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Archive for April, 2010

Automation to Innovation: A historical account of the future

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 2:21 am   - Posted by Shivesh Vishwanathan

Automation To Innovation In Software

“A piece of software is mass-produced the instant it is written.”

Towards the later half of the twentieth century, a big revolution gripped humanity. After having tackled mass production and creating machines, people looked to using a single machine to do multiple things. I am happy to report that software was born, and with it, a period of information revolution was unleashed. The whole digital world is an automated mass production factory that can’t help being any other way. A piece of software is mass-produced the instant it is written (it is soft-ware after all!). In fact, people go to great lengths to limit (more…)

 

Technology Trends in Gaming Industry: My Views from the GDC

Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 3:05 am   - Posted by Pravin Kulange

I recently visited the Game Developer Conference at San Francisco. GDC is the largest event for folks in the gaming industry. This year’s GDC attracted a record number of participants from across the world and highlighted some interesting trends that are significantly changing the gaming industry. While I observed various interesting trends during this GDC, I am limiting this blog post to the three that I think are the important ones: Social Games, Augmented Reality and Mobile.

1. Social Games
Social gaming is spreading rapidly beyond the borders of game platforms, and attracting those users who rarely played games before. It has caught on because (more…)
 

Apple’s Secret Sauce: Interactive User Experience

Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 5:34 am   - Posted by Shivesh Vishwanathan

Interactive User Experience An interesting study conducted recently could shed some light on why some of the new-age companies like Google and Apple are scoring so well compared to the erstwhile leaders like Microsoft and Yahoo!. The study from Cornell, published in , shows that experiences are better than possessions. The study essentially says:

The satisfaction we get from buying vacations, bikes for exercise and other experiences starts high and keeps growing. The initial high we feel from acquiring a flashy car or (more…)

 

SuperSpeed USB 3.0: A Perfect Complement to Solid-state Drives?

Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 4:51 am   - Posted by Subodh Bhide

Super fast USB 3.0 and colossal SSD seems to be like a perfect marriage, with the two clearly complementing each other.

The SuperSpeed USB 3.0, as the name suggests, aims to be much faster than its predecessors, the Hi-Speed USB 2.0. With a signaling rate of 5 Gbps, usb.org claims a 10x performance boost over Hi-Speed. As I had mentioned in my previous post on SSD, the capacity of flash NAND based SSDs is on the rise. Few hundreds of giga bytes have now become standard capacities. As this type of storage reaches the enterprise world, the struggle for capacity increase will continue, and in the near future, we will have SSDs with terra byte capacities.

Now, even as SSD is a great improvement over traditional storage media, and enables massive storage spaces, without the fast speeds of data transfer, the large amount of storage would be severely restricted. To get a sense of the enormity of this problem, consider this: Based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation, USB 2.0 will take approximately 73 minutes to read 250 GB of data whereas USB 3.0 will take 7.5 minutes (not considering any types of latencies). So, combining USB 3.0 and SSD together will give us an almost perfect combination that includes a large capacity source (or a sink) and a very fast channel to move data in and out of it.

A close analysis of the specifications brings out 5 primary reasons that make USB 3.0 so fast –

  1. Physically, USB 3.0 implements 2 additional twisted signal pairs than USB 2.0 for carrying data.
  2. At a protocol level, SuperSpeed implements a dual-simplex unicast bus for concurrent bi-directional operations. Earlier versions of USB used the slow, half-duplex broadcast bus.
  3. Data Bursting in USB 3.0 allows the end points to send / receive data packets with no time wastage for handshakes. Though error prone, this gives greater efficiency when data is transferred in burst mode.
  4. USB 3.0 has introduced streaming capabilities for bulk type of transfers. This allows multiple streams (between 1 and 65533 in number) to be established over the same pipe. This gives a much greater bandwidth for data transfer.
  5. SuperSpeed USB 3.0 does not work on a serial transaction model like USB 2.0, where the host has to wait for an acknowledgment of a transaction before initiating a new transaction. Instead, USB 3.0 uses a sort of split transaction model, which allows multiple transactions at the same time. This kind of parallel processing results in improved response time.

The SuperSpeed USB 3.0 specification has surely set the stage for USB to be an ideal channel for data transfer from SSD. However, the real picture will emerge as USB 3.0 gets absorbed into the main stream by year 2011 and the way it stands up to competitive technologies like SATA and PCI Express.