General technology, not anything in particular
Great article and lots of hardcore important details like drivers and throughput. It’s early days yet for the PCI based SSDs, so there’s going to be lots of changes and architectures until a great design or a cheap design begins to dominate the market. And while some PCIe cards may not be ready for the Enterprise Data Center, there may be a market in the high end gamer fanboy product segment. Stay Tuned!
via makeitfaster
Diary Of An x264 Developer » (4/25/2010)
For many years it has been possible to make your own DVDs with free software tools. Over the course of the past decade, DVD creation evolved from the exclusive domain of the media publishing companies to something basically anyone could do on their home computer.
The move towards Blu-ray encoding is very encouraging. In reading the article I don’t see a mention of CUDA or OpenCL acceleration of the encoding process. As was the case for MPEG-2 a glaring need for acceleration of the process was painfully obvious once people started converting long form videos. I know x264 encoding can be accelerated by splitting threads across CPUs on a multi-core processor. But why not unleash the floodgates and get some extra horsepower from the ATI or nVidia graphics card too. We’re talking large frames and large frame rates and the only way to guarantee adoption of the new format is to make the encoding process fast, fast, fast.
Last year, Samsung told the world it had teamed with Instrinsity on a 1GHz ARM chip known as the Hummingbird, and Samsung manufactures the ARM chips underpinning the Apple iPhone, a smaller version of the iPad. This has led many to assume that the Hummingbird architecture is the basis for the the A4.
via Apple admits to eating ‘iPad chip designer’ • The Register.
I am sure that Apple’s ability to act quickly and independently helped win them not just design expertise, but an actual nearly finished CPU in the form of the Hummingbird project. There does now seem to be a smartphone Megahertz War similar to the bad old days of desktop computing when AMD and Intel fought it out 1 gigahertz at a time. We will see what comes of this when the new iPhones come out this Summer. A4 may not translate into a handheld cpu form factor. But looking at the iFixit teardown of the iPad makes me think the iPad motherboard is almost the size of a cell phone! So who knows, maybe A4 is scalable down to iPhone as well. We’ll find out in June I’m sure when Apple hosts its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, CA.
TomTom is releasing a new personal navigation device (PND) called the TomTom Live 1000. As part of this article from MacNN they mention TomTom is attempting to get into the App Store market by creating its own marketplace for TomTom specific software add-ons (like the Apple App Store). The reason is the cold war going on between device manufacturers gaining the upper hand by wholesale adoption of a closed application software universe. Google is doing it with Android and Apple has done it with the iPhone and iPad. Going all the way back to the iPod, there was interest in running games on those handheld devices, but no obvious way to ‘sell’ them, until the App Store came out. Now TomTom is following suit, by redesigning the whole TomTom universe using Webkit as a key component of it’s new OS on TomTom devices (Webkit is also being used in the Android based Garmin A10 phone too). Ambivalent about the added value? Other than trying to gain some market share against PND manufacturers, Harold Goddijn, the CEO of TomTom says it’s all about innovation. They mention in passing the possibility of Augmented Reality apps for TomTom devices. But there’s a small matter of getting a video feed into the PND that can then be layered with the AR software. And honestly even the CEO Tom Goodjin is somewhat ambivalent about seizing the opportunity of Augmented Reality in the TomTom application store universe. As reported on Pocket-lint.com: “Although Goddjin confirmed that the company was looking at the possibility of adding augmented reality in to the mix, the niche technology isn’t a major objective for them.”
It’s not enough to just overlay information on an Apple iPhone or TomTom PND screen showing related points of interest (POI). Like the iPhone Nearest Tube app from Acrossair, knowing the general compass direction to a subway station is useful. But full step-by-step navigating to it seems to be the next logical step, maps and all. What makes me think of this is the recent announcement of the Garmin A10 smartphone with GPS navigation. If Garmin, TomTom or an independent developer could mashup Augmented Reality with their respective navigation engines, whilst throwing in a bit of Google Street View one might, just might have the most useful personal assistant for finding places on foot. Garmin has a whole slew of devices for the hiking, and bicycling market. They even offer walking/pedestrian directions on their automobile navigation devices. So the overlay of Augmented Reality/Point-of-Interest and full-on Garmin Navigation to me would be a truly killer app.
I wonder: Is there an opportunity for Alan Kay’s Dynabook? An iPad with a Sqeak implementation that enables any user to write his or her own applications, rather than resorting to purchasing an app?
via Did Steve Jobs Steal The iPad? Genius Inventor Alan Kay Reveals All. (source: 6:20 PM – April 17, 2010 by Wolfgang Gruener, Tom’s Hardware)
Apple earlier this month instituted a new rule that also effectively blocks meta-platforms: clause 3.3.1, which stipulates that iPhone apps may only be made using Apple-approved programming languages. Many have speculated that the main target of the new rule was Adobe, whose CS5 software, released last week, includes a feature to easily convert Flash-coded software into native iPhone apps.
Some critics expressed concern that beyond attacking Adobe, Apple’s policies would result in collateral damage potentially stifling innovation in the App Store. Scratch appears to be a victim despite its tie to Jobs’ old friend.
Apple Rejects Kid-Friendly Programming App (April 20, 2010 2:15 pm)
What a difference 3 days makes right? Tom’s Hardware did a great retrospective on the ‘originality’ of the iPad and learned a heck of a lot of Computer History along the way. At the end of the article they plug Alan Kay’s Squeak based programming environment called Scratch. It is a free application that is used to create new graphical programs and is used as a means to teach mathematics problem-solving through writing programs in Scratch. The iPad was the next logical step in the distribution of the program, giving kids free access to it whenever and on whatever platform was available. But two days later, the announcement came out the Apple App Store, the only venue by which to purchase or even download software onto the iPhone or the iPad had roundly reject Scratch. The App Store will not allow it to be downloaded and that’s the end of that. The reasoning is Scratch (which is really a programming tool) has an interpreter built-in which allows it to execute the programs written within its programming environment. Java does this, Adobe Flash does this, it’s common with anything that’s like a programming tool. But Apple has forbidden anything that looks, sounds, or smells like a potential way of hijacking or hacking into their devices. So Scratch and Adobe Flash are now both forbidden to run on the Apple iPad. How quickly things change don’t they especially if you read the whole Tom’s Hardware article. Alan Kay and Steve Jobs are presented as really friendly towards one another.
Let me start by saying Chris Mellor of The Register has been doing a great job of keeping up with the product announcements from the big vendors of the server based Flash memory products. I’m not talking simply Solid State Disks (SSD) with flash memory modules and Serial ATA (SATA) controllers. The new Enterprise level product that supersedes SSD disks is a much higher speed (faster than SATA) caches that plug into the PCIe slots on rack based servers. The fashion followed by many data center storage farms was to host large arrays of hot online, or warm nearly online spinning disks. Over time de-duplication was added to prevent unnecessary copies and backups being made on this valuable and scarce resource. Offline storage to tape back-up could be made throughout the day as a third tier of storage with the disks acting as the second tier. What was first tier? Well it would be the disks on the individual servers themselves or the vast RAM memory that the online transactional databases were running on. So RAM, disk, tape the three tier fashion came into being. But as data grows and grows, more people want some of the stuff that was being warehoused out to tape to do regression analysis on historical data. Everyone wants to create a model for trends they might spot in the old data. So what to do?
So as new data comes in, and old data gets analyzed it would seem there’s a need to hold everything in memory all the time, right? Why can’t we just always have it available? Arguing against this in corporate environment is useless. Similarly explaining why you can’t speed up the analysis of historical data is also futile. Thank god there’s a technological solution and that is higher throughput. Spinning disks are a hard limit in terms of Input/Output (I/O). You can only copy so many GBits per second over the SATA interface on a spinning disk hard drive. Even if you fake it by copying alternate bits to adjacent hard drives using RAID techniques you’re still limited. So Flash based SSDs have helped considerably as a tier of storage between the the old disk arrays and the demands made by the corporate overseers who want to see all their data all the time. The big 3 disk storage array makers IBM/Hitachi, EMC, and NetApp are all making hybrid, Flash SSD and spinning disk arrays and optimizing the throughput through the software running the whole mess. Speeds have improved considerably. More companies are doing online analysis to data that previously would be loaded from tape to do offline analysis.
And the interconnects to the storage arrays has improved considerably too. Fibre Channel was a godsend in the storage farm as it allowed much higher speed (first 2Gbytes per second, then doubling with each new generation). The proliferation of Fibre Channel alone made up for a number of failings in the speed of spinning disks and acted as a way of abstracting or virtualizing the physical and logical disks of the storage array. In terms of Fibre Channel the storage control software offers up a ‘virtual’ disk but can manage it on the storage array itself anyway it sees fit. Flexibility and speed reign supreme. But still there’s an upper limit to the Fibre Channel interface and the motherboard of the server itself. It’s the PCIe interface. And evenwith PCIe 2.0 there’s an upper limit to how much throughput you can get off the machine and back onto the machine. Enter the PCIe disk cache.
In this article I review the survey of PCIe based SSD and Flash memory disk caches since they entered the market (as it was written in The Register. It’s not a really mainstream technology. It’s prohibitively expensive to buy and is going to be purchased by those who can afford it in order to gain the extra speed. But even in the short time since STEC was marketing it’s SSDs to the big 3 storage makers, a lot of engineering and design has created a brand new product category and the performance within that category has made steady progress.
LSI’s entry into the market is still very early and shipping product isn’t being widely touted. The Register is the only website actively covering this product segment right now. But the speeds and the density of the chips on these products just keeps getting bigger, better and faster. Which provides a nice parallel to Moore’s Law but in a storage device context. Prior to the PCIe flash cache market opening, SATA, Serial Attached Storage (SAS) was the upper limit of what could be accomplished with even a flash memory chip. Soldering those chips directly onto an add-on board connected directly to the CPU through the PCIe 8-Lane channel is nothing short of miraculous in the speeds it has gained. Now the competition between current vendors is to build one off, customized setups to bench test the theoretical top limit of what can be done with these new products. And this recent article from Chris Mellor shines a light on the newest product on the market the LSI SSS6200. In this article Chris concludes:
None of these million IOPS demos can be regarded as benchmarks and so are not directly comparable. But they do show how the amount of flash kit you need to get a million IOPS has been shrinking
Moore’s law holds true now for the Flash caches which are now becoming the high speed storage option for many datacenters who absolutely have to have the highest I/O disk throughput available. And as the sizes and quantity of the chips continues to shrink and the storage volume increases who knows what the upper limit might be? But news travels swiftly and Chris Mellor got a whitepaper press release from Samsung and began drawing some conclusions.
Interestingly, the owner of the Korean Samsung 20nm process foundry has just taken a stake in Fusion-io, a supplier of PCIe-connected flash solid-state drives. This should mean an increase in Fusion-io product capacities, once Samsung makes parts for Fusion using the new process
The new Flash memory makers are now in an arms race with the product manufacturers. Apple and Fusion-io get first dibs on the shipping product as the new generation of Flash chips enters the market. Apple has Toshiba, and Fusion-io gets Samsung. In spite of LSI’s benchmark of 1million IOPs in their test system, I give the advantage to Fusion-io in the very near future. Another recent announcement from Fusion-io is a small round of venture capital funding that will hopefully cement its future as a going concern. Let’s hope their next generation caches top out at a size that is competitive with all its competitors and that its speed is equal to or faster than currently shipping product.
Outside the datacenter however things are more boring. I’m not seeing anyone try to peer into the future of the desktop or laptop and create a flash cache that performs at this level. Fusion-io does have a desktop product currently shipping mostly targeted at the PC gaming market. I have not seen Tom’s Hardware try it out or attempt to integrate it into a desktop system. The premium price is enough to make it very limited in its appeal (it lists MSRP $799 I think). But let’s step back and imagine what the future might be like. Given that Intel has incorporated the RAM memory controller into its i7 cpus and given that their cpu design rules have shrunk so far that adding the memory controller was not a big sacrifice, Is it possible the PCIe interface electronics could be migrated on CPU away from the Northbridge chipset? I’m not saying there should be no chipset at all. A bridge chip is absolutely necessary for really slow I/O devices like the USB interface. But maybe there could be at least on 16x PCIe lane directly into the CPU or possibly even an 8x PCIe lane. If this product existed, a Fusion-io cache could have almost 1TB storage of flash directly connected into the CPU and act as the highest speed storage yet available on the desktop.
Other routes to higher speed storage could even be another tier of memory slots with an accompanying JEDEC standard for ‘storage’ memory. So RAM would go in one set of slots, Flash in the other. And you could mix, match and add on as much Flash memory as you liked. This potentially could be addressed through the same memory controllers already built into Intel’s currently shipping CPUs. Why does this even matter or why do I think about it at all? I am awaiting the next big speed increase in desktop computing that’s why. Ever since the Megahertz Wars died out, much of the increase in performance has been so micro incremental that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between any currently shipping PC. Disk storage has reigned supreme and has becoming painfully obvious as the last link in the I/O chain that has stayed pretty static. Parallel ATA migration to Serial ATA has improved things, but nothing like the march of improvements that occurred with each new generation of Intel chips. So I vote for dumping disks once and for all. Move to 2TByte Flash memory storage and let’s run it through the fastest channel we can onto and off the CPU. There’s not telling what new things we might be able to accomplish with the speed boost. Not just games, not just watching movies and not just scientific calculations. It seems to me everything OS and Apps both would receive a big benefit by dumping the disk.
Another report, appearing in The New York Times in February, stated that Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm were all working to develop their own ARM-based chips before noting that “it can cost these companies about $1 billion to create a smartphone chip from scratch.” Developing an SoC based on licensed ARM designs is not “creating a chip from scratch,” and does not cost $1 billion, but the article set off a flurry of reports that said Apple has spent $1 billion on the A4.
Thankyou AppleInsider for trying to set the record straight. I doubted the veracity of the NYTimes article when I saw that $1Billion figure thrown around (seems more like the price of a Intel chip development project which is usually from scratch). And knowing now from this article here (link to PA Semi historical account), that PA Semi made a laptop version of a dual core G5 chip, leads me to believe power savings is something they would be brilliant at engineering solutions for (G5 was a heat monster, meaning electrical power use was large). P.A. Semi was going to made the G5 power efficient enough to fit into a laptop and they did it, but Apple had already migrated to Intel chips for its laptops.
Intrinsity + P.A. Semiconductor + Apple = A4. Learning that Intrinsity is an ARM developer knits a nice neat picture of a team of chip designers, QA folks and validation folks who would all team up to make the A4 a resounding success. No truer mark of accomplishment can be shown for this effort than Walt Mossberg and David Pogue stating in reviews of the iPad yesterday they both got over 10 hours of run time from their iPads. Kudos to Apple, you may not have made a unique chip but you sure as hell made a well optimized one. Score, score, score.
Apropos to the big Easter Weekend, Apple is releasing the iPad to the U.S. market. David Pogue from the NYTimes has done two reviews in one. Rather than anger his technophile readers or alienate his average readers he gave each audience his own review of a real hands-on iPad. Where’s Walt Mossberg on this topic? (Walt likes it) Pogue more or less says lack of a physical keyboard is a showstopper for many. Instead, users who need a keyboard need to get a laptop of some sort. Otherwise for what it accomplishes through finger gestures and software design the iPad is a pretty incredible end user experience. Whether or not your personality, demeanor is compatible with the iPad is up for debate. But try before you buy, hand-on will tell you much more than doing a web order and hoping for the best. And given the price, it’s a wise choice. Walt Mossberg too feels you had better actually try to use it before you buy. It is in his own words, not like any other computer but in a different class all its own. So don’t trust other people to tell you whether or not it will work for you.
One thing David Pogue is also very enthused by is the data plan seems less onerous than the first and second generation iPhone contracts with AT&T. The dam is about to burst on mandatory data plans, and in the iPad universe you can subscribe and lapse, re-subscribe lapse again depending on your needs. So don’t pay for a long term contract if you don’t need it. That addresses a long-standing problem I have had with the iPhone as it is currently marketed by Apple and AT&T. Battery life is another big upshot. The review models that Mossberg and Pogue used had ‘longer’, read that again LONGER run times than stated by Apple. Both guys tried doing real heavy network and video playback on the devices and went over the 10hr. battery life claimed by Apple. Score a big win for the iPad in that category.
Lastly Pogue hinted at maps looking and feeling like real maps on the bigger display. Mossberg points out the hardware isn’t what’s really important. No, it’s what’s going to show up on the AppStore specifically for the iPad. I think I’ve heard a few M.I.T. types say this before. It’s unimportant what it does. The question is what ‘else’ does it do. And that ‘else’ is the software developer’s coin of the realm. Without developers these products have no legs, no markets outside of the loyal fan base. What may come, no one can tell but it will be interesting times for the iPad owners that’s for sure.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 