Jon Peddie Back Pages - It's all about the pixels

A look at the future—maybe

Posted by Webmaster on March 2nd 2010 | Discuss (0)
Tags: nvidia gpu intel ati opencl amd graphics gpgpu

We’ve spent some intense and serious time with the AMD folks recently, in Las Vegas, Texas, Santa Clara, here in our labs, on the phone and by email, and we’ve gotten a pretty good understanding of the company’s plans and people—or so we’d like to think (or maybe they’d like us to think…). Putting aside Machiavellian schemes and ideas for novels, being able to understand a company and its people keeps you from making toady comments, misstating facts, and hopefully making bad forecasts. It also helps you better understand other companies in the market. AMD is into sweets-SSSS In June of…

Look at me when I talk to you

Posted by Webmaster on February 16th 2010 | Discuss (0)
Tags: text-to-speech computers listen mips speech

About ten years ago, I wrote an editorial suggesting our PCs could, and should, look at and listen to us. And when they did they would be able to see if we were happy, angry, sad, impatient, or bored. They would know when we were dictating a memo, story, or email, and when we were giving them commands to open a file or get a program. I even went so far as to suggest eye-tracking as a replacement for the mouse. I never suggested hand waving as an alternative input mechanism because of my experience many years ago with a light-pen.…

The middle ground—is there one or many?

Posted by Jon Peddie on February 3rd 2010 | Permalink
Tags: nvidia intel apple ipad tablet newton os

When Steve Jobs presented the iPad, he set up the premise that we have smart phones, and we have laptops, and there is a gap between them that should be filled. As he made his presentation, I thought, I just saw this presentation a few weeks ago in Las Vegas. Jen-Hsun Huang did it at CES. Huang said the exact same things, and showed tablets that would fit in the middle. And then I thought about Intel, who also wanted to fill the perceived middle. Intel called it a mobile Internet device—MID. Intel wasn’t successful in creating that category, but a…

Stereo—can we get real?

Posted by Webmaster on January 19th 2010 | Permalink
Tags: 3d s3d stereovision glasses stereopsis

The movie industry commonly called “Hollywood’ is famous for stereotypes, mislabeling, and misrepresenting. In some sense you could say that’s their business model—to create an illusion, to misdirect. Just the term Hollywood is misdirection as the Canadians, French, Indians, and Nigerians will attest. Those countries produce an amazing amount of movies and some amazing content and yet they are grouped under the banner of Hollywood. The same thing is true with regard to the trick of creating the impression of depth on a flat two-dimensional surface known as a movie screen. The movie industry and specifically Hollywood in this case wants…

Predictions

Posted by Jon Peddie on January 5th 2010 | Permalink
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They’re pretty predicable—wrong. This is the time of year when everyone and their dog make predictions about what’s going to happen next year. I predict that this year, that will happen again (see, my accuracy count is already ahead). I was thinking about all the predictions we’ve heard and how many of them came true —very few. Worst prediction? One of my favorite DA (dumb ass) predictions was how the world would come to a screeching halt on 00:001 01.01.2000 because computers could only go to 1999. I haven’t seen a decimal-based computer in quite a while, and 1999 is not…

Welcome to the Cloud - It may be scarier than you thought - Cloud Computing

Posted by Jon Peddie on December 10th 2009 | Permalink
Tags: amazon s3 cloud storage cloud cloud computing cloud files amazon ec2 cloud hosting

The following is purely fictional. No small children, animals, or data were hurt in the making of this story. Reader’s discretion advised. Content contains suggestive and potentially rude ideas, loud music, and sex scenes that may not be appropriate for readers with an IQ of less than 110. Winter in Seattle, and the sun had set on a cold and rainy Friday night. Jaymes couldn’t stand the thought of one more cup of coffee to try and fight the fatigue of a long day and even longer week. He just had three more paragraphs to write, make the finals sums in…

Your locus of control and what it means to be super

Posted by Jon Peddie on November 25th 2009 | Permalink
Tags: nvidia gpu intel opencl amd cuda gpgpu supercomputer cray super

In psychology, there is a term to describe how one sees himself or herself with regard to the rest of the world. If they feel they are in control of their lives and themselves they are said to have an internal locus of control. If they feel they are controlled by the environment, by bosses, family, government, etc., then they are said to have an external locus of control. And yes, naturally it varies from time to time, but in general one’s locus of control is steady. People whose lives are ruled by their phone, Blackberry, or some email or social…

The world at our fingertips

Posted by Jon Peddie on November 9th 2009 | Permalink
Tags: cyclopaedia memx pim arpanet cyclopaedia memx arpanet jacquard pda chambers

We are so enamored with our multifunction mobile phone, and our multifunction PC—devices that promise us the world at our fingertips—that we may have forgotten, those of us that ever even knew, about the machines that got us here. The Jacquard loom comes to mind as an early single-function machine, and I’ve commented on that before. But the idea of having all the world’s knowledge available to you, your own library of Alexander, was first attempted by Ephraim Chambers in London in 1728, when he published his two-volume Cyclopaedia, which was the forerunner to the modern encyclopedia developed by Diderot in…

The democratization of the PC—the ubiquitous USB port

Posted by Webmaster on October 28th 2009 | Permalink
Tags:

I remember back to 1996 when the first USB standard was proposed. I had done a little consulting with Intel prior to that and tried to convince them to use Philips’ I2C which had been developed in the early 80s as a CE inter-box communications system It had a 400 kb capability, and in 1998 got updated to 3.4 Mbit. In 1986 Apple and National Semiconductor introduced Firewire and it a 400 Mbit half duplex capability. Firewire ultimately became IEEE 1394 in 1995. Intel was actually interested in I2C but Philips at the time thought they had the golden goose and…

Of hot rods and chipsets—Nvidia can’t win

Posted by Jon Peddie on October 15th 2009 | Permalink
Tags: nvidia gpu opencl cuda gpgpu geforce charlie chipsets

What an incredible week this has been for Nvidia. It started out with them introducing the most revolutionary new architecture in a decade and ended with stories about them getting kicked out of the chipset business, and giving up the gaming market. Fermi is an amazing piece of technology—period. The Nvidia haters (they are legion I’m told) have been quick to point out that it is overloaded with silicon not needed for gaming, and is big, and won’t be available in time for this year’s holiday madness. And actually much of that is true—but wait—there’s more. Back in the days I…