Re: Security

Normally, additional features that command a premium are fused-out in 'common' silicon and enabled only for special SKUs.

To temporarily enable fused-out feature you would need several things none of which are present in the computers employed in ordinary businesses. And even if you had all the tooling and clearances (which is next to impossible) the process of temporary enabling is not going to be unnoticed. Hardly something that can be used for exploitation. There are much easier avenues - including more and more rare kernel-level exploits.

Re: Talk about apples and moonrocks

Sorry, but you obviously do not know what are you talking about, sorry.

Intel's modern CPUs have different micro-ops which are used internally. x86 instruction set is only used as a backwards-compatibility measure and gets decoded to the series of micro-ops (besides, modern instructions such as AVX have nothing to do with the ancient x86). Today's Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge architecture has almost nothing in common with, say, Pentium III or even Core. Intel tweaks their architectures in the "tick" cycle, but the "tock" architectures are brand new and very different from each other.

As for X86 instruction set, and the age-old mantra (I believe coming from Apple fanboys) that x86 is inherently more power-demanding, this has been nicely disproved lately with refined Intel Atoms (2007 architecture, mind you) which are pretty much on par with modern ARM architectures in terms of power consuption.

I am not a fan of x86 at all, I use what gets my job done in the best possible way.

But when I read things like this, it really strikes me how people manage to comment on something they obviously do not understand.

Re: Where is the advantage?

Err, why would a sandboxed userspace code cause "computer to crash" any more than anything else that runs in the userland? I see absolutely no point in that statement. If a computer crashes today, this is almost universally due to bad kernel-level 3rd party code such as drivers. NaCL has nothing to do with this any more than Javascript - both languages would execute in the userspace and, at the end, use OS supplied userspace APIs.

And how is Javascript any higher-level than, say, C++ ?

Sorry, the fact that the language is more open to script kiddies does not make it any more "high level", nor it does make buggy code any less likely to occur. Crappy code is crappy code, it is caused by the developer and not by the language.

The advantage of the NaCL would be performance - if someone needs it say, for multimedia, gaming, etc... It does not mean that everybody needs to use it but it would be good to have it as an option. The fact that computers are getting faster does not render it any less relevant as modern multimedia/gaming is always pushing the limits of the hardware.

Re: The Kernel of Linux

Cars engine management?

Yeah, that's exactly where I'd want a general purpose OS like Linux...

Thankfully, automotive industry is still not going crazy and critical ECU-s are driven by hardened RTOS-es.

Re: So, not exactly Orac then

My bet is on the truly neuromorphic hardware.

Anything else introduces unnecessary overhead and bottlenecks. While initial simulations for model validation are OK to be done on general-purpose computing architectures, scaling that up efficiently to match the size of a small primate brain is going to require elimination of overheads and bottlenecks in order not to consume megawatts.

Problem with neuromorphic hardware is of "chicken and the egg" type - to expect large investments there needs to be a practical application which clearly outperforms the traditional Von Neumann sort - and to find this application, large research grants are needed. I am repeating the obvious, but our current knowledge of neurons is probably still far from being on the level enough to make something really useful.

Recognizing basic patterns with lots of tweaking is cool - but for a practical application it is not really going to cut it as the same purpose could be achieved with much cheaper "conventional" hardware.

If cortical modelling is to succeed - I'd guess it needs to achieve goals which would make it useful for military/defense purposes (can be something even basic mammals are good at - recognition, and today's computers still suck big time when fed with uncertain / natural data).. Then, the whole discipline will certainl get a huge kick to go to the next level.

Even today, there is a large source of funding - say, for Human Brain Project (HCP). But, I am afraid that the grandiose goals of HCP might not be met - coupled with pimping of general public and politician's expectations, the consequences of failure would be disastrous and potentially yield to another "winter" similar to the AI Winters we had.

This is why I am very worried about people making claims that we can replicate human brain (or even brain of a small primate) in the near future - while this is perhaps possible, failing to meet the promises would bring unhealthy pessimism and slow down the entire discipline due to cuts in funding. I, for one, would much rather prefer smaller goals - and if we exceed them, so much for the better.

Re: Better platform needed

There is still a tiny issue of connectivity - despite the fact that synaptic connectivity patterns are of "small world" type (highest % of connections are local), there is still a staggering amount of long-range connections that go across the brain. Average human brain contains on order of hundreds of thousands of kilometers (nope, that is not a mistake) of synaptic "wiring".

Currently our technologies for wiring things on longer distances are not yet comparable to mother nature's. Clever coding schemes can somehow mitigate this (but then, you need to plan space for mux/demux, and those things will consume energy), however - but still, the problem is far from being tractable with the today's tech.

Re: Strong AI will, of course, use Linux

Operating system choice has absolutely nothing to do with brain modelling.

Most models are initially done in Matlab, which exists on Linux, OS X and Windows.

Then, applying this in large-scale practice is simply a question of tooling, and tooling exists on all relevant operating systems today. You have CUDA and OpenMP on Linux and Windows. Heck, you even have Intel compiler if you love x86 on both Linux and Windows. It is more a practical choice which is down to the other requirements.

On the other hand, it is true, however, that there is a large choice of support tools (such as Freesurfer) existing on Linux and not on Windows. But then, anybody can run anything in a virtual machine nowdays.

Re: So, not exactly Orac then

Hmm, machine language would be a huge waste of time as you could accomplish the same with the assembler ;-) Assuming you meant assembly code - even that would be an overkill for the whole project and actually it might end up with slower code compared to an optimizing C/C++ compiler.

What could make sense is assembly-code optimization of critical code paths, say synaptic processing. But even then, you are mostly memory-bandwidth bound and clever coding tricks would bring at most few tenths of % of improvement in the best case.

However, that is still drop in the bucket compared to the biggest contributor here - for any decent synaptic receptor modelling you would need at least 2 floating point variables per synapse and several floating point variables per one neuron compartment.

Now, if your simulation accuracy is 1 ms (and that is rather coarse as 0.1 ms is not unheard of) - you need to do 1000 * number_of_synapses * N (N=2) floating point reads, same number of writes - and several multiplications and additions for every single synapse. Even for a bee brain-size, that is many terabytes per second of I/O. And >that< is the biggest problem of large-scale bilogically-plausible neural networks.

Re: I've gone for large capacity.

Not all SSD are created equal - SLC SSDs can sustain writes on orders of petabytes and that's why they are used in the enterprise sector.

Re: Android

You are comparing a simple ability to find what you want (application-wise) online... by say, googling for it with writing of the 4-line bash script?

Wow... standards have indeed fallen these days. I guess in 10 years even mere searching would be considered an intellectual chore.

Ehm... because of... quality?

Because VP6 is quite better in terms of quality per equal bitrate comared to Ogg Theora?

Meaning that bandwidth required to carry quality streams will be lower?

Or, meaning that people would get higher video quality per same bandwidth utilized?

Not to mention that streaming HD streams with Theora requires ludricous bit rate compared to H.264 or even On2 VP6. Argument that "everyone has broadband" does not cut it - first of all because it is still NOT enough for HD Theora streams, and second -because someone HAS to pay for all that bandwidth being moved between servers.

Of course that anyone with a hint of technical competence would choose better codec (better in terms of quality per bits engaged) as it decreases costs and improves quality of viewing.

Patents and Trade Secrets

Usually patents contain only brief and basic information about the technology.

In most complex cases, the devil is in the detail of implementation, and that implementation is typically held as trade-secret kind of IP.

Actually...

i4i did offer their technology - they were in fact negotiating with Microsoft long before the court case.

What MS did - they thought they can avoid the patent (email proof shown in court) - and decided to say goodbye to i4i...

Well, at the end - it looks like it did not play well for Microsoft, and what they did in fact was willful infringement.

So, before you call people morons, get your facts straight, mr. Anonimous Coward.

Unfortunately - no GMA500

Uhh

I just saw it is GMA3150 - 45nm shrinkage of GMA3100

It is not capable of hw. decoding of anything except MPEG-2. This is a really ridiculous decision from Intel's side - especially when NVidia's ION is available.

Actually, GMA can do HD

GMA500, that is - the kind part of Intel's "MID" and embedded ATOM parts, and probably the same GPU in the new Pineview parts.

However, the biggest problem of GMA500 (PoverVR) is extremely crappy driver support, so actually most people can't see what this thing can truly deliver.

In fact, I have it decoding 1080p AVC with ~3-5% of CPU load - and, yes, that's a 1.3 GHz Z5xx ATOM.