This makes perfect sense. In 2011, Objective Analysis published a report (How PC NAND Will Undermine DRAM) that found, through nearly 300 benchmarks, that a dollar’s worth of flash yielded a bigger performance boost than a dollar’s worth of DRAM, once some minimum DRAM requirement was met. This minimum level was actually relatively low — between 1 and 2 GB, depending on the benchmark.
Now Jim Handy is talking my language. Flash per dollar IS the best value for performance gain. I think if RAM chips were soldered directly to the motherboard and were sufficiently large (maybe not 1-2GB but say 4-8GB) and Flash was added as a secondary memory layer you would see some big boosts in computer performance. Look at DDR4 now, just entering the market. Performance gains from this generation are mostly aimed at retiring operations and completing tasks and going into low power sleep mode. It’s no longer about clock speeds, and registered rows and refresh cycles. It’s all about completing a read/write/flush operation and going to sleep as fast as you can to save power. Now that we’ve hit that plateau why not adopt Flash as the main memory with RAM as the 4th Level cache in principle? If people still want to upgrade/max out their RAM install, let them buy the higher end part, the enterprise data center chipset with extra sockets for DIMMs. Let the consumers have the fixed RAM allocation with RAM chips on the motherboard, and the all the DIMM sockets devoted to Flash memory instead. And with proper OS and chipset support, this revolution could happen overnight.
IBM and SanDisk tickled our imaginations and now I’m wanting to see the X6 Server tech hit the broader consumer market. While we’ll still see SSDs and PCIe SSDs for some time to come, the real revolution is still waiting to take place, Flash DIMMs for everyone. If it takes 3 years to convince motherboard manufacturers and Intel and AMD to go this route, fine let’s get the discussion going now.m Start prototyping, and sampling chipsets and Flash DIMMs today. This might be enough of a product differentiator going forward as to make a desktop computer with upgradeable Flash DIMMs a hotter product than the consumer desktop is today.
Interesting revision of this Lytro technology. Reminds me a little bit of the Black Magic Cinema camera with it’s funny shaped body design. I remember the initial breathless reports about how earth-shaking this multi-lens camera was going to be. After that, never saw a shipping product or an actual review per se. I think maybe some samples were given to individuals who said it was cool you could set the depth of field after the picture was taken, or pull the subject into focus if it was initially shot out of focus.
It reminds me in some ways of Carver Mead’s attempt to design a 3 layer cmos sensor that was light sensitive to all the wave lengths as you down through each layer. It was in essence a panchromatic sensor that did not require a micro light filter grid be bonded to the front surface (like all sensors today). That camera never really caught on either. It was extremely over-priced for the amount of resolution capable on the sensor. One conclusion you can make from this is not all good ideas make good workable cameras. We’ll see how Lytro Illum changes the equation, but I suspect it’s still a tough row to hoe.
If Facebook buying Oculus for a cool $2 billion is a step towards democratizing the currently-niche platform, Jaunt seems like an equally monumental step towards making awesome virtual reality content that appeals to folks beyond the gaming community. The VR movies in addition to VR games.
Amazing story about a stealthy little company with a 3D video recording rig. This isn’t James Cameron like motion capture for 3D rendering. This is just 2D video in real time stitched together. No modeling, or texture-mapping, or animating required. Just run the video camera, capture the footage, bring it back to the studio and stitch it all together. Watch the production on your Oculus Rift head set. If you can produce 3D movies with this without having to invest in the James Cameron high end, ultra-expensive virtual sets, you just lowered the barriers to entry.
I’m also kind of disappointed that in the article the author keeps insisting that you “had to be there”. Telling us words cannot express the experience is like telling me in writing the “dog ate my homework”. I guess I “had to be there” for that too. Anyway you put it, telling me more about the company and the premises and about the prototypes means you’re writing for a Venture Capital audience, not someone who might make work using the camera or those who might consume the work made by the artists working with the camera. I say just cave into the temptation and TRY expressing the experience in words. Don’t worry if you fail, as you’ve just increased the comment rate on your story, engaging people longer after the initial date the story was published. In spite off the lack of daring, to describe the experience, I picked up enough detail, extrapolated it enough and read between the lines in a way that indicates this camera rig might well be the killer app, or authoring app for the Oculus Rift platform. Let’s hope it sees the light of day and makes it market quicker than the Google Glass prototypes floating around these days.
Decapping a computer chip is a toxic, non-trivial task. However what’s revealed underneath the plastic capping material will amaze you. Especially the sizes of the chips. We’re talking millimeters, sometimes fractions of a millimeter on a side for very simple functions. In this example, a USB isolator chip from Analog Devices is decapped and examined under a microscope to trace out the circuitry. Very interesting stuff and reminds me a lot of the iPhone tear-downs that include an analysis of the A series processor chip Apple installs in each one. Always a lot of information to be gleaned from the exposed circuits, that’s for sure.
It’s not often that you see something that makes you think “this is a game changer.” The introduction of logic synthesis circa 1990 was one such event; today’s introduction of SDNet from Xilinx may well be another.
Cisco has used different RISC chips over the years as its network processors. Both in it’s network closet switches and the core router chassis. First generation was based on the venerable MIPS processor, then subsequently they migrated to PowerPC, both for power reduced processing but also network optimized cpus. Cisco’s engineers would accommodate changes in function by releasing new version of the IOS. Or they would release new line cards for the big multi-slot router chassis. Between software and hardware releases they would cover the whole spectrum of wired, wireless, optical networking. It was a rich mix of what could be done.
Enter now the possibility of not just Software Defined Networking (kind of like using Virtual Machines instead of physical switches), but software defined firmware/hardware. FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) are the computing world’s reconfigurable processor. So instead of provisioning a fixed network processor, and virtualizing on top of that to gain the software defined network, what if you could work the problem from both ends? Reconfigure the software AND the network processor. That’s what Xilinx is proposing with this announcement of SDNet. The prime example given in this announcement is the line card that would slot into a a large router chassis (some Cisco gear comes with 13 slots). If you had just a bunch of ports, let’s say RJ-45 facing outward, what then happens on the inside via the software/hardware reconfigurability would astound you. You want Fibre Channel over Ethernet? You want 10Gbit? You want SIP traffic only? You don’t buy a line card per application because it’s set in stone what the function is. You tell the SDNet compiler these are the inputs, these are the outputs, please optimize the functions and reconfigure the firmware as needed.
Once programmed, that line card does what you tell it to do. It can inspect packets, it could act as a firewall, it could prioritize traffic, shape bandwidth or just simple route things as fast as it could possibly go. Doesn’t matter what signals are running over what pins, as long as it knows it’s RJ-45 connectors, it will do the rest. Amazing when you think about it that way.
Thali sounds like an amazing non-cloud centric enabling technology. And would be well worth the price of admission to use it. I cannot tell you how many times I remind friends when they complain about Facebook, that they are the product not Facebook. Thali makes each person their data center cloud with full rights to grant access to which ever fragment/shard of that existing “mesh” that you wish to any other individual person. Big Brother is only going to watch the data go through the series of tubes. He will not get notices or National Securities Letters from the FBI asking for all the data in your account as all the data is where it originated on YOUR devices, in YOUR possession. I think I’m getting the hang of this now and I find it very appealing. Can’t wait to learn more about Thali.
When Groove launched somebody asked me to explain why it was an important example of peer-to-peer technology. I said that was the wrong question. What mattered was that Groove empowered people to communicate directly and securely, form ad-hoc networks with trusted family, friends, and associates, and exchange data freely within those networks. P2P, although then much in vogue — there were P2P books, P2P conferences — wasn’t Groove’s calling card, it was a means to an end.
The same holds true for Thali. Yes it’s a P2P system. But no that isn’t the point. Thali puts you in control of communication that happens within networks of trust. That’s what matters. Peer networking is just one of several enablers.
Imagine a different kind of Facebook, one where you are a customer rather than a product. You buy social networking applications, they’re not free. But when you use those apps…
The president of VMware said after seeing it (and not knowing what he was seeing), “Wow, what movie is that?” And that’s what it’s all about — dispersion of disbelief. You’ve heard me talk about this before, and we’re almost there. I famously predicted at a prestigious event three years ago that by 2015 there would be no more human actors, it would be all CG. Well I may end up being 52% or better right (phew). – Jon Peddie
via Nvidia Pulls off ‘Industrial Light and Magic’-Like Tools | EE Times. Jon Peddie has covered the 3D animation, modeling and simulation market for YEARS. And when you can get a rise out of him like the quote above from EETimes, you have accomplished something. Between NVidia’s hardware and now its GameWorks suite of software modeling tools, you have in a word created Digital Cinema. Jon goes on to talk about how the digital simulation demo convinced a VMWare exec it was real live actors on a set. That’s how good things are getting.
And the metaphor/simile of comparing ILM to NVidia’s toolkits off the shelf is also telling. No longer does one need to have on staff computer scientists, physicists and mathematicians to help model, and simulate things like particle systems and hair. It’s all there along with ocean waves, and smoke altogether in the toolkit ready to use. Putting these tools into the hands of the users will only herald a new era of less esoteric, less high end, exclusive access to the best algorithms and tools.
nVidia GameWorks by itself will be useful to some people but re-packaging it in a way that embeds it in an existing workflow will widen the level of adoption.Whether that’s for a casual user or a student in a 3D modeling and animation course at a University. The follow-on to this is getting the APIs publishedto tap into this through current off the shelf tools like AutoCAD, 3D StudioMax, Blender, Maya, etc. Once the favorite tools can bring up a dialog box and start adding a particle system, full ray tracing to a scene at this level of quality, things will really start to take off. The other possibility is to flesh out GameWorks in a way that makes it more of a standalone, easily adopted brand new package creatives could adopt and eventually migrate to over time. That would be another path to using GameWorks as an end-to-end digital cinema creation package.
Where you’re going to see the biggest benefits to DDR4 is in the mobile/portable device category. On the desktop there might be a slight increase in speed, but not like the big bumps of previous generations of DDR architectural moves. So figure on 10% maybe depending on the chipset and CPU and the 3rd level cache on the cpu die. That combo is more likely to affect your overall system speed than just moving to DDR4 DIMMs on the motherboard.
SK Hynix?s high-capacity DDR4 modules are based on Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology.
DDR4 capable motherboards and CPUs aren’t yet on the market, but that hasn’t stopped SK Hynix from putting some serious work into making high capacity DDR4 modules. On Tuesday the South Korean sem…
Qualcomm finally unveils its high-end 64-bit enabled SoCs, but they won?t be available until the first half of 2015.
Qualcomm has launched its first batch of ARM v8-based SoCs last month, but this time around it is detailing its plans for the high-end segment. The Snapdragon 810 and …
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 