee is ever going to be successful. It took so long to release the i740, that the market for low end graphics GPUs had eroded to the point where Intel could only sell it for the measly price of $35 per card, and even then no one bought it.

    Larrabee GPU

    According to current known information, our source indicated that Larrabee may end up being quite a big chip–literally. In fact,we were informed that Larrabee may be close to 650mm square die, and to be produced at 45nm. “If those measurements are normalized to match Nvidia’s GT200 core, then Larrabee would be roughly 971mm squared,” said our source–hefty indeed. This is of course, an assumption that Intel will be producing Larrabee on a 45nm core.

    via Intel’s ‘Larrabee’ to Be “Huge” – Tom’s Hardware.

  • links for 2009-06-09

  • links for 2009-06-06

  • My GAF Viewmaster Viewer

    Henry Fonda
    Henry Fonda

    Futurists are all alike. You have your 20th Century types like the Italians who celebrated war. You have Hitler’s architect Albert Speer. You have guys like George Gilder hand waving, making big pronouncements. And all of them use terms like paradigm and cusp as a warning to you slackers, trailers, luddite ne’er-do-wells. Make another entry in your list of predictions for Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Everyone feels like Apple has to really top what it’s achieved since last year with the Apple iPhone, the iPhone OS and the AppStore. Mark Sigal writing for O’Reilly Radar believes there’s so much untapped juice within the iPhone that an update in the OS will become the next cusp/paradigm shift.

    From today’s O’Reilly Radar article by Mark Sigal:

    Flash forward to the present, and we are suddenly on the cusp of a game-changing event; one that I believe kicks the door open for 3D and VR apps to become mainstream. I am talking about the release of iPhone OS version 3.0.

    from: 3D Glasses: Virtual Reality, Meet the iPhone – O’Reilly Radar.

    I’m not so certain. One can argue that even the average desktop 3D accelerator doesn’t really do what Sigal would ‘like’ to see in the iPhone. Data overlays is nice, for a 3D glasses kind of application sure, but it’s not virtual reality. It’s more like a glorified heads-up display which the military has had going back to the Korean War. So enter me into the column of the hairy eyeball, critical and suspicious of claims that an OS Update will change things. In fact OSes don’t change things. The way people think about things, that’s what changes things. The move of the World Wide Web from an information sharing utility to a medium for commerce, that was a cusp/paradigm shift. And so it goes with the iPhone and the Viewmaster Viewer. They’re fun yes. But do they really make us change the way we think?

  • links for 2009-06-05