Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
Spacial audio
Another example of an idea I mentioned in my Millicomputing talk turning up at NTT. This is something that could be programmed on an iPhone using OpenAL I think. It's really the idea of using stereo sound to carry conversations, which depends upon people using stereo headsets. I think there needs to be additional value in the headset such as video capture of what I'm looking at, and into-eye video display like the MyVue, then spacial audio is an add-on not the main feature.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Renesas Low power HD Video processor
Sighted at engadget mobile, where they think it could turn up in mobile devices that do both input and output of HD video at 1080p, 30fps
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Andy Bechtolsheim on the Solid State Storage Revolution
At the MySQL conference Andy gives a talk that is up on YouTube.
He gives a good overview of the hardware changes, but doesn't talk about the software challenges, where many of the assumptions and algorithms that are built into all the common operating systems, filesystems and databases are simply wrong. There is a lot of work to be done here. My own work at Sun involved several attempts to point this problem out over the years, and if I had done a better job of getting traction for my ideas, there would be a lot more preparation and research in this area by now. The specific examples include trying to explain the benefits of embedding NVRAM products into servers during the 1990's, and doing extensive testing with solid state disks around 2002. The current size and cost benefits that we see were very predictable, and so are the problems. The SSD's at the time were very expensive, but they were perfectly capable of supporting research and development of new algorithms, and an opportunity was missed.
The next thing that is coming is non-volatile RAM (all the RAM in the system), in case anyone is listening. There need to be fundamental changes in operating systems (user level memory protection models etc.) and we then have the ability to build truly diskless database servers, with safely persistent in-memory databases, in user space, no device drivers.
He gives a good overview of the hardware changes, but doesn't talk about the software challenges, where many of the assumptions and algorithms that are built into all the common operating systems, filesystems and databases are simply wrong. There is a lot of work to be done here. My own work at Sun involved several attempts to point this problem out over the years, and if I had done a better job of getting traction for my ideas, there would be a lot more preparation and research in this area by now. The specific examples include trying to explain the benefits of embedding NVRAM products into servers during the 1990's, and doing extensive testing with solid state disks around 2002. The current size and cost benefits that we see were very predictable, and so are the problems. The SSD's at the time were very expensive, but they were perfectly capable of supporting research and development of new algorithms, and an opportunity was missed.
The next thing that is coming is non-volatile RAM (all the RAM in the system), in case anyone is listening. There need to be fundamental changes in operating systems (user level memory protection models etc.) and we then have the ability to build truly diskless database servers, with safely persistent in-memory databases, in user space, no device drivers.
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