tag: software

Writing Application Software Directly To The Metal
By Ed Sperling - 13 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling How necessary is an operating system? That question would have been considered superfluous a decade ago, possibly even blasphemous and career-limiting. But it now is beginning to surface in low-power discussions, particularly in compute-intensive applications where performance and power are both critical. General-purpose operating systems constantly call on the processor fo... » read more

The Great Debate: Fewer Functions?
By Ed Sperling - 19 Feb, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling What do you do when you can’t fit any more functionality on a chip without blowing your power budget? That question is being debated inside IBM right now, and one of the more radical concepts is to actually have systems do fewer things. “That trend will happen,” said Brad McCredie, chief architect of the Power6 chip and an IBM Fellow. “I think devices w... » read more

The Trouble With Multicore Software
By Ed Sperling - 12 Feb, 2009 - Comments: 0

David Patterson, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, presented his views to the Naval Postgraduate School about the prospects for multicore programming success. This video was excerpted from his presentation. [youtube vid=EDHXIH8DlLY] » read more

Making A Multicore System Work
By Ed Sperling - 29 Jan, 2009 - Comments: 0

If you think designing a single-core system is hard, designing multicore systems is multiple times harder. Connecting all the pieces together and making them work properly, if not together, is one of the hardest tasks design engineers and architects will ever face. System-Level Design tracked down some of the experts in this field and sat them down around a table to discuss what’s going... » read more

Achieving Successful LTE Design and Test
By Cheryl Ajluni - 22 Jan, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Cheryl Ajluni In spite of all of its hype, WiMAX is not the only standard causing a stir these days or being called a “killer app.” Another technology that has achieved this illustrious title is Long Term Evolution (LTE), the Third Generation Partnership Project’s (3GPP’s) air interface for wireless access. Granted, WiMAX does have the advantage of a head start in development, test... » read more

What’s Next In ESL?
By Ed Sperling - 21 Jan, 2009 - Comments: 0

The easy stuff is over, not that anything was ever really easy in the semiconductor world. But getting the most from a chip in terms of lowering power and boosting performance will no longer be a function of the silicon alone.   Most software engineering has been done with existing languages and operating systems, but the well-known versions are aimed at general-purpose computing. They’r... » read more

Case Study: A Better Way To Predict Weather
By Ed Sperling - 17 Dec, 2008 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Most of our weather predictions are developed from about 150 stationary government radar systems, which interlock and occasionally overlap to create a cohesive picture. The picture isn’t perfect—in fact, it’s probably the equivalent of looking at a large, grainy satellite photo—which creates plenty of wrong forecasts. But the system can track large storms across state bo... » read more

Can SaaS Really Make Chip Design Easier?
By Cheryl Ajluni - 17 Dec, 2008 - Comments: 0

By Cheryl Ajluni Software as a Service (SaaS) is not a technology. It is a software deployment business model where an application is hosted as a service that is provided to customers across the Internet. Thanks to success stories from companies like Google, Salesforce.com, WebEx, and TurboTax, among others, this business model has become quite popular and is now even being looked at by some E... » read more

Houston…We Have A System-Level Problem
By Ed Sperling - 04 Dec, 2008 - Comments: 0

[youtube vid=iZ61OU12TNU] Just imagine what happens when the guidance system on the International Space Station goes on the fritz and the entire lab begins doing somersaults through outer space. Then the solar panels no longer work and the communication system fails, and suddenly you understand how serious system-level design problems can become. Ret. Capt. Daniel Bursch recounts the inciden... » read more

SOI Goes Mainstream
By Ed Sperling - 20 Nov, 2008 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The crossover for system on insulator (SOI) versus bulk CMOS was supposed to happen at the 22nm, but that was before software developers ran into problems programming multicore chips. For years, SOI was considered the high-performance cousin of CMOS—more expensive, more difficult to manufacture and unnecessary for most applications. It is the heart of the Cell processor, ... » read more

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