I did not have time to post my computer technologies predictions t the ends of 2016. Because I missed the year end deadline, I though that there is no point on posting anything before the news from CES 2017 have been published. Here are some of myck picks on the current computer technologies trends:
CES 2017 had 3 significant technology trends: deep learning goes deep, Alexa everywhere and Wi-Fi gets meshy. The PC sector seemed to be pretty boring.
Gartner expects that IT sales will growth (2.7%) but hardware sales will not have any growth – can drop this year. TEKsystems 2017 IT forecast shows IT budgets rebounding from a slump in 2016, and IT leaders’ confidence high going into the new year. But challenges around talent acquisition and organizational alignment will persist. Programming and software development continue to be among the most crucial and hard-to-find IT skill sets.
Smart phones sales (expected to be 1.89 billion) and PC sales (expected to be 432 million) do not grow in 2017. According to IDC PC shipments declined for a fifth consecutive year in 2016 as the industry continued to suffer from stagnation and lack of compelling drivers for upgrades. Both Gartner and IDC estimated that PC shipments declined about 6% in 2016.Revenue in the traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure segment decreased 10.8 per cent year over year in the third quarter of 2016. Only PC category that has potential for growth is ultramobile (includes Microsoft Surface ja Apple MacBook Air). Need for memory chips is increasing.
Browser suffers from JavaScript-creep disease: This causes that the browing experience seems to be become slower even though computer and broadband connections are getting faster all the time. Bloat on web pages has been going on for ages, and this trend seems to continue.
Microsoft tries all it can to make people to switch from older Windows versions to Windows 10. Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 7 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses as malware attacks that could have been avoided by upgrading to Windows 10. Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 7 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses. Microsoft: Windows 7 Does Not Meet the Demands of Modern Technology; Recommends Windows 10. On February 2017 Microsoft stops the 20 year long tradition of monthly security updates. Windows 10 “Creators Update” coming early 2017 for free, featuring 3D and mixed reality, 4K gaming, more.
Microsoft plans to emulate x86 instructions on ARM chips, throwing a compatibility lifeline to future Windows tablets and phones. Microsoft’s x86 on ARM64 Emulation is coming in 2017. This capability is coming to Windows 10, though not until “Redstone 3″ in the Fall of 2017.
Parents should worry less about the amount of time their children spend using smartphones, computers and playing video games because screen time is actually beneficial, the University of Oxford has concluded. 257 minutes is the time teens can spend on computers each day before harming wellbeing.
Outsourcing IT operations to foreign countries is not trendy anymore and companied live at uncertain times. India’s $150 billion outsourcing industry stares at an uncertain future. In the past five years, revenue and profit growth for the top five companies listed on the BSE have halved. Industry leader TCS too felt the impact as it made a shift in business model towards software platforms and chased digital contacts.
Containers will become hot this year and cloud will stay hot. Research firm 451 Research predicts this year containerization will be US $ 762 million business and that Containers will become 2.6 billion worth of software business in 2020. (40 per cent a year growth rate).
Cloud services are expected to have 22 percent annual growth rate. By 2020, the sector would grow from the current 22.2 billion to $ 46 billion. In Finland 30% of companies now prefer to buy cloud services when buying IT (20 per cent of IT budget goes to cloud).Cloud spend to make up over a third of IT budgets by 2017. Cloud and hosting services will be responsible for 34% of IT budgets by 2017, up from 28% by the end of 2016, according to 451 Research. Cloud services have many advantages, but cloud services have also disadvantages. In five years, SaaS will be the cloud that matters.
When cloud is growing, so is the spending on cloud hardware by the cloud companies. Cloud hardware spend hits US$8.4bn/quarter, as traditional kit sinks – 2017 forecast to see cloud kit clock $11bn every 90 days. In 2016′s third quarter vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew by 8.1 per cent year over year to $8.4 billion. Private cloud accounted for $3.3 billion with the rest going to public clouds. Data centers need lower latency components so Google Searches for Better Silicon.
The first signs of the decline and fall of the 20+ year x86 hegemony will appear in 2017. The availability of industry leading fab processes will allow other processor architectures (including AMD x86, ARM, Open Power and even the new RISC-V architecture) to compete with Intel on a level playing field.
USB-C will now come to screens – C-type USB connector promises to really become the only all equipment for the physical interface.The HDMI connection will be lost from laptops in the future. Thunderbolt 3 is arranged to work with USB Type-C, but it’s not the same thing (Thunderbolt is four times faster than USB 3.1).
World’s first ‘exascale’ supercomputer prototype will be ready by the end of 2017, says China
It seems that Oracle Begins Aggressively Pursuing Java Licensing Fees in 2017. Java SE is free, but Java SE Suite and various flavors of Java SE Advanced are not. Oracle is massively ramping up audits of Java customers it claims are in breach of its licences – six years after it bought Sun Microsystems. Huge sums of money are at stake. The version of Java in contention is Java SE, with three paid flavours that range from $40 to $300 per named user and from $5,000 to $15,000 for a processor licence. If you download Java, you get everything – and you need to make sure you are installing only the components you are entitled to and you need to remove the bits you aren’t using.
Your Year in Review, Unsung Hero article sees the following trends in 2017:
- A battle between ASICs, GPUs, and FPGAs to run emerging workloads in artificial intelligence
- A race to create the first generation of 5G silicon
- Continued efforts to define new memories that have meaningful impact
- New players trying to take share in the huge market for smartphones
- An emerging market for VR gaining critical mass
Virtual Reality Will Stay Hot on both PC and mobile.“VR is the heaviest heterogeneous workload we encounter in mobile—there’s a lot going on, much more than in a standard app,” said Tim Leland, a vice president for graphics and imaging at Qualcomm. The challenges are in the needs to calculate data from multiple sensors and respond to it with updated visuals in less than 18 ms to keep up with the viewer’s head motions so the CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, sensor fusion core, display engine, and video-decoding block are all running at close to full tilt.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
PC sales fell by half in three years
In April-June, PCs sold 61.1 million PCs. Markets have shrunk now 11 quarters in a row, says Gartner. Over three years, the number of PC machines has fallen by half.
In the second quarter of the year, PC sales grew. According to the Canalys research institute, 123.9 million units were sold. The figure was 14 per cent higher than a year earlier.
In the spring, PC manufacturers are still suffering from expensive component prices. DRAMs, SSDs and monitors did not go down in the usual way, but in fact cost a lot. In this case, the new PC will cost more, which will affect many purchasing decisions.
In the second quarter, HP was the largest manufacturer with a market share of 20.8 percent. Lenovo immediately followed a 19.9 percent share and Dell reached 15.6 percent.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/6567-pc-myynti-romahti-puoleen-kolmessa-vuodessa
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux for Everyone–All 7.5 Billion of Us
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-everyone-all-75-billion-us
Linux has long since proven it’s possible for one operating system to work for everyone—also that there’s an approach to development that opens and frees code so everyone can use it, improve it and assure its freedoms spread to everyone doing the same.
This has been great for computing at all scales. But, it hasn’t been great for everybody, yet, because not everybody has access to hardware or software, but we can still help them out, our way.
What I’m suggesting here is that we conceive and develop new approaches to bringing the benefits of free and open-source computing, software and methods to everybody.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chris Davies / SlashGear:
Disney unveils Star Wars: Jedi Challenges, which combines a Lenovo-made mobile AR headset and a smartphone app to allow users to play games including holochess
Star Wars: Jedi Challenges puts an AR lightsaber in your hands
https://www.slashgear.com/disney-star-wars-jedi-challenges-augmented-reality-game-15491577/
Disney has teased what Star Wars fans have long been demanding: an augmented reality game that allows you to wield your own lightsaber. Previewed at D23, Disney’s annual expo, Star Wars: Jedi Challenges combines an AR headset with a smartphone app and a number of games. While details are in short supply right now, there are already several hints at just what the system could do.
The headset is made by Lenovo, and looks like a riff on what we’ve seen before with Microsoft’s HoloLens. Two transparent displays are visible through the front visor, overlaying computer graphics onto the real world. Unlike a VR headset – such as the Windows Holographic headset Lenovo announced earlier this year – this transparent fascia means real and virtual elements can be combined.
Where HoloLens is a completely self-sufficient system, however, combining both the AR displays and a computer that’s worn on the head, Jedi Challenges will offload its processing demands. That’ll be taken on by your smartphone, where different Star Wars themed apps and games will run.
Tomi Engdahl says:
John Mannes / TechCrunch:
Jefferies report says IBM’s Watson investment will struggle to return value to shareholders, points to IBM’s failed partnership with MD Anderson to show why — IBM’s Watson unit is receiving heat today in the form of a scathing equity research report from Jefferies’ James Kisner.
Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/13/jefferies-gives-ibm-watson-a-wall-street-reality-check/
IBM’s Watson unit is receiving heat today in the form of a scathing equity research report from Jefferies’ James Kisner. The group believes that IBM’s investment into Watson will struggle to return value to shareholders. In recent years, IBM has increasingly leaned on Watson as one of its core growth units — a unit that sits as a proxy for projecting IBM’s future value.
In the early days, IBM’s competitive advantage was its longstanding relationships with Fortune 500 companies.
a case study for IBM’s broader problems scaling Watson.
The MD Anderson nightmare doesn’t stand on its own. I regularly hear from startup founders in the AI space that their own financial services and biotech clients have had similar experiences working with IBM.
https://javatar.bluematrix.com/pdf/fO5xcWjc
Tomi Engdahl says:
Universities finally realize that Java is a bad introductory programming language
https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/04/24/universities-finally-realize-java-bad-introductory-programming-language/#.tnw_rCxo4cg8
Java is popular, certainly, but it’s also extremely clunky and syntactically bloated.
But a new version of the course, CS 106J is based on JavaScript.
According to the University website, “[CS 106J] covers the same material as CS 106A but does so using JavaScript, the most common language for implementing interactive web pages, instead of Java.”
The decision to ditch Java is a laudable one. While there’s a lot to like about it, Java is perhaps the harshest language you can learn as a beginner. In fact, in this respect, it’s straight-up awful.
Because, here’s the thing. Programming is fun – or at least, it should be. It shouldn’t be scary, but rather a fundamentally creative endeavor that can lead to an amazing career.
By teaching Java, you risk associating programming with something tedious and difficult in the minds of beginners, and run the risk of them switching to something less arduous.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft:
Microsoft Q4: revenue of $23.3B, up 13% YoY, net income of $6.5B, up 109% YoY; Intelligent Cloud revenue of $7.4B, up 11% YoY; productivity revenue was $8.4B — REDMOND, Wash. — July 20, 2017 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended June 30, 2017
Earnings Release FY17 Q4
Microsoft Cloud Strength Highlights Fourth Quarter Results
Commercial cloud annualized revenue run rate exceeds $18.9 billion
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2017-Q4/press-release-webcast
Tomi Engdahl says:
James Vincent / The Verge:
Intel-owned Movidius debuts $79 USB Compute Stick with 12-core Myriad 2 VPU that increases host hardware’s AI capabilities — The Neural Compute Stick from Movidius makes it easy to add a machine vision processor to any device — Step by step, artificial intelligence is moving down from the cloud and into the device in your hand.
This little USB stick is designed to make AI plug-and-play
The Neural Compute Stick from Movidius makes it easy to add a machine vision processor to any device
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/20/16002682/movidius-ai-neural-compute-stick-intel
Step by step, artificial intelligence is moving down from the cloud and into the device in your hand. The latest sign? This unassuming little thumb drive from chipmaker Movidius, which packs one of the company’s machine vision processors — the same chip used by DJI for its autonomous drones — into a plug-and-play USB stick. If manufacturers want to beef up the AI capabilities of their new product, all they need to do is plug in one of these.
The Movidius Neural Compute Stick was actually announced last April as a prototype device called the Fathom.
From a technical point of view, the new Compute Stick is the same as the old one. At its heart is a Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit or VPU — a low-power processor (it consumes just a single watt) that uses twelve parallel cores to run vision algorithms like object detection and facial recognition. Movidius says it delivers more than 100 gigaflops of performance, and can natively run neural networks built using the Caffe framework. (Caffe is one of the neural network libraries around, but it’s not clear if the Compute Stick will also work with Google’s popular TensorFlow framework.)
price has been cut from a putative $99 for the original, to $79. Movidius says Intel’s involvement helped push this price down.
But who will use the Neural Compute Stick? Well, it’ll come in handy for a few different groups. AI researchers will be able to use the stick as an accelerator
Companies looking to put AI powers in a physical product will also benefit, with the USB-compatible stick giving them an easy and fast way to execute neural networks locally.
But of course, a device like this certainly has its limitations. For a company building, say, an AI-powered security camera, there will be more efficient ways to incorporate specialized vision processors in their product, especially if they’re manufacturing at scale.
What a device like the Neural Compute Stick does well, is fill a gap in the market.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Regains Turnaround Momentum on Strong Cloud Growth
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-20/microsoft-sales-profit-top-estimates-as-cloud-growth-marches-on
Microsoft Corp.’s turnaround plan got back on track in the latest quarter, buoyed by rising sales of internet-based software and services.
Profit in the fiscal fourth quarter exceeded analysts’ estimates and adjusted sales rose 9 percent as demand almost doubled for Azure cloud services, which let companies store and run their applications in Microsoft data centers. A tax-rate benefit added 23 cents a share to earnings, Microsoft said.
Shareholders are watching closely to gauge whether Satya Nadella is making progress toward reshaping 42-year-old Microsoft as a cloud-computing powerhouse with new services related to Azure and the Office 365 online productivity apps
“They are a company that seems to be ahead of some of these old-line technology companies that are making transitions to the cloud,” said Dan Morgan, a senior portfolio manager at Synovus Trust, which owns Microsoft shares. “The story is still intact but they still have a ways to go.”
Cloud Revenue
Commercial cloud revenue was $18.9 billion on an annualized basis, moving closer to the $20 billion target the company set for the fiscal year that started July 1. Even as cloud sales rise, the company has been able to meet a pledge to trim costs, with commercial cloud gross margin widening to 52 percent.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Accelerating Neural Networks with Binary Arithmetic
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/accelerating-neural-networks-with-binary-arithmetic?cid=&utm_medium=Syndication&utm_source=Taboola&utm_campaign=AI_ASMO_Q1_17_Content_Syndication&&utm_term=aol-techcrunch&utm_content=What+Are+Binary+Neural+Networks+%28BNNs%29+and+Why+Are+They+Important%3F
The original article is published on Nervana site: Accelerating Neural Networks with Binary Arithmetic. Please go to Nervana Homepage to learn more on Intel Nervana’s deep learning technologies.
At Nervana we are deeply interested in algorithmic and hardware improvements for speeding up neural networks. One particularly exciting area of research is in low precision arithmetic. In this blog post, we highlight one particular class of low precision networks named binarized neural networks (BNNs), the fundamental concepts underlying this class, and introduce a Neon CPU and GPU implementation. BNNs achieve accuracy comparable to that of standard neural networks on a variety of datasets.
Binarized Neural Networks: Training Neural Networks with Weights and Activations Constrained to +1 or −1
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02830v3.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ina Fried / Axios:
Microsoft CFO Amy Hood: for the first time, Microsoft got more revenue from Office 365 subscriptions than from traditional Office software licensing
Microsoft shares hit record high after upbeat earnings report
https://www.axios.com/microsoft-shares-hit-record-high-after-upbeat-earnings-report-2462704685.html
Shares of Microsoft hit record territory in after-hours trading on Thursday, topping $75 a share, after the software giant’s better-than-expected financial results.
As has been the case for the last several quarters, strength in Microsoft’s cloud business, including Office 365 and Windows Azure, was the key to the company’s growth. Of note, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood told analysts that, for the first time, Microsoft got more revenue from Office 365 subscriptions than from traditional Office software licensing.
Why it matters: Microsoft has shown an ability to grow its business even as the PC market has stalled, reflecting moves the company made in the cloud both since Satya Nadella took over as CEO as well as some that were in place before he took over the top spot.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paula Dwyer / Bloomberg:
Some economists say US tech giants are becoming harmful monopolies, need to be broken up; regulators need to consider alternatives to classic antitrust theory
Should America’s Tech Giants Be Broken Up?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-20/should-america-s-tech-giants-be-broken-up
Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook may be contributing to the U.S. economy’s most persistent ailments.
As a former tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band, Jonathan Taplin isn’t your typical academic. Lately, though, he’s been busy writing somber tomes about market shares, monopolies, and online platforms. His conclusion: Amazon.com, Facebook, and Google have become too big and too powerful and, if not stopped, may need to be broken up.
He has a point, judging by market-research figures. Alphabet Inc.’s Google gets about 77 percent of U.S. search advertising revenue. Google and Facebook Inc. together control about 56 percent of the mobile ad market. Amazon takes about 70 percent of all e-book sales and 30 percent of all U.S. e-commerce. Taplin pegs Facebook’s share of mobile social media traffic, including the company’s WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram units, at 75 percent.
Economists have noticed these monopoly-size numbers and drawn even bigger conclusions: They see market concentration as the culprit behind some of the U.S. economy’s most persistent ailments—the decline of workers’ share of national income, the rise of inequality, the decrease in business startups, the dearth of job creation, and the fall in research and development spending.
Can Big Tech really be behind all that? Economists are starting to provide the evidence.
A recent paper he co-wrote argues that prestigious technology brands, using the internet’s global reach, are able to push out rivals and become winner-take-all “superstar” companies. They’re highly profitable, and their lucky employees generally earn higher salaries to boot.
They don’t engage in the predatory behavior of yore, such as selling goods below the cost of production to steal market share and cripple competitors. After all, the services that Facebook and Google offer are free (if you don’t consider giving up your personal data and privacy rights to be a cost). However, academics have documented how these companies employ far fewer people than the largest companies of decades past while taking a disproportionate share of national profits.
Tomi Engdahl says:
This little USB stick is designed to make AI plug-and-play
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/20/16002682/movidius-ai-neural-compute-stick-intel
The Neural Compute Stick from Movidius makes it easy to add a machine vision processor to any device
Step by step, artificial intelligence is moving down from the cloud and into the device in your hand. The latest sign? This unassuming little thumb drive from chipmaker Movidius, which packs one of the company’s machine vision processors — the same chip used by DJI for its autonomous drones — into a plug-and-play USB stick. If manufacturers want to beef up the AI capabilities of their new product, all they need to do is plug in one of these.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AR and Mixed Reality Have More Potential, But VR Has All the Hype
https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/ar-and-mixed-reality-have-more-potential-vr-has-all-hype/67311435157095?cid=nl.x.dn14.edt.aud.dn.20170712.tst004t
According to the second annual VRDC VR/AR Innovation Report, developers see more long-term potential in mixed reality (MR) and augmented reality (AR) than VR. Yet the hype over VR still reigns.
Developers are seeing more long-term potential for mixed reality (MR) and augmented reality (AR) over virtual reality (VR), as well as a need for more enterprise applications, according to a new survey. The UBM Game Network*, which runs the Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC) as well as the Game Developers Conference (GDC), polled over 600 professional VR, AR, and MR developers in order to gain insight into the industry, including funding, hardware preferences, and market trends and challenges.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Neural Accelerator Battle Begins
Movidius to launch AI accelerator in a USB stick
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332038&
PARIS — The embedded market for neural network accelerators is heating up, with more systems — ranging from smart speakers and drones to light bulbs — poised to run neural networks locally instead of going back to the cloud for computation.
Movidius, an Intel company, launched Thursday (July 20) a self-contained AI accelerator in the form of a USB stick. Called Movidius Neural Compute Stick, it is designed to plug simply into Raspberry Pi or X86 PCs. The Neural Compute Stick makes it easier for university researchers, independent software developers and tinkerers to compile, tune and accelerate deep learning applications for embedded systems, said El-Ouazzane.
Tomi Engdahl says:
System enables large speedups — as much as 88-fold — on common parallel-computing algorithms (MIT)
https://semiengineering.com/system-enables-large-speedups-much-88-fold-common-parallel-computing-algorithms-mit/
A new system called Fractal achieves 88-fold speedups through a parallelism strategy known as speculative execution.
As is commonly known, the chips in most modern desktop computers have four cores or processing units, which can run different computational tasks in parallel, but that the chips of the future could have dozens or even hundreds of cores, and taking advantage of all that parallelism is a stiff challenge, reminded researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Along these lines, in order to make parallel program run much more efficienct and easier to code, MIT researchers have developed Fractal, a system that they proven enables 10-fold speedups over existing systems.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/sanchez/papers/2017.fractal.isca.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bloomberg:
Microsoft designs new AI chip for next version of HoloLens, which will let mixed reality goggles recognize speech and images on device instead of the cloud
Inside Microsoft’s Plan to Bring AI to its HoloLens Goggles
New HoloLens processor will let mixed reality goggles recognize speech and images
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-24/quest-for-ai-leadership-pushes-microsoft-further-into-chip-development
Tech companies are keen to bring cool artificial intelligence features to phones and augmented reality goggles—the ability to show mechanics how to fix an engine, say, or tell tourists what they are seeing and hearing in their own language. But there’s one big challenge: how to manage the vast quantities of data that make such feats possible without making the devices too slow or draining the battery in minutes and wrecking the user experience.
Microsoft Corp. says it has the answer with a chip design for its HoloLens goggles—an extra AI processor that analyzes what the user sees and hears right there on the device rather than wasting precious microseconds sending the data back to the cloud. The new processor, a version of the company’s existing Holographic Processing Unit, was unveiled at an event in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Sunday.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alphabet Announces Second Quarter 2017 Results
https://abc.xyz/investor/news/earnings/2017/Q2_alphabet_earnings/
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – July 24, 2017 – Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG, GOOGL) today announced financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2017.
“With revenues of $26 billion, up 21% versus the second quarter of 2016 and 23% on a constant currency basis, we’re delivering strong growth with great underlying momentum, while continuing to make focused investments in new revenue streams,” said Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet.
Tomi Engdahl says:
China Outlines Ambitions to Become World Leader in AI by 2025
http://www.caixinglobal.com/2017-07-21/101119663.html
(Beijing) — China unveiled a national development plan for artificial intelligence industries, outlining ambitions to become a world leader in AI by 2025.
China’s State Council said the AI industry will serve as a major new economic growth engine and will trigger expansion in related industries of more than 1 trillion yuan by 2020. An official blueprint issued Thursday called for the AI industry itself to generate annual revenue of more than 1 trillion yuan by 2030, an almost seven-fold increase in a decade.
The plan also pledged research into the impact of AI on employment and how to prepare the appropriate economic policy responses. Business leaders are already forecasting headcount reductions as AI technologies and applications expand. China will establish laws and policies governing AI industries by 2025, according to the plan.
Chinese Startup Breaks AI Fundraising Record
http://www.caixinglobal.com/2017-07-14/101115926.html
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup SenseTime Group Ltd. has raised the single largest round of funding in AI history — $410 million.
The Beijing-based deep-learning and computer-vision developer said it will use the funds to strengthen its research and development capabilities as well as explore new areas such as auto-driving, according to a company statement.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Coding bootcamps are dying out, here’s why
https://www.thememo.com/2017/07/24/coding-bootcamps-are-dying-out-heres-why/
Not quite the future of learning?
Coding bootcamps – intensive courses that promise to turn you into a developer in just a matter of weeks – are going out of business at a breakneck pace.
In the US this month alone two courses, Dev Bootcamp and The Iron Yard (which closed its London operations last year), announced they will completely shut down.
Similarly, Startup Institute quietly shut its London office late last year having already closed in Berlin and scrapped plans for European expansion.
The reason, as Dev Bootcamp put it, is because: “ultimately, we have been unable to find a sustainable [business] model.”
But what’s going on? These courses cost thousands to take part in, and are supposed to help ‘traditional’ workers jump into the high-tech jobs of the future.
So shouldn’t bootcamps be booming?
Makers Academy co-founder and CEO Evgeny Shadchnev.
“I expect that many people who started coding bootcamps in the recent years will go out of business.”
He explains the current wave of market failures as the symptom of a race to the bottom.
“It’s very easy to launch a bootcamp and promise the earth to applicants. This leads to a low quality of training, and makes it very hard to make profits or even break even,” Shadchnev told The Memo.
“This, in turn, leads to [bootcamp] graduates of dubious quality, which reflects badly on the entire industry.”
2016 Coding Bootcamp Market Size Study
https://www.coursereport.com/reports/2016-coding-bootcamp-market-size-research
Coding Bootcamps Expected to Graduate 17,966 Students and Grow by 74% in 2016, Based on Responses from 97% of US & Canadian Schools
Tomi Engdahl says:
Confirmed: Some Devices Will Never Get the Windows 10 Creators Update
Microsoft will continue to support them with version 1607
http://news.softpedia.com/news/confirmed-some-devices-will-never-get-windows-10-creators-update-517073.shtml
News of devices not getting the Windows 10 Creators Updates emerged earlier this week, after we previously covered the issue in April this year, just after Microsoft started the rollout of the new OS version.
At that time, a number of chips, like Atom Z2760, Atom Z2520, Atom Z2560, and Atom Z2580 were listed as unsupported by the Creators Update, but Microsoft said it was working with partners to address this and make version 1703 of Windows 10 available for these CPUs as well.
“Security updates until 2023″
But in a statement released today, Microsoft confirms that Intel Atom Clover Trail chips won’t get the Creators Update because of the hardware limitations.
“They require additional hardware support to provide the best possible experience when updating to the latest Windows 10 feature update, the Windows 10 Creators Update. However, these systems are no longer supported by Intel (End of Interactive Support), and without the necessary driver support, they may be incapable of moving to the Windows 10 Creators Update without a potential performance impact,” a company spokesperson was quoted as saying.
Microsoft explains that instead of shipping the Creators Update to these devices, it will continue supporting the Anniversary Update, which is available for all of them, until January 2023. This is the same end of support date as for Windows 8.1, which is the operating system that all the devices running on Intel Atom Clover Trail processors were powered by at launch.
Microsoft confirms it’s cutting Windows 10 updates for Atom PCs
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/19/16001366/microsoft-windows-10-creators-update-atom-pcs
Microsoft has been preventing PCs with Intel Atom Clover Trail processors from obtaining the latest Windows 10 Creators Update. While many devices with Intel’s Atom Clover Trail chips were released in the Windows 8 era, Microsoft offered a free Windows 10 update to keep the tablet / laptop hybrids up-to-date. ZDNet revealed earlier this week that compatible drivers are preventing owners from updating to the Windows 10 Creators Update, and Microsoft has now confirmed to The Verge that it no longer supports Intel Atom Clover Trail processors for its latest Windows 10 updates.
“They require additional hardware support to provide the best possible experience when updating to the latest Windows 10 feature update, the Windows 10 Creators Update,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Python autocomplete-in-the-cloud tool Kite pushes into projects, gets stabbed with a fork
Cloud dev biz tries rainmaking, stirs up storm of complaints
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/25/kite_flies_into_a_fork/
Kite, a San Francisco-based development tools startup, has managed to alienate developers by quietly altering open-source projects for its benefit.
Kite makes a Python programming plugin, called Kite, for various code editors to boost developer productivity through automatic code completion and other enhancements. The company introduced its software in a private beta last year and launched in March, 2017.
Kite remains somewhat controversial because it uploads source code to Kite’s servers, raising privacy and security concerns. It does this to analyze code and make autocomplete recommendations. The company insists it does so only with whitelisted Python files, but some developers remain skeptical that anything stored in the cloud can truly be secure.
Kite’s troubles stem from its involvement with two popular open-source projects, autocomplete-python and Minimap, used with the Atom code editor. The former is a widely used autocompletion engine for Python code, and the latter is a plugin that provides a zoomed-out view of code for easier navigation.
Paul Berg, an open-source licensing expert who has worked at Amazon and advises Idaho National Laboratory, said forks happen, but once projects get large enough, there’s pressure for unification.
“Once a project is large enough to have significant IP value to be a successful commercial enterprise, there are enough players in the field that taking it in a more proprietary direction means you are running the risk of splitting your development talent pool via a fork,” he said in an email to The Register. “That causes your dev costs to skyrocket and the community-driven project can often outpace the more commercial one.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Firefox Marketshare is ‘Falling off a Cliff’, Says Former Mozilla CTO
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/07/firefox-marketshare-falling-off-cliff-former-mozilla-cto-thinks-knows
In a detailed post published on his blog, Gal offers some insight and analysis as to why Mozilla Firefox marketshare is, in his words, ‘falling off a cliff’ and why the trend is probably irreversible.
‘Why is Firefox marketshare falling off a cliff?’
Mozilla publishes raw usage data in the form of ‘Active Daily Installs’ (ADIs). Gal, who worked for 7 years at Mozilla, extracted and processed some of this data to see whether the sanguine outlook reported by web observers like StatCounter are accurate.
And, as the graph heading this post shows, the trend downwards appears to be accelerating
But why is Firefox losing the browser wars if, as Gal believes, it is now a better browser than it’s ever been?
He points to two major reasons: the rise of mobile, and the dominance of Google.
‘Firefox Desktop is probably headed for extinction’, says former Mozilla CTO
“Firefox’s decline is not an engineering problem. Its a market disruption (Desktop to Mobile shift) and monopoly problem. There are no engineering solutions to these market problems.”
Bleak sounding stuff, isn’t it?
But there may be a reason why this ‘acceleration’ appears so pronounced in the data.
Mozilla Firefox has, over the past year or two, slowly dropped support for users on older operating systems and architectures (e.g., PowerPC). This leaves those users running older builds that do not contribute (AIUI) to the data this graph is derived from.
They’re still using Firefox, but they’re just not being counted.
Relatedly, a number of Firefox users are actively choosing to stick with older versions because of various features being dropped, retired or (in some cases) introduced. Firefox 57, for example, is due later this year and will no longer support legacy Firefox add-ons — and many of these add-ons are a real selling point of Firefox.
Firefox marketshare revisited
https://andreasgal.com/2017/07/19/firefox-marketshare-revisited/
Why building a better browser doesn’t translate to a better marketshare
Tomi Engdahl says:
AR and Mixed Reality Have More Potential, But VR Has All the Hype
https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/ar-and-mixed-reality-have-more-potential-vr-has-all-hype/67311435157095?cid=nl.x.dn14.edt.aud.dn.20170711.tst004t
According to the second annual VRDC VR/AR Innovation Report, developers see more long-term potential in mixed reality (MR) and augmented reality (AR) than VR. Yet the hype over VR still reigns.
Developers are seeing more long-term potential for mixed reality (MR) and augmented reality (AR) over virtual reality (VR), as well as a need for more enterprise applications, according to a new survey. The UBM Game Network*, which runs the Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC) as well as the Game Developers Conference (GDC), polled over 600 professional VR, AR, and MR developers in order to gain insight into the industry, including funding, hardware preferences, and market trends and challenges.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Says ‘Mixed Reality’ Is the Future, Not VR and AR
https://www.designnews.com/design-hardware-software/microsoft-says-mixed-reality-future-not-vr-and-ar/148821410256869
It’s not VR or AR. Microsoft wants immersive headsets to be as common as a keyboard and mouse and the company is betting on a new concept, Mixed Reality (MR), to get there.
If Microsoft has its way reality won’t be virtual or augmented, it’ll be mixed. Whereas virtual reality (VR) creates entirely computer-generated environments and augmented reality (AR) overlays computer-generated imagery onto the real world, mixed reality (MR), a term dating all the way back to a 1994 whitepaper based on research conducted at the University of Toronto and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, seeks to blend the physical and digital worlds together. In a design setting for example, imagine being able to use a real screwdriver to make adjustments to a virtual product design, or being able to overlay virtual additions and adjustments onto a physical prototype and you start to get the idea.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Adobe says it will stop updating and distributing Flash at the end of 2020 — Adobe today announced that Flash, the once-ubiquitous plugin that allowed you to play your first Justin Bieber video on YouTube and Dolphin Olympics 2 on Kongregate, will be phased out by the end of 2020.
Get ready to finally say goodbye to Flash — in 2020
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/25/get-ready-to-say-goodbye-to-flash-in-2020/
Adobe today announced that Flash, the once-ubiquitous plugin that allowed you to play your first Justin Bieber video on YouTube and Dolphin Olympics 2 on Kongregate, will be phased out by the end of 2020. At that point, Adobe will stop updating and distributing Flash. Until then, Adobe will still partner with the likes of Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft and Google to offer security updates for Flash in their browsers and support new versions of them, but beyond that, Adobe will not offer any new Flash features.
Adobe also notes that it plans to be more aggressive about ending support for Flash “in certain
geographies where unlicensed and outdated versions of Flash Player are being distributed.”
To some degree, today’s announcement doesn’t come as a major surprise. Given its wide distribution, Flash (and especially outdated versions of it) quickly became one of the main targets for hackers, and Flash offered them plenty of avenues for trying to get into their target’s machines. The fact that Apple never supported it on mobile (and Steve Job’s famous 2010 letter about that) only sped up Flash’s demise, especially as modern browsers and HTML5 allowed browser vendors to replicate Flash’s functionality without the need for third-party plugins. To be fair, Adobe probably wanted Flash do go away as much as everybody else and, by 2015, the company said as much. Since then, it has started to phase out Flash support from its applications and worked on providing its users with alternatives.
Tomi Engdahl says:
James Vincent / The Verge:
Qualcomm open sources its Neural Processing Engine SDK that adapts its mobile chips to the demands of AI, says dedicated mobile chips are in the pipeline
Qualcomm opens up its AI optimization software, says dedicated mobile chips are coming
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/25/16024540/ai-mobile-chips-qualcomm-neural-processing-engine-sdk
The chipmaker’s SDK adapts its mobile processors to AI demands, but dedicated chips are the next step
n the race to get AI working faster on your smartphone, companies are trying all sorts of things. Some, like Microsoft and ARM, are designing new chips that are better suited to run neural networks. Others, like Facebook and Google, are working to reduce the computational demands of AI itself. But for chipmaker Qualcomm — whose processors account for 40 percent of the mobile market — the current plan is simpler: adapt the silicon that’s already in place.
To this end the company has developed what it calls its Neural Processing Engine. This is a software development kit (or SDK) that helps developers optimize their apps to run AI applications on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600 and 800 series processors. That means that if you’re building an app that uses AI for, say, image recognition, you can integrate Qualcomm’s SDK and it will run faster on phones with compatible processors.
Qualcomm first announced the Neural Processing Engine a year ago as part of its Zeroth platform (which has since been killed off as a brand).
“Any developer big or small that has already invested in deep learning — meaning they have access to data and trained AI models — they are the target audience,”
How exactly developers will use the SDK will vary from job to job, but the basic task of the software is to allocate tasks to different parts of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset. Depending on whether developers want to optimize for battery life or processing speed, for example, they can draw on compute resources from different parts of the chip — eg, the CPU, GPU, or DST. “It allows you choose your core of choice relative to the power performance profile you want for your user,” explains Brotman.
The SDK works with some of the most popular frameworks for developing AI systems, including Caffe, Caffe2, and Google’s TensorFlow. Qualcomm says it’s designed not just to optimize AI on mobile devices, but also in cars, drones, VR headsets, and smart home products.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Motley Fool identifies 3 companies who are ‘rewriting the rules of data centers’
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/pt/2017/07/the-motley-fool-identifies-3-companies-who-are-rewriting-the-rules-of-data-centers.html?cmpid=enl_cim_cimdatacenternewsletter_2017-07-25
On June 13, The Motley Fool’s Leo Sun noted how “Intel controls about 99% of the data center CPU market with its flagship Xeon chips. But over the past few years, the growth of that unit has been throttled by slower enterprise spending and longer upgrade cycles.”
That slowdown has been a dead weight on Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) top line, and a major factor in analysts downgrading the stock. But that slowdown could also be great news for three disruptive players in the data center market — NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA), AMD (NASDAQ: AMD), and Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM).
Challengers like NVIDIA, AMD, and Qualcomm have put Intel in a tough position. It must beef up the Xeon’s machine learning capabilities so data center operators don’t buy GPUs and postpone CPU upgrades, and it must defend its turf against direct challengers like Epyc and Centriq — which are backed by industry giants like Microsoft.
Tomi Engdahl says:
USB speed doubled
The current standard for the USB bus is 3.1.
The USB-based management organization USB-IF has announced that the new 3.2 standard is being introduced. However, USB-IF is not bringing a new bus into the market very fast. The standard is not promised before the end of the year and the September meeting of the Organization for more information. Products that support the new standard will come next year.
This new USB should not be confused with the C-type physical connector or Apple’s and Intel’s Thunderbolt bus (40 gigabits per second on C-type USB connector).
Sooirce: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/6594-usb-n-nopeus-kaksinkertaistuu
Tomi Engdahl says:
Upcoming USB 3.2 Specification Will Double Data Rates Using Existing Cables
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/07/25/2138212/upcoming-usb-32-specification-will-double-data-rates-using-existing-cables?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
A new USB specification has been introduced today by the USB 3.0 Promoter Group, which is comprised of Apple, HP, Intel, Microsoft, and other companies. The new USB 3.2 specification will replace the existing 3.1 specification and will double data rates to 20Gbps using new wires available if your device embraces the newest USB hardware. Mac Rumors reports:
An incremental update, USB 3.2 is designed to define multi-lane operation for USB 3.2 hosts and devices. USB Type-C cables already support multi-lane operation, and with USB 3.2, hosts and devices can be created as multi-lane solutions, allowing for either two lanes of 5Gb/s or two lanes of 10Gb/s operation. With support for two lanes of 10Gb/s transfer speeds, performance is essentially doubled over existing USB-C cables.
Upcoming USB 3.2 Specification Will Double Data Rates Using Existing Cables
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/07/25/usb-3-2-specification-double-data-rates/
The USB 3.0 Promoter Group, comprising Apple, HP, Intel, Microsoft, and other companies, today introduced an upcoming USB 3.2 specification, which will eventually replace the existing USB 3.1 specification upon release.
An incremental update, USB 3.2 is designed to define multi-lane operation for USB 3.2 hosts and devices. USB Type-C cables already support multi-lane operation, and with USB 3.2, hosts and devices can be created as multi-lane solutions, allowing for either two lanes of 5Gb/s or two lanes of 10Gb/s operation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD shocks the world by only losing $16m
Ryzen gets desktops back in the black
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/25/amd_q2_fy2017/
AMD wasn’t able to turn a profit this quarter, but analysts are bullish on the chipmaker’s solid Ryzen CPU sales.
The world’s other x86 chipmaker topped estimates with a 21 per cent jump in revenues, but still couldn’t quite manage to get into the black. For the FY2017 Q2 period, ended July 1
Tomi Engdahl says:
Firefox doesn’t need to be No 1 – and that’s OK, ‘cos it’s falling off a cliff
Mozilla runs counter to Valley narrative
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/25/new_war_for_mozilla/
Just in case you didn’t believe Firefox was on a trajectory that should have it crash and burn into extinction in the next couple of years, former chief technology officer Andreas Gal has usage stats that confirm it. To use Gal’s words: “Firefox market share is falling off a cliff.” The same could be said of Firefox itself.
What’s most interesting about this data and Gal’s interpretation of it is that at the same time that Firefox is sliding into irrelevancy it’s becoming a better browser. It’s faster than it’s ever been and uses less memory – less than its replacement, Chrome. Of course, as the ancient Betamax vs VHS format wars demonstrated, having a superior product does not translate to market share.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adobe will kill Flash by 2020: No more updates, support, tears, pain…
Buggy multimedia nightmare won’t see President Zuckerberg’s inauguration
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/25/flash_nahuh_internets_screen_door_gone_for_good_by_2020/
Adobe has officially set a kill date for its beleaguered Flash.
The Photoshop giant said today it plans to end support for the hacker-prone multimedia browser plugin by the end of 2020. This means no more updates for Flash Player after that date and the end of support on many browsers, including Chrome, Internet Explorer and Edge, and Firefox.
Facebook also says it will shut off Flash games by the end of 2020, and is advising developers to change their FB games over to a different format.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Meg Whitman OUT at HP …Inc
Yes, she’s giving up her board seat. What did you think we meant?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/26/whitman_out_at_hp_inc/
Meg Whitman has cut her last ties with HP Inc by stepping down as chairwoman of the company’s board of directors.
Whitman, who will still be the CEO of the split-off Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said that effective immediately she would be leaving her role and handing control of the board over to Chip Bergh.
Prior to the 2015 split-up into HPE and HP Inc, Whitman had been the CEO of what was known as Hewlett Packard. While Dion Weisler has been the CEO of HP Inc since the breakup, Whitman had stayed on as chairman.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tired: Java. Desired: Node.js. Retired: The suggestion a JavaScript runtime is bonkers
Er, according to these JS framework fans
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/26/one_node_to_rule_them_all/
As the Node Summit got underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, Charles Beeler, general partner at Rally Ventures, said the Node community has come a long way since 2012, when everyone was talking about Node.js and no one was using it.
Initially released in 2009, the JavaScript runtime environment now has enough users and momentum that the nonprofit Node.js Foundation feels comfortable claiming that “Node.js is emerging as a universal development framework for digital transformation with a broad diversity of applications.”
Its claim is without much specificity, burdened with the meaningless jargon “digital transformation.” But it’s backed by a small bit of data: a survey of 1,405 Node users in more than 85 countries from November 30, 2016 through January 16, 2017, in both English and Mandarin.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adobe announces the end of Flash
https://www.neowin.net/news/adobe-announces-the-end-of-flash
It’s finally happening. Long regarded as a miserable blight on the world wide web, Flash is going to the great tech graveyard in the sky – or perhaps to the depths of hell – and a date has been set for its demise.
Today, Adobe announced that it is “planning to end-of-life Flash”, and said it will “stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020″. For now, Adobe remains “committed to supporting Flash through 2020″, and will continue to distribute security patches, maintaining OS and browser compatibility, and even adding new features and capabilities “where needed”.
The company also said that it plans “to move more aggressively to [end-of-life] Flash in certain geographies where unlicensed and outdated versions of Flash Player are being distributed.”
With the availability of newer web standards, such as HTML5 and WebGL, Flash has little reason to exist; major browsers have already begun phasing out their support, including Firefox, Chrome, and Microsoft Edge, which started blocking Flash content by default with the Windows 10 Creators Update.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pydio
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/pydio?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+linuxjournalcom+%28Linux+Journal+-+The+Original+Magazine+of+the+Linux+Community%29
Pydio describes itself as the world’s largest open-source file sharing and synchronization project for the enterprise, and the newly announced Pydio 8 boasts a new user experience that the company says extends the platform’s lead in design and simplicity, oversight, security and control.
Pydio 8 adds EasyTransfer, a new, intuitive drag-and-drop web interface for organizations in need of an easy-to-use sharing tool. Meanwhile, the aforementioned full UX redesign, based on Google’s Material Design principles, builds on Pydio’s already smooth and efficient design and simplifies the ability to white-label Pydio.
https://pydio.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Establish A Software Procurement Process To Manage Supply Chain Risk
https://semiengineering.com/establish-a-software-procurement-process-to-manage-supply-chain-risk/
Manage your software supply chain risk with practical cyber security procurement language
Improving the procurement language in your software contracts is an effective way to convey requirements for built-in security. Too many examples of afterthought bolt-on security have put enterprises and users at risk due to exploitable software.
Historically, there has been no shared liability associated with software because standard contracts have absolved software suppliers and outsourced development providers. This “caveat emptor” method no longer works as software is now included in life critical functions and devices, from personal medical devices to automobiles. Procurement professionals should instead strive to create demand for secure software by adopting a procurement governance model that includes security up-front in vendor selection and contract negotiation processes.
https://www.synopsys.com/software-integrity/resources/white-papers/procurement-language-risk.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Machine Learning Popularity Grows
https://semiengineering.com/machine-learnings-popularity-grows/
After two decades of experimentation, the semiconductor industry is scrambling to embrace this approach.
Machine learning and deep learning are showing a sharp growth trajectory in many industries. Even the semiconductor industry, which generally has resisted this technology, is starting to changing its tune.
Both machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) have been successfully used for image recognition in autonomous driving, speech recognition in natural language processing applications, and for multiple uses in the health care industry. The general consensus is that it can be similarly applied to semiconductor design.
his isn’t exactly a new idea, though. The basis for ML and DL in chip design dates back nearly two decades, and the concept of ML/DL dates back another three decades before that.
“We called it ‘metrics’ in 1998-1999,” said Andrew Kahng, a professor of computer science and engineering at UC San Diego. “The main principle was measure everything, data-mine the log files, predict tool sweet spots and failures, and figure out how to tune specific tool options for a specific design instance.”
That made sense on paper, but actual adoption lagged.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bloomberg:
Jeff Bezos surpasses Bill Gates as world’s richest person, with a net worth of ~$90.9B, as Amazon rose in intraday trading; Gates held the top spot since 2013 — His net worth climbs more than $1 billion in intraday trading — Gates has held top spot on Bloomberg wealth index since 2013
Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World’s Richest Person
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-27/bezos-surpasses-gates-as-world-s-richest-ahead-of-amazon-results
Tomi Engdahl says:
Natalie Gagliordi / ZDNet:
Intel reports Q2 revenue of $14.8B, up 9% YoY, vs. 14.4B expected, net income of 2.8B, up 111%; IoT revenue was $720M, up 26% YoY; data center revenue was $4.4B
Intel tops Q2 targets, raises outlook
http://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-tops-q2-targets-raises-outlook/
Intel is raising its full-year revenue outlook, citing higher expectations for the PC business.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Secret Life Of Accelerators
https://semiengineering.com/the-secret-life-of-accelerators/
Unique machine learning algorithms, diminished benefits from scaling, and a need for more granularity are creating a boom for accelerators.
Accelerator chips increasingly are providing the performance boost that device scaling once provided, changing basic assumptions about how data moves within an electronic system and where it should be processed.
To the outside world, little appears to have changed. But beneath the glossy exterior, and almost always hidden from view, accelerator chips are becoming an integral part of most designs where performance is considered essential. And as the volume of data continues to rise—more sensors, higher-resolution images and video, and more inputs from connecting systems that in the past were standalone devices—that boost in performance is required. So even if systems don’t run noticeably faster on the outside, they need to process much more data without slowing down.
This renewed emphasis on performance has created an almost insatiable appetite for accelerators of all types, even in mobile devices such as a smart phone where one ASIC used to be the norm.
“Performance can move total cost of ownership the most,” said Joe Macri, corporate vice president and product CTO at AMD. “Performance is a function of frequency and instructions per cycle.”
And this is where accelerators really shine. Included in this class of processors are custom-designed ASICs that offload a particular operation in software, as well as standard GPU chips, heterogeneous CPU cores that can work on jobs in parallel (even within the same chip), and both discrete and embedded FPGAs
But accelerators also add challenges for design teams. They require more planning, a deeper understanding of how software and algorithm works within a device, and they are very specific. Reuse of accelerators can be difficult, even with programmable logic.
“Solving problems with accelerators require more effort,” said Steve Mensor, vice president of marketing at Achronix. “You do get a return for that effort. You get way better performance. But those accelerators are becoming more and more specific.”
Accelerators change the entire design philosophy, as well. After years of focusing on lower power, with more cores on a single chip kept mostly dark, the emphasis has shifted to a more granular approach to ratcheting up performance, usually while keeping the power budget flat or trending downward. So rather than having everything tied to a single CPU, there can be multiple heterogeneous types of processors or cores with more specialized functionality.
“There is now more granularity to balance a load across cores, so you can do power management for individual cores,” said Guilherme Marshall, director of marketing for development solutions at ARM. “These all require fine tuning of schedulers. This is a trend we’ve been seeing for awhile, and it’s evolving. The first implementation of this was big.LITTLE. Now, there is a finer degree of control of the power for each core.”
This may sound evolutionary, but it’s not a trivial change. Marshall noted this required changes to the entire software stack.
Concurrent with these changes, there is an effort to make software more efficient and faster. For years, software has been developed almost independently from the hardware
Machine learning mania
Accelerators are best known for their role in machine learning, which is seeing explosive growth and widespread applications across a number of industries. This is evident in sales of GPU accelerators for speeding up machine learning algorithms. Nvidia’s stock price chart looks like a hockey stick. GPUs are extremely good at accelerating algorithms in the learning phase of machine learning because they can run floating point calculations in parallel across thousands of inexpensive cores.
As a point of reference, Nvidia’s market cap is slightly higher than that of Qualcomm, one of the key players in the smart phone revolution.
Many architectures, one purpose
While accelerators accomplish the same thing, no one size fits all and most are at least semi-customized.
“On one side, there are accelerators that are truly integrated into the instruction set, which is the best form of acceleration,” said Anush Mohandass, vice president of marketing and business development at NetSpeed Systems. “In the last couple years, we’ve also seen accelerators emerge as separate blocks in the same package. So you may have an FPGA and an SoC packaged together. There also can be semi-custom IP and an FPGA. IP accelerators are a relatively new concept. They hang off the interconnect. But to be effective, all of this has to be coherent. So it may range from not-too-complex to simple, but if you want it to be coherent, how do you do that?”
That’s not a simple problem to solve. Ironically, it’s the automotive industry, which historically has shunned electronics, that is leading the charge, said Mohandass.
New types of accelerators are entering the market, as well. One of the reasons that embedded FPGAs have been gaining so much attention is that they can be sized according to whatever they are trying to accelerate. The challenge is understanding up front exactly what size core will be required, but the tradeoff is that it adds programmability into the device.
Accelerators in context
The semiconductor industry has always been focused on solving bottlenecks
Other applications
Driving the chip industry’s focus on accelerator chips are some fundamental market and technology shifts. There are more uncertainties about how new markets will unfold, what protocols need to be supported, and in the case of machine learning, what algorithms need to be supported. But accelerators are expected to be a key part of solutions to all of those shifts.
“The raw technology will be built into your sunglasses,” said ArterisIP’s Shuler. “Cars are the first place it will show up because consumers are willing to pay for it. But it will show up everywhere—in your phone, and maybe even your dishwasher.”
Conclusion
Rising design costs and diminishing returns on scaling, coupled with a slew of new and emerging markets, are forcing chipmakers and systems companies to look at problems differently. Rather than working around existing hardware, companies are beginning to parse problems according to the flow and type of data. In this world, a general-purpose chip still has a place, but it won’t offer enough performance improvement or efficiency to make a significant difference from one generation to the next.
Accelerators that are custom built for specific use cases are a much more effective solution, and they add a dimension to semiconductor design that is both challenging and intriguing. How much faster can devices run if everything isn’t based on a linear increase in the number of transistors? That question will take years to answer definitively.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jeff Bezos Briefly Tops Bill Gates as the World’s Richest Person
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-27/bezos-surpasses-gates-as-world-s-richest-ahead-of-amazon-results
Founder’s net worth increased $2.5 billion in intraday trading
Gates has held top spot on Bloomberg wealth index since 2013
A surge in Amazon.com Inc. shares Thursday morning in advance of the online retailer’s earnings report briefly propelled founder Jeff Bezos past Bill Gates as the world’s richest person.
Bezos remains ranked second on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, behind the Microsoft Corp. co-founder. Gates, 61, has held the top spot since May 2013.
Bezos, 53, owns about 17 percent of Seattle-based Amazon
Tomi Engdahl says:
THE RISE OF AI IS FORCING GOOGLE AND MICROSOFT TO BECOME CHIPMAKERS
https://www.wired.com/story/the-rise-of-ai-is-forcing-google-and-microsoft-to-become-chipmakers
BY NOW OUR future is clear: We are to be cared for, entertained, and monetized by artificial intelligence. Existing industries like healthcare and manufacturing will become much more efficient; new ones like augmented reality goggles and robot taxis will become possible.
it’s hitting a speed bump: Computers aren’t powerful and efficient enough at the specific kind of math needed.
One datapoint that shows how great that need is: software companies Google and Microsoft have become entangled in the messy task of creating their own chips. They’re being raced by a new crop of startups peddling their own AI-centric silicon—and probably Apple, too. As well as transforming our lives with intelligent machines, the contest could shake up the established chip industry.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
USB 3.2 specification announced, which promises double data transfer speeds, or up to 20Gbps, over existing Type-C ports and cables
Upcoming USB 3.2 Specification Will Double Data Rates Using Existing Cables
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/07/25/usb-3-2-specification-double-data-rates/
The USB 3.0 Promoter Group, comprising Apple, HP, Intel, Microsoft, and other companies, today introduced an upcoming USB 3.2 specification, which will eventually replace the existing USB 3.1 specification upon release.
An incremental update, USB 3.2 is designed to define multi-lane operation for USB 3.2 hosts and devices. USB Type-C cables already support multi-lane operation, and with USB 3.2, hosts and devices can be created as multi-lane solutions, allowing for either two lanes of 5Gb/s or two lanes of 10Gb/s operation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
FreeBSD 11.1 Released
https://bsd.slashdot.org/story/17/07/27/2023251/freebsd-111-released
Linux is not the only free open-source operating system. FreeBSD, which is based off of the historical BSD Unix in which TCP/IP was developed on from the University of California at Berkeley, has been updated. It does not include systemd nor PulseAudio and is popular in many web server installations and networking devices. FreeBSD 11.1 is out with improvements in UEFI and Amazon cloud support in addition to updated userland programs.
EFI improvements including a new utility efivar(8) to manage UEFI variables…
as well as Microsoft Hyper-V UEFI and Secure Boot for generation 2 virtual machines for both Windows Server and Windows 10 Professional hosts.
FreeBSD 11.1 also has extended support Amazon Cloud features. A new networking stack for Amazon has been added with the ena(4) driver, which adds support for Amazon EC2 platform.
FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE Announcement
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.1R/announce.html
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE. This is the second release of the stable/11 branch.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Saas 1000: Top SaaS Companies
http://saas1000.com/
The SaaS 1000 is a list of the top saas companies according to employee size growth.
The list will include the largest saas companies and smaller startups. For now in order to get a ranking you must have at least 40 employees.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Rust Can Replace C In Python Libraries
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/07/29/046258/how-rust-can-replace-c-in-python-libraries?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
Proponents of Rust, the language engineered by Mozilla to give developers both speed and memory safety, are stumping for the language as a long-term replacement for C and C++. But replacing software written in these languages can be a difficult, long-term project. One place where Rust could supplant C in the short term is in the traditionally C libraries used in other languages… [A] new spate of projects are making it easier to develop Rust libraries with convenient bindings to Python — and to deploy Python packages that have Rust binaries.
How Rust can replace C, with Python’s help
Four new projects make it easier to develop Rust libraries with Python bindings, allowing Rust to replace C as a low-level Python partner
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3208391/python/how-rust-can-replace-c-with-pythons-help.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
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Programming Bug Security
TechCrunch Urges Developers: Replace C Code With Rust
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/07/16/1715256/techcrunch-urges-developers-replace-c-code-with-rust
Copious experience has taught us all, the hard way, that it is very difficult, verging on “basically impossible,” to write extensive amounts of C code that is not riddled with security holes. As I wrote two years ago, in my first Death To C piece… “Buffer overflows and dangling pointers lead to catastrophic security holes, again and again and again, just like yesteryear, just like all the years of yore. We cannot afford its gargantuan, gaping security blind spots any more. It’s long past time to retire and replace it with another language.
“The trouble is, most modern languages don’t even try to replace C…
Death to C, ++
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/16/death-to-c/
The C programming language is terrible. I mean, magnificent, too. Much of the world in which we live was built atop C. It is foundational to almost all computer programming, both historically and practically; there’s a reason that the curriculum for Xavier Niel’s revolutionary “42” schools begins with students learning how to rewrite standard C library functions from scratch. But C is no longer suitable for this world which C has built.
I mean “terrible” in the “awe-inspiring dread” sense more than the “bad” sense. C has become a monster. It gives its users far too much artillery with which to shoot their feet off. Copious experience has taught us all, the hard way, that it is very difficult, verging on “basically impossible,” to write extensive amounts of C code that is not riddled with security holes. As I wrote two years ago, in my first Death To C piece:
In principle, as software evolves and grows more mature, security exploits should grow ever more baroque … But this is not the case for software written in C/C++. Buffer overflows and dangling pointers lead to catastrophic security holes, again and again and again, just like yesteryear, just like all the years of yore.
We cannot afford its gargantuan, gaping security blind spots any more. It’s long past time to retire and replace it with another language. The trouble is, most modern languages don’t even try to replace C. […] They’re not good at the thing C does best: getting down to the bare metal and working at mach speed.
If you’re a developer you already know where I’m going, of course: to tout the virtues of Rust, which is, in fact, a viable C/C++ replacement. Two years ago I suggested that people start writing new low-level coding projects in Rust instead of C. The first rule of holes, after all, is to stop digging.
Today I am seriously suggesting that when engineers refactor existing C code, especially parsers and other input handlers, they replace it — slowly, bit by bit — with Rust.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The USB 3.2 update is on the horizon. The incremental update defines multi-lane operation for new USB 3.2 hosts and devices, allowing for up to two lanes of 5 Gbps or two lanes of 10 Gbps operation. Existing USB Type-C cables designed to support multi-lane operation (certified for SuperSpeed USB 10 Gbps) will see effectively doubled performance. The specification is in draft release, with a formal release by September’s USB Developer Days.
Source: https://semiengineering.com/the-week-in-review-design-90/
More: http://www.usb.org/press/USB_3.2_PR_USB-IF_Final.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
HackerRank Tries To Calculate Which US States Have The Best Developers
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/07/30/2234253/hackerrank-tries-to-calculate-which-us-states-have-the-best-developers
Palo Alto-based HackerRank, which offers online programmng challenges, “dug into our data of about 450,000 unique U.S. developers to uncover which states are home to the best software engineers, and which pockets of the country have the highest rate of developer growth.” Examining the 24 months from 2015 through the end of 2016, they calculated the average score for each state in eight programming-related domains. (Algorithms, data structures, functional programming, math, Java, Ruby, C++, and Python.) But it seems like low-population states would have fewer people taking the tests
HackerRank: Washington, not California, has the most highly skilled developers
https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/28/hackerrank-washington-not-california-has-the-most-highly-skilled-developers/
Silicon Valley has long been the center of technology in the U.S., not just by largest (1) share of venture capital but also highest growth (2) in tech jobs. But as companies across all industries increasingly transform into tech companies, the demand for software developers all across the country has skyrocketed. In fact, a recent study (3) found that 89% of software developers today work and live outside of Silicon Valley.
In an effort to understand the state of software developers in the U.S., we dug into our data of about 450,000 unique U.S. developers to uncover which states are home to the best software engineers, and which pockets of the country have the highest rate of developer growth.
Our data revealed: Washington, not California, ranked number one in most skilled developers on HackerRank, and the smaller concentration of talented coders in Wyoming is right on its heels.
California came in third overall and placed in the top 10 across multiple domains.