Opinion

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Processor Designers’ Sad, Sad World

Stroll the halls of any computer engineering graduate school and you will doubtless encounter numerous students brimming with ideas for cranking up processor speeds. Until recently, graduates of these schools found a warm welcome in the PC processor market, which seemed to have an insatiable need for speed. Today, however, fewer and fewer PC buyers are willing to pay a premium for more speed—after all, who needs a 3 GHz processor to write a letter to Grandma? If the PC market no longer needs Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Easy Money

In October, ARM Ltd. announced two unhappy firsts: its first-ever quarter-to-quarter sales decline, and its first layoffs. Prior to these developments, ARM seemed to have discovered a bulletproof business model that was easy to mimic: just whip up a core, license it, and let the royalty checks roll in. Indeed, ARM’s previously uninterrupted ascent, coupled with the ready availability of venture capital, gave rise to a flood of new processor core licensors in the late 90’s. In truth, core Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Time is Money

Experienced engineers know that a comprehensive technical specification is a prerequisite for all but the most trivial projects. Without a solid spec, it is difficult to know how to begin a project, let alone deliver a high-quality product. Yet specifications are rarely complete in the sense that they rarely capture every minute element of the product’s ultimate behavior and performance. Indeed, attempting to specify every detail is usually futile: changing customer requirements, unforeseen Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—FPGAs Crash the Party

These days, digital signal processing enables everything from satellites to engine controllers. With their decades of experience, one would expect DSP processor vendors to have a lock on these applications. All they have to do is belly up to the all-you-can-eat buffet, right? Not if FPGA vendors can help it. Until fairly recently, FPGAs lacked the capacity to implement demanding DSP algorithms—and they were perceived as being too expensive and power-hungry to compete with DSPs anyway. One Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Frankenstein’s Camera

Is the lowly camera the focal point for a revolution in convergence devices? In the past few months consumer electronics manufacturers have shipped a camcorder with a built-in MP3 player and voice recorder; a PDA with a built-in camera and an MP3 player; and a cell phone with (you guessed it) a built-in camera and voice recorder. Are these devices harbingers of a golden age of consumer electronics? Or are they like Frankenstein's monster: technically brilliant but disastrous in practice? In Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—I Want My VoD

Over the years, futurists have made technology predictions that seem ridiculous in retrospect. Even brilliant, serious thinkers promised us hover cars and space colonies that have yet to pan out; what went wrong? In many cases, the technology was available, but there was no business case for the predicted advances. Sure, we can colonize the moon—if somebody is willing to foot the bill. Consider the fate of streaming video: we have the technologies to make high-quality, on-demand video a Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Jack-of-All-Trades

Customizable processors were all the rage at this year’s Embedded Processor Forum. Vendors from Tensilica to Toshiba touted customizable processors as the ultimate solution for DSP applications from voice-over-IP to MPEG-4 video compression. In the view of these companies, processors with fixed instruction sets are forever bound to be jacks-of-all-trades, but masters of none. A better approach, they argue, is a flexible instruction set that designers can fine-tune to do one thing well. Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—1600 lbs. of Gorilla

A battle of the titans is shaping up for supremacy in embedded application processors—processors intended for next-generation portable information appliances like multimedia cell phones and PDAs. The stakes in this battle are enormous: according to Micrologic Research, worldwide cell phone shipments alone are expected to exceed 450 million units this year. And the contestants are appropriately gargantuan: Texas Instruments, the long-time king of digital signal processors (DSPs), is pitted Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Reinventing the Wheel

In the early days of the automotive industry, every car was a unique, handcrafted specimen—even mundane items like pistons were one-of-a-kind. This changed in 1908, when Cadillac disassembled three Model K's, mixed the parts together, and then built three running cars from the hodgepodge of parts. Today, this feat seems wholly unremarkable—even cars as seemingly dissimilar as Fords and Jaguars often share major components. One of the great lessons of the 20th-century automotive industry is Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—MPEG? No, Thanks.

Microsoft and Real Networks must be thrilled. This February, Apple immediately followed the unveiling of its QuickTime 6 media player and QuickTime Broadcaster with an announcement that these products were on hold indefinitely. At issue were the proposed licensing terms for MPEG-4 video, a key component of these products. These licensing terms, announced in February, require content providers to pay a royalty for every second of MPEG-4 video downloaded, streamed over a network, or distributed Read more...