King Ranch Tarantino
Motherbusted sausage role, lying in the sand
One leg out the door, baby’s head in hand
Putrid mustard motzah ball, gift bag garbage can
Eggplant massacre, sunshine china getaway
Reverse roadrage dollar bill, a phony winter day
Commie t-bone barbeque, eat raw meat on Sunday
King Ranch Tarantino, comes to save my ass
They turn to demons all is lost
Night night and I dream them all away.
– Simon Solotko 1.9.2010
Overclockers are the champions of performance computing. We owe them our allegiance. Herein are the chronicles of the the Dragon and its rise to the apex of 7GHz. My child, The Abomination, is finally here for all to gaze upon with utter terror. The Phantom from my friend Aaron Schradin and The Venom from the K|ngp|n. Great overclockers from across the land. Witness all!
You’ve come this far so you are entitled to something. Here’s the plan. (some links are live, others not yet…)
November
7GHz Ist Rad | http://links.amd.com/7Fang
Completed Console 2.0 | http://links.amd.com/console2 |Updating Dragon-Based HTPC | Testing with Samsung pn50b650
Extreme OC Gathering http://links.amd.com/LHE4
Patience Pays | C3 on H2O | http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=238910 | T-5 Days And Counting | charged3800z24 | Buckeye | Beta | Zeus | wuttz | ridney | crazydiamond | Daveburt714 | chew* | Special Guests
Dragon Age Origins on EyeFinity | http://links.amd.com/DragonAgeFang
Top Secret All Powerfulness
Holiday Buying Guide | Arrival of the UltraThin | http://links.amd.com/utracool
Turkey | Lots of Turkey
Microsoft’s Multi-Room Windows 7 Demo | http://links.amd.com/nexus
Watch the Matrix Trillogy
The Sleeper Must Awaken
December
Console 2.0 Meets Multi-Room Computing | http://links.amd.com/consolethg
Headboard 1.0
Lucky To Be Alive
Preparing For What is Next
January
Baby 3.0
CES 5.0
Gom Jabbar
Top Secret All Powerfulness
And You Were Looking | They Are Always Taking You Back to What They Define as Reality
You are officially off the beaten path. You came here for a reason? Perhaps. Or you might have just clicked from curiosity.
I don’t know the truth. But I can show you how the world looks from my point of view. As technology forks the future picture evolves, and I think significant changes hit about every six months. I want to offer a new lexicon for computing terms with which you are already familiar. Not what each of these things are, but why they are important. These are biased by my world view, and you can read more about that here at the Omnixedia.
Digital Convergence | Yes. Two axes. Mobile Personal Assitant & Home Group Assistant | The mobile personal assistant is currently split into a range of devices from laptop to cell phone to media player, near term collapsing to Xphone plus mid for consumers and Xphone plus Ultrathin for mobile professionals | The home will fall to platform companies = companies with the good sense to build hardware with a regularly updated software stack to keep them relevant. Companies failing to create platforms are creating bricks and consumer are catching on.
USB 3.0 | DOA ?| Xntel and others have other plans?
Light Peak | Yes. Thin, lightweight, USB 2.0 compatible. Tethers Xphones & mids. The wire for the digital home has been revealed and you better pay attention. The ability to deliver upstream video and downstream content changes the potential of the Xphone, the mid, the laptop, and the PC. It speeds digital convergence as defined above.
Eyefinity | Yes. Multiple displays in one room today. Multiple displays in many rooms one day. Much work to be done but so much benefit upon introduction that’s its truly a marvel.
Ethernet | Yes. In the home makes for a mess as consumers try to plug everything into the network and expect it to actually solve problems in a consistent and reliable fashion. Some wild cards here. #1 Wild Card – Cloud-based rending & decentralized mini-platforms. Wired home networks may be short lived. Central PC talks to router. Router has wireless for all other devices. If only Europe didn’t have stone walls.
Cloud Computing | Yes. OnLive & cloud-based rendering brings the cloud into the living room. How does a console maker prevent their box from becoming an OnLive portal. Funny!
PC Gaming | Yes. OnLive plus stubborn free-thinking enthusiasts plus web-based gaming continue.
Consols | Yes. Next gen evolutionary. Delivery of web content to big screens is the #1 capability change in gen 2. And faster. And cheaper. Normal cycle. Video telephony, gesture gaming, the death of brick & mortar media outlets, PC replacment, world domination. Their mouths are open wide but its a lot to swallow.
Crowd Computing | Yes. More people collaborating online. More people collaborating @ home. Large screens connected to app-bearing platforms make it innevitable. More here http://links.amd.com/eyecndy
Remote | It’s a problem and has been for a long, long time. No solution. Many remotes.
DisplayPort | Yes. 1.2 will be a big deal. HDMI too will evolve to support I/O and downstream connectivity or become a legacy connector like VGA was to PC’s. The future of interconnect is convergence. I/O, HD video, audio all in one cable over long distances. That’s the market requirement. If your interconnect does that its got a shot, otherwise, gone. Unlike LightPeak it’s got an install base and the cable can be cheap.
Multi-Session | Yes. The big guys have a lot of work to do. But no other application needs what Moore’s law will bring. And BigSoft needs a big vision with a big challenge.
Multi-Room | Yes. See above.
Netbook | Current generation sucks. UltraThin delivers on the user experience promise in ways a netbook to too stupid to fathom. Now, next generation with Android >2 plus dual core plus more capable media processor? Jury’s out.
Mobile Person Assistant |Yes, See Digital Convergence above.
Central Group Assistant | http://links.amd.com/eyecndy and particularly the prior entry in the series.
Open, paralell computing can excel in applications where the underlying data is a representation of physical reality. An abundance of visual information. The interaction of forces of nature. Physical representations in space and time. With ATI Stream support for both DirectCompute and OpenCL we now have an open, paralell , platform independent computing evironment that supports x86 CPUs and many GP GPUs.
With these tools, computing can face the ultimate challenge, the one that useful and “intelligent” machines must learn to face – how to deal with reality.
If you are interested in learning how OpenCL works,check out the full blog where Ben Sander and I discuss the power of ATI Stream technology and the elegant, standards-based interface now available with OpenCL for GPU.
Or check out the ATI Stream SDK v2.0 supports OpenCL 1.0 for both x86 CPUs and a wide range of AMD GPUs.
I thought that we would have a unified cable enabling the digital nexus, a centralized home PC, to be connected to many displays throughout the home in 2012 with DisplayPort 1.2. Surprise, surprise. Looks like I am not the only one who has thought about this. But these guys figured you need to be able to go 100 meters. And the cable needs to be thin and durable. And Optical. And they may be right. Intel Light Peek is indeed one cable aiming to rule them all. Making it a standard will be harder than climbing Everest. Many competing standards, and copper keeps getting better. For example, you can now port 1080p on a single CAT5/6 with Atlona’s CAT5 1080p HDMI converter.
The challenge this solution and DisplayPort 1.2 aim to resolve is the combination of HD video/audio and I/O via USB over a single cable that can stretch the PC experience (and potentially other computing experiences other than the x86/Windows experience) throughout the home. DisplayPort has the lead in my book with a nice and growing installed base and an improving cost structure. It’s also copper, which has won similar battles over fibre in the consumer space just about every time.
As I have said elsewhere, enabling the use cases associated with this topology happens to require a multi-session OS with highly configurable multi I/O. Intel may say this is to get rid of wire clutter for laptop docking. My pajamas. You don’t need a hundred meters of fibre to dock your laptop. This cable is purpose made to wire the digital home and put a PC at the center of it. Period. If you are a bit lost and want a better explanation of the digital nexus you can read this.
So my challenge now is that I have gone from finding the central home computing hypothesis appealing and plausible to finding it likely and potentially innevitable. Prevailing views that follow the trendline of the digitally networked and gadget infested home, our Gordeon’s Knot, simply don’t jive with this world view and you will make yourself unpopular at this year’s CES if you dwell too long.
I do not know if the major league players in the PC or CE space understand the full implications of the model. And I am very surprised by the rapid progress in the past two weeks toward the model, with the revelation of ATI Eyefinity, which is really an architectural and software solution to multi-monitor/audio, and now the revelation of Intel’s Light Peak, supporting long run video/video plus USB (or USB-like) based control.
But now I am certain that I am not the only one jumping up and down, saying to myself, it has begun. A few players had aces up their sleeves that are now flipped up and on the table. They may not have known they were aces….Who will throw down next? What piece of the puzzle will they complete?
The race is on. The question is, who’s heard the starting gun.
For more, head over to TechReaction.net where you can read even more.
Photo | Simon Solotko
In prior entries I have employed the term “digital nexus” or “central home computer” to describe the multi-session | multi-person | multi-screen model. This model requires a multi-session operating system, one aware of multiple inputs and multiple users, which can map a separate set of inputs (keyboard, mice, remotes, game controllers) to each user and each screen. Imagine the possibilities of a fully configurable I/O environment where a computer can support many keyboards, mice, and free-motion controllers. Dad can be in the den playing Tom Clancy’s Hawks (against his son) while his daughter is doing homework in her room and mom is managing finances in the office, all on the same, centrally managed PC. You can think of this model as multiple, simultaneous instances of single-session | single-person | single screen. The central computer would be capable of juggling multiple user sessions, multiple screens, and multiple input / output peripherals throughout the home.
I believe that we are on an inevitable path toward Crowd Computing. Many people, computing together, using many screens in many rooms with uniform and easy access to their user-settings, information, applications and powerful compute resources. The multi-monitor capability provided by ATI Eyefinity is an important piece of the puzzle, a powerful display adapter which can extend the computer to multiple separate displays in multiple positions or nearby locations.
Read the entire blog for AMD here at http://links.amd.com/eyecndy
Photo | Simon Solotko
7.29.09 I press the button at the right moment. A fraction of a second to capture an unpredictable natural wonder. New Smyrna beach, Florida.
7.30.09 I am standing 30′ from where I took the photo, outside under the beach house. Lighning strikes with 30′. Everyone temporairly freaks out. Power adapters fry. Half the brakers trip. The house is not on fire.
Lightning Under Clouds Kills. L.U.C.K.
Photos | Simon Solotko
