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

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.

Wireless Video standards war

A bunch of references from GigaOM - it looks as if UltraWideBand 480Mbit USB is in trouble, and the alternatives are a dedicated Wireless HD video standard and Wifi based video streaming. UWB has some nice characteristics, but perhaps the ubiquity of WiFi wins again.... (There have been many cases over the years of technologies losing to Ethernet and IP based networks in the end).

http://gigaom.com/2008/10/31/ultra-wideband-near-death-as-wiquest-shuts-down/

http://gigaom.com/2008/04/09/wireless-hd-is-the-new-front-in-a-standards-war/

http://gigaom.com/2008/08/15/vcs-hope-to-see-wi-fi-everywhere/

I just want to be able to stream video from my iPhone to my TV set without any wires, don't care what the technology is, and I'm thinking of getting a WiFi enabled TV with Netflix embedded in it around the end of this year.

MIT Medialab's Sixth Sense

This is exactly the kind of user interface development that I've been looking forward to as part of my Millicomputing meme. I hope it inspires some products soon...

iPhone 3.0 hardware interface implications

An insightful posting by Daniel Eran on the iPhone 3.0 hardware interface controller, and its significance.

All I would like to add is that I really hope wideband/wireless USB is a feature of the next iPhone hardware. 480Mbits/s without any wires, and with wireless video output, so your pocket can drive your projector sunglasses, TV, meeting room projector or computer screen without even leaving your pocket.

Intel licenses Atom to TSMC

Intel licenses low power Atom CPU design to TSMC. This is another step along the road of bringing the Intel x64 architecture down into low power embedded devices to compete with ARM.

TI OMAP4 is based on ARM Cortex A9

Nice summary on GigaOM about the new chip just launched by TI.

This continues along the direction I outlined two years ago, high def video and graphics processing, very long battery life, high speed networking and lots of CPU capacity in a multicore chip, sampling soon, and in products in 2010.