When Does If Equal Else?

Apr 22

adminRandom Randal 1 Comment

While i was looping for an else I found an if. This if told me that my else found a goto that went to my loop. So I asked myself when does if equal else???? …. AND more importantly what will happen when it does.

The Future for Chip Manufacturers

Apr 22

adminCode Monkey No Comments

It is now 2010 and computing is about to enter into a new dawn. (Referring to computing as instruction being execute on some hardware being produced by a chip manufacturing). Now let me explain what this dawn is by first addressing the past.

The Past
Through out the 90’s and early 2000’s chip manufactures such as Intel and AMD were driven by Moore’s law and their marketing strategy reflected this. That is, each new chip architecture, while it had various new features, also had more transistors and better clock speed. This was achieved through reducing the channel width of MOS devices (making them smaller). Call me old (and a bit cheap) but I still have a P4 in my PC. It runs fine, maybe seven or so years old, but yes it still does the job. I mention this because the P4 was the pinnacle of Moore’s law. Heaps of small transistors (for that time) and a fast clock speed (for that time).

The P4 series was the demise of single threaded computing. Chip manufactures and the larger semiconductor industry realized that the current fabrication processes for transistors were hitting their limits, well at least for staying in line with Moore’s law. Thus, the industry moved towards parallel computing. Chip sets with multiple cores and multiple threads within each core.

The Current Computer Trend
Computing at the moment is stagnant with no real since of direction. I say this because if you sit back and think about what technologies are being pushed by the big players in the industry it is easy to observed that they are all waiting to see where the new mass consumer market will go. Just to clear this up, here are some technologies I am referring to:

  1. Smart phone (iPhone, Google’s Phone etc)
  2. IPad
  3. Netbook computing
  4. Supercomputing with GPUs

Now notice that in this short list that:

  1. I have not mentioned directly a chip manufacturers name and
  2. There is a clear divide between the applications.

What I am trying to get out is that companies such as Google, and Apple are pushing new technologies that they think add value to the customer. These technologies do not require massive computing power, especially the net-book. If Google get their way, move over Windows, the net-book just needs a browser. But it does not stop there. Lets say the net-book takes off and your digital life is completely stored remotely, what happens to Western Digital. Hard drives, where do they go. What happens to operating systems? what happens to linux? Haha, I almost shead a tear.

To make my point clear, these new applications are forcing hardware manufactures to rethink their marketing strategies. This relates back to the point I alluded to earlier, the computing market is stagnant. To back this up,  my work computer has an i7 in it, and to be honest I am not that impressed. I get home and my P4 still does the job. Okay it may do it a little slower for every day use and a lot slower if I am running a MATLAB simulation. So why am I not impressed. Well to be honest I feel that Intel do not believe in their own product. Now this leads me to my last explaination of this rant.

The scientific community has always looked for more processing power. Why? the need to run simulations, that’s why. Driven by the gaming market GPUs have far out performed CPUs for a while (when you compare a small subset of hardware characteristics). Nvidia and ATI have both opened up their hardware graphic pipeline for more general computing.  This has lead to much recent research into areas such as computer clusters with GPUs.

The Future
The question is, what technology will the mass consumer market follow? and where does this leave the chip manufacturers? Here is my opinion. Chip manufactures such as Intel will have to make a division in their headline processors; One division for powerful processing and the other for low power, long life processing for net-books etc. To re-inforce this point, there is no reason why the future net-books could not run of a RISC based system. They new ARM 9 MCU’s from T.I are extremly powerful and will only get more powerful in the future. Are Intel willing to lose market share to T.I in a new market that will see embedded systems take on general computing. Who knows? only time will tell. One thing is for sure, the marketing stradagies will have to change. Interesting times ahead….

Exception 55 : Now using wordpress

Apr 22

adminUncategorized No Comments

After many years on inactivity, Exception 55 is now using wordpress to communicate with the world. More content will come.