Tchaikovsky Symphony number four opens with the full force of the combined brass section at fortissimo introducing the main theme.  One minute thirty seconds later, we are left with nothing but bassoon – barely audible above the noise floor of most home audio systems.   If you try to take that CD into your car, you’re facing a serious problem.  Turn the volume on the intro down to the point where it doesn’t distort your automotive sound system and a minute and a half later you’ll be listening to nothing … Read More → "Better Mobile Media"

Multicore processing chips answer the power-energy challenge while increasing processing capability. For many years, increasing the computational power of processing chips has been achieved by increasing the core-clock frequency. However, this boosts the required input power and cooling by the cube of the frequency. A partial answer is achieved by using superscalar, single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) architectures and larger memory caches. Multicore technology takes this trend a step further through the use of multiple full-function cores, each with its own local memory, on a single chip. Surprisingly, the movement toward multicore technology has not been driven by military applications, but … Read More → "Accelerating Persistent Surveillance Radar with the Cell Broadband Engine"

“There is a lot of hype about multicore, but there is no infrastructure to support it.” A throw-away remark from a senior figure in an embedded tools company was the start of this article. Certainly he didn’t want to be quoted directly, which made me greatly to wonder. As I started researching the issues I talked to a number of people across the industry. The choice wasn’t scientific or comprehensive – just people I thought might have opinions that were valuable, whose company had recently made an announcement in this area, written an article … Read More → "Multicore to Massively Parallel"

My setup bears the tell-tale tattoos of early-adopter syndrome.  Each signal source plumbed into the cable jungle on the back of the receiver has no fewer than five separate strands – three for component video and two for analog audio.  An S/PDIF might add to the bundle with optional digital audio.  One input source – the homebrew HTPC has a pasta-like plethora of cables coming out of the sound and video cards – some of which run through a special converter box that switches VGA to Component Video.  Fifty expensive component cable-feet away is … Read More → "HDMI To Go"