rayo 3 by El Garza (cc) (from Flickr)

Although technically Project Lightening and Thunder represent some interesting offshoots of EMC software, hardware and system prowess,  I wonder why they would decide to go after this particular market space.

There are plenty of alternative offerings in the PCIe NAND memory card space.  Moreover, the PCIe card caching functionality, while interesting is not that hard to replicate and such software capability is not a serious barrier of entry for HP, IBM, NetApp and many, many others.  And the margins cannot be that great.

So why get into this low margin business?

I can see a couple of reasons why EMC might want to do this.

• Believing in the commoditization of storage performance.  I have had this debate with a number of analysts over the years but there remain many out there that firmly believe that storage performance will become a commodity sooner, rather than later.  By entering the PCIe NAND card IO buffer space, EMC can create a beachhead in this movement that helps them build market awareness, higher manufacturing volumes, and support expertise.  As such, when the inevitable happens and high margins for enterprise storage start to deteriorate, EMC will be able to capitalize on this hard won, operational effectiveness.
• Moving up the IO stack.  From an applications IO request to the disk device that actually services it is a long journey with multiple places to make money.  Currently, EMC has a significant share of everything that happens after the fabric switch whether it is FC,  iSCSI, NFS or CIFS.  What they don’t have is a significant share in the switch infrastructure or anywhere on the other (host side) of that interface stack.  Yes they have Avamar, Networker, Documentum, and other software that help manage, secure and protect IO activity together with other significant investments in RSA and VMware.   But these represent adjacent market spaces rather than primary IO stack endeavors.  Lightening represents a hybrid software/hardware solution that moves EMC up the IO stack to inside the server.  As such, it represents yet another opportunity to profit from all the IO going on in the data center.
• Making big data more effective.  The fact that Hadoop doesn’t really need or use high end storage has not been lost to most storage vendors.  With Lightening, EMC has a storage enhancement offering that can readily improve  Hadoop cluster processing.  Something like Lightening’s caching software could easily be tailored to enhance HDFS file access mode and thus, speed up cluster processing.  If Hadoop and big data are to be the next big consumer of storage, then speeding cluster processing will certainly help and profiting by doing this only makes sense.
• Believing that SSDs will transform storage. To many of us the age of disks is waning.  SSDs, in some form or another, will be the underlying technology for the next age of storage.  The densities, performance and energy efficiency of current NAND based SSD technology are commendable but they will only get better over time.  The capabilities brought about by such technology will certainly transform the storage industry as we know it, if they haven’t already.  But where SSD technology actually emerges is still being played out in the market place.  Many believe that when industry transitions like this happen it’s best to be engaged everywhere change is likely to happen, hoping that at least some of them will succeed. Perhaps PCIe SSD cards may not take over all server IO activity but if it does, not being there or being late will certainly hurt a company’s chances to profit from it.

There may be more reasons I missed here but these seem to be the main ones.  Of the above, I think the last one, SSD rules the next transition is most important to EMC.

They have been successful in the past during other industry transitions.  If anything they have shown similar indications with their acquisitions by buying into transitions if they don’t own them, witness Data Domain, RSA, and VMware.  So I suspect the view in EMC is that doubling down on SSDs will enable them to ride out the next storm and be in a profitable place for the next change, whatever that might be.

And following lightening, Project Thunder

Similarly, Project Thunder seems to represent EMC doubling their bet yet again on the SSDs.  Just about every month I talk to another storage startup coming out in the market providing another new take on storage using every form of SSD imaginable.

However, Project Thunder as envisioned today is not storage, but rather some form of external shared memory.  I have heard this before, in the IBM mainframe space about 15-20 years ago.  At that time shared external memory was going to handle all mainframe IO processing and the only storage left was going to be bulk archive or migration storage – a big threat to the non-IBM mainframe storage vendors at the time.

One problem then was that the shared DRAM memory of the time was way more expensive than sophisticated disk storage and the price wasn’t coming down fast enough to counteract increased demand.  The other problem was making shared memory work with all the existing mainframe applications was not easy.  IBM at least had control over the OS, HW and most of the larger applications at the time.  Yet they still struggled to make it usable and effective, probably some lesson here for EMC.

Fast forward 20 years and NAND based SSDs are the right hardware technology to make  inexpensive shared memory happen.  In addition, the road map for NAND and other SSD technologies looks poised to continue the capacity increase and price reductions necessary to compete effectively with disk in the long run.

However, the challenges then and now seem as much to do with software that makes shared external memory universally effective as with the hardware technology to implement it.  Providing a new storage tier in Linux, Windows and/or VMware is easier said than done. Most recent successes have usually been offshoots of SCSI (iSCSI, FCoE, etc).  Nevertheless, if it was good for mainframes then, it certainly good for Linux, Windows and VMware today.

And that seems to be where Thunder is heading, I think.

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Post tags: commoditization of storage performance, Commodity hardware, EMC, EMC Project Lightening, EMC Project Thunder, external shared memory, Linux, NAND, SSD, VMware, Windows

Isilon Packaging by ChrisDag (cc) (from Flickr)”]

[InfiniBand interconnected

From many analyst’s perspective, IB is one of the only technologies out there that can efficiently interconnect a cluster of commodity servers into a supercomputing system.

What’s InfiniBand?

Recall that IB is one of three reigning data center fabric technologies available today which include 10GbE, and 16 Gb/s FC.  IB is currently available in DDR, QDR and FDR modes of operation, that is 5Gb/s, 10Gb/s or 14Gb/s, respectively per single lane, according to the IB update (see IB trade association (IBTA) technology update).  Systems can aggregate multiple IB lanes in units of 4 or 12 paths (see wikipedia IB article), such that an IB QDRx4 supports 40Gb/s and a IB FDRx4 currently supports 56Gb/s.

The IBTA pitch cited above showed that IB is the most widely used interface for the top supercomputing systems and supports the most power efficient interconnect available (although how that’s calculated is not described).

Where else does IB make sense?

One thing IB has going for it is low latency through the use of RDMA or remote direct memory access.  That same report says that an SSD directly connected through a FC takes about ~45 μsec to do a read whereas the same SSD directly connected through IB using RDMA would only take ~26 μsec.

However, RDMA technology is now also coming out on 10GbE through RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE, pronounced “rocky”).  But ITBA claims that IB RDMA has a 0.6 μsec latency and the RoCE has a 1.3 μsec.  Although at these speed, 0.7 μsec doesn’t seem to be a big thing, it doubles the latency.

Nonetheless, Intel’s purchase is an interesting play.  I know that Intel is focusing on supporting an ExaFLOP HPC computing environment by 2018 (see their release).  But IB is already a pretty active technology in the HPC community already and doesn’t seem to need their support.

In addition, IB has been gradually making inroads into enterprise data centers via storage products like the Oracle Exadata Storage Server using the 40 Gb/s IB QDRx4 interconnects.  There are a number of other storage products out that use IB as well from EMC Isilon, SGI, Voltaire, and others.

Of course where IB can mostly be found today is in computer to computer interconnects and just about every server vendor out today, including Dell, HP, IBM, and Oracle support IB interconnects on at least some of their products.

Whose left standing?

With Qlogic out I guess this leaves Cisco (de-emphasized lately), Flextronix, Mellanox, and Intel as the only companies that supply IB switches. Mellanox, Intel (from Qlogic) and Voltaire supply the HCA (host channel adapter) cards which provide the server interface to the switched IB network.

Probably a logical choice for Intel to go after some of this technology just to keep it moving forward and if they want to be seriously involved in the network business.

IB use in Big Data?

On the other hand, it’s possible that Hadoop and other big data applications could conceivably make use of IB speeds and as these are mainly vast clusters of commodity systems it would be a logical choice.

There is some interesting research on the advantages of IB in HDFS (Hadoop) system environments (see Can high performance interconnects boost Hadoop distributed file system performance) out of Ohio State University.  This research essentially says that Hadoop HDFS can perform much better when you combine IB with IPoIB (IP over IB, see OpenFabrics Alliance article) and SSDs.  But SSDs alone do not provide as much benefit.   (Although my reading of the performance charts seems to indicate it’s not that much better than 10GbE with TOE?).

It’s possible other Big data analytics engines are considering using IB as well.  It would seem to be a logical choice if you had even more control over the software stack.

~~~~

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Post tags: 10GBE, BIGData, EMC Isilon, ExaFLOP computing, Flextronics, Hadoop, HDFS, HPC, IB EDR, IB QDR, IBTA, Intel, IPoIB, Melanox, OpenFabrics Alliance, Qlogic, supercomputing clusters, Voltaire

1906 Patent for Wireless Telegraphy by Wesley Fryer (cc) (from Flickr)

I read a report today in Technology Review about how Bouncing data would speed up data centers, which talked about using wireless technology and special ceiling tiles to create dedicated data links between servers.  The wireless signal was in the 60Ghz range and would yield something on the order of couple of Gb per second.

The cable mess

Wireless could solve a problem evident to anyone that has looked under data center floor tiles today – cabling.  Underneath our data centers today there is a spaghetti-like labyrinth of cables connecting servers to switches to storage and back again.  The amount of cables underneath some data centers is so deep and impenetrable that some shops don’t even try to extract old cables when replacing equipment just leaving them in place and layering on new ones as the need arises.

Bouncing data around a data center

The nice thing about the new wireless technology is that you can easily set up a link between two servers (or servers and switches) by just properly positioning antenna and ceiling tiles, without needing any cables.  However, in order to increase bandwidth and reduce interference the signal has to be narrowly focused which makes the technology point-to-point, requiring line of sight between the end points.   But with signal bouncing ceiling tiles, a “line-of-sight” pathway could readily be created around the data center.

This could easily be accomplished by different shaped ceiling tiles such as pyramids, flat panels, or other geometric configurations that would guide the radio signal to the correct transceiver.

I see it all now, the data center of the future would have its ceiling studded with geometrical figures protruding below the tiles, providing wave guides for wireless data paths, routing the signals around obstacles to its final destination.

Probably other questions remain.

• It appears the technology can only support 4 channels per stream.  Which means it might not scale up to much beyond current speeds.
• Electromagnetic radiation is something most IT equipment tries to eliminate rather than transmit.  Having something generate and receive radio waves in a data center may require different equipment regulations and having those types of signals bouncing around a data center may make proper shielding more of a concern..
• Signaling interference is a real problem which might make routing these signals even more of a problem than routing cables.  Which is why I believe they need  some sort of multi-directional wireless switching equipment might help.

In the report, there wasn’t any discussion as to the energy costs of the wireless technology and that may be another issue to consider. However, any reduction in cabling can only help IT labor costs which are a major factor in today’s data center economics.

~~~~

It’s just in investigation stages now but Intel, IBM and others are certainly thinking about how wireless technology could help the data centers of tomorrow reduce costs, clutter and cables.

All this gives a whole new meaning to top of rack switching.

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Post tags: Ceiling tiles, Data center, data transmission, IBM, Intel, radio channels, Wireless data center connections

2011 Wikimedia commons (400px-Synapse_Illustration_unlabeled.svg)

Recently MIT announced a new brain chip, a breakthrough device that simulates a single brain synapse with an analog chip.

We have discussed before the digital nueromorphic chip activity going on (see my IBM introducing their SyNAPSE chip and Electro-human interface posts). However both those were digital, this new MIT chip is analog.  The chip uses ~400 transistors and was fabricated using VLSI processing.

Analog, whats that?

Given that the world has gone digital, analog devices may be foreign to most of us.  But analog dominated the way electronics worked for the first half of last century and were still pretty prominent during the last half.

Nowadays, such devices are used primarily in signal processing, and where streams of data are transformed from one mode to another (serial/deserializers).   An analog signal has a theoretically an infinite resolution (Wikipedia), which should make it closer to real life and may be why some stereophiles perfer records to CDs.

Neurons are analog devices

That being said, it’s a treat to see some new analog technology come out that’s better than digital implementations.  One would have to say that neural activity is by definition analog and as such, should make simulating brain activity much easier.

The advantage of analog can be seen in that the neural synapse is the connection between two neurons.  Information is transferred between the two neurons by the take up of Ions.  In the case of the MIT synapse chip, the same sort of process occurs but in this case information flows based on gradients of electronic potential.

In testament to the capabilities of the new synapse chip they were able to resolve a long standing debate in neuro-biology. The question was on how long term potentation (LTP) and long term depression (LTD) which enhances or depresses the information transfer across the synapse was accomplished in real neurons.  Previously, it had been postulated that LTP and LTD would depend on two different mechanisms in real cells. But there was one theory that said with a specific type of receptor, both LTP and LTD could be performed in a single way.

MIT researchers were able to configure their synapse-chip to mimic that new receptor and were able to show how LTP and LTD could work with this single receptor in the brain.

Onto the brain

Of course a single synapse is not much considering the brain has 100B neurons each with many 100′s if not 1000′s of synapses. But it’s a start.

Naturally, considering its built out of transistors using CMOS technology, it should follow Moore’s law and after 18 months or so we should have a chip with two synapses on it. Another 40 or so doublings more (~60 years from now in 2071), if Moore’s law holds, we can have a brain-chip with 100B neurons and 100T synapses on it.

Of course, this being a prototype, I suppose with today’s fabrication capable of  creating 40M transistors/chip, we may already be able to simulate 100K synapses and 100 neurons. Which means we should have a brain’s level of neurons and synapses in 30 doublings or ~2056.

Analog is better than biological

The other nice thing about analog logic and transistors, is that information processing in the brain-chip should be orders of magnitude faster than the brain’s biological processing.  Which is probably even more frightening.

The IBM SyNAPSE chip mentioned earlier was an all digital creation and had two chip cores, one provided “learning synapses” and the other “programmable synapses”.  This was probably an attempt to mimic neural processing in digital logic.

The analog brain-chip that MIT has invented, has no such distinction, supplying all synapse functionality in 400 transistors.   Nonetheless, any accurate simulation of neural processes can help us to understand how to mimic it better. The fact that we have an analog simulation neural processes should help us improve the digital simulation to more closely match the brain.

—-

Not sure what we should call this chip, it’s certainly not neuromorphic, because it’s a real simulation of analog neural synapses not a digital approximation.  I would use synapse- chip but its already in use.  I kind of like the brain-chip but that may be stretching it a bit. Maybe the neuron-chip is best for now

Now that we know the date for the singularity, hopefully we can be ready to deal with whatever happens then.

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Post tags: Analog synapse, Analog synapse simulation, Brain-chip, MIT, Neuromorphic, Neuron-chip, Singularity, SyNAPSE chip, Synapse simulation

Untitled by johnwilson1969

We have been discussing off and on how smart power meters (see Smart metering data storage appetite) and intelligent sensors (see the Sensor cloud comes home) such as smart thermostats generate copious amounts of data.  Sensors and meters such as these are used in a new power distribution network called the smart grid.

But recently there was a report in Technology Review of how smart thermostats can “communicate” with power companies to determine current energy costs and then alter temperature settings to reduce power use.

Power companies give discounts to those customers who install the smart thermostats in the hope that such devices will lower peak power use.  If this happens they will save significant investments in new power generation and power lines to satisfy the ever-growing peak power level. This probably works best in summer with A/C equipment which is a prime user of electricity during peak consumption periods. The story goes on to say that these smart thermostats have been used in a small test bed but are about to be rolled out on a wider basis.

Power thrashing?!

One serious concern brought up in the article is that when such devices are rolled out on a large scale there is a high chance of power thrashing.

As smart thermostats reduce home power consumption in volume, they may end up driving the cost of power down low enough such that the thermostats, on the next cycle, will start to consume more power, leading to power thrashing.

If this happens on a big enough region, such oscillations of power use may lead to an even higher peak than what was in place prior to the smart grid.  And if the thermostats have been in place for a while and succeeded in reducing peak power capabilities, such thrashing may lead to a smart grid crash or congestion collapse.

Thrashing prevention on the power grid

There are three ways to prevent power thrashing:

• Increase the amount of peak power to handle the worst case regional energy working set.
• Decrease the power consumption of the largest power users.
• Decrease the number of consumers.

It would seem the first solution defeats the purpose of the smarter grid.  I believe the second approach can best be implemented by having even more smart appliances which can reduce power consumption on demand.  As for the third approach, this may be infeasible, as you cannot just drop power to consumers without some serious consequences.

Dumb grid solutions

We have for a couple of years now received a discount on our power bill by having a special device attached to our A/C unit that reduces our power consumption on one day a year. It’s not quite as intelligent as the smart thermostats discussed above but it does the job (at least once/year).  Such devices, used on a large scale could provide the capabilities of the smart thermostat but eliminate the potential for thrashing and large power oscillations.

—-

So the smart grid is coming but the smarter it gets the more care we need to take in implementing it.

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Post tags: dumb grid, Peek power, power thrashing, power thrashing prevention, smart grid, smart power systems, smart thermostats

Mobile Phone with Money in Kenya by whiteafrican (cc) (from Flickr)

Read an article today about Safaricom creating a domestic cloud service offering outside Nairobi in Kenya (see Chasing the African Cloud).

But this got me to thinking that cloud services may be just like mobile phones in that developing countries can use it to skip over older technologies like wired phone lines and gain advantages of more recent technology that offers similar services, the mobile phone without the need to bother with the expense and time to build telephone wires across the land.

Leapfrogging IT infrastructure buildout

In the USA, cloud computing, cloud storage, and SAAS services based in the cloud are essentially taking the place of small business IT infrastructure services today.  Many small businesses skip over building their own IT infrastructures, absolutely necessary years ago for email, web services, back office processing, etc., and are moving directly to using cloud service providers for these capabilities.

In some cases, it’s even more than  just the IT infrastructure, as the application, data and processing services all can be supplied from SAAS providers.

Today, it’s entirely possible to run a complete, very large business without owning a stitch of IT infrastructure (other than desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile phones) by doing this

Developing countries can show us the way

Developing countries can do much the same for their economic activity. Rather than have their small businesses spend time building out homegrown IT infrastructure just lease it out from one or more domestic (or international) cloud service providers and skip the time, effort and cost of doing it your self.

Hanging out with Kenya Techies by whiteafrican (cc) (from Flickr)

Given this dynamic, cloud service vendors ought to be focusing more time and money on developing countries. They should adopt such services more rapidly because they don’t have the sunk costs in current, private IT infrastructure and applications.

China moves into the cloud

I probably should have caught on earlier.  Earlier this year I was at a vendor analyst meeting, having dinner with a colleague from the China Center for Information Industry Development (CCID) Consulting.  He mentioned that Cloud was one of a select set of technologies that China was focusing considerable state and industry resources on.   At the time, I just thought this was prudent thinking to keep up with industry trends. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the cloud could be a leap frog technology that would help them avoid a massive IT infrastructure build out in millions of small companies in their nation.

One can see that early adopter nations have understood that with the capabilities of mobile phones they can create a fully functioning telecommunications infrastructure almost overnight.  Much the same can be done with cloud computing, storage and services.

Now if they can only get WiMAX up and running to eliminate cabling their cities for internet access.

—-

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Post tags: Africa, CCID consulting, China cloud focus, Cloud computing, Cloud services, Cloud Storage, developing countries, land lines, leapfrog technologies, mobile phones, SAAS, WIMAX

Flaming Lotus Girls Neuron by SanFranAnnie (cc) (from Flickr)

There has been a lot of talk recently about neuromorphic computing (see IBM introduces SyNAPSE) and using Phase Change Memory for artificial neurons but there hasn’t been much discussion of ways to interface human’s or for that matter any life whatsoever to electronics.

That is until today.

Recently a report came out highlighted in IEEE Spectrum on a Transistor Made to Run on Protons.  It seems that transistor technology used everywhere today runs on electrons or negative charges but bio-neurological systems all run on positive IONs and/or protons.  This makes a proton transistor especially appealing for a biocompatible electronic interface.

Proton transistors are born

Apparently the chip is made out of “nanofibers of chitosan” originally derived from a squid.  Also the device works in the presence of only high humidity and when “loaded with proton-donating acid groups”.

All sounds a bit biological to me but that’s probably the point.

It seems in the past when they tried to provide a bio-electronic interface like this they used micro-fluidics with a flow of positive IONs through a pipe. But this new approach does not use flowing liquid at all but rather just a flow of protons across an acid.  The proton flow is controlled by an electrostatic potential applied to the transistors gate electrode.

Today the proton transistor has a channel width of 3.5 μm.  At that size, it’s ~1000X bigger than current transistor technology (maybe even more).  Which means it will be some time before they embed a proton based, 12-core Xeon processor in a brain.

Apparently the protons have a flow rate of ~5×10⁻³ cm² V⁻¹ s⁻¹ through the transistor or by my calculations, roughly about ~1/2 bit per 100 seconds.  Seems like we are going to need a lot more channels, but its only a start.  For more information on the new transistor read the original article in Nature, A polysaccharide bioprotonic field-effect transistor.

But what can it do for me?

A proton transistor has the potential to interface directly with human neurons and as such, can form a biocompatible electronic interface.  Such a bionanoprotonic device can conceivably create an in the brain-to-electronics interface that can bring digital information directly into a person’s consciousness.  Such a capability would be a godsend to the blind, deaf and handicapped.

Of course if information can go in, it can also come out

One can imagine that such an interface can provide a portal to the web, an interface to a desktop or mobile computing device without the burden of displays, keyboards, or speakers. Such a device, when universally available, may make today’s computing paradigm look like using a manual typewriter.

This all sounds like science fiction but it feels like it just got a step closer to to reality.

Can The Singularity be that far behind?

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Post tags: bio, biocompatible, biology, bionanoprotonic, bionanoprotonics, bioprotonic, Human computer interface, proton transistor

Gold Nanowire Array by lacomj (cc) (from Flickr)

A post by Chris M. Evans, in his The Storage Architect blog (Intel inside storage arrays) re-invigorated the discussion we had last year on commodity hardware always loses.

But buried in the comments was one from Michael Hay (HDS) which pointed to another blog post by Andrew Huang in his bunnie’s blog (Why the best days of open hardware are ahead) where he has an almost brillant discussion on how Moore’s law will eventually peter out (~5nm) and as such, will take much longer to double transistor density.  At that time, hardware customization (by small companies/startups) will once again, come to the forefront in new technology development.

Custom hardware, here now and the foreseeable future

Although it would be hard to argue against Andrew’s point nevertheless, I firmly believe there is still plenty of opportunity today to customize hardware that brings true value to the market.   The fact is that Moore’s law doesn’t mean that hardware customization cannot still be worthwhile.

Hitachi’s VSP (see Hitachi’s VSP vs. VMAX) is a fine example of the use of both custom ASICs, FPGAs (I believe) and standard off the shelf hardware.   HP’s 3PAR  is another example,  they couldn’t have their speedy mesh architecture without custom hardware.

But will anyone be around that can do custom chip design?

Nigel Poulton commented on Chris’s post that with custom hardware seemingly going away, the infrastructure, training and people will no longer be around to support any re-invigorated custom hardware movement.

I disagree.  Intel, IBM, Samsung, and many others large companies still maintain an active electronics engineering team/chip design capability, any of which are capable of creating state of the art ASICs.  These capabilities are what make Moore’s law a reality and will not go away over the long run (the next 20-30 years).

The fact that these competencies are locked up in very large organizations doesn’t mean it cannot be used by small companies/startups as well.  It probably does mean that these wherewithal may cost more. But the market place will deal with that in the long run, that is if the need continues to exist.

But do we still need custom hardware?

Custom hardware creates capabilities that magnify Moore’s law processing capabilities to do things that standard, off the shelf hardware cannot.  The main problem with Moore’s law from a custom hardware perspective is it takes functionality that once took custom hardware yesterday (or 18 months ago) and makes it available on off the shelf components with custom software today.

This dynamic just means that custom hardware needs to keep moving, providing ever more user benefits and functionality to remain viable.  When custom hardware cannot provide any real benefit over standard off the shelf components – that’s when it will die.

Andrew talks about the time it takes to develop custom ASICs and the fact that by the time you have one ready, a new standard chip has come out which doubles processor capabilities. Yes custom ASICs take time to develop, but FPGAs can be created and deployed in much less time. FPGA’s, like custom ASICs, also take advantage of Moore’s law with increased transistor density every 18 months. Yes, FPGAs  may be run slower than custom ASICs, but what it lacks in processing power, it makes up in time to market.

Custom hardware has a bright future as far as I can see.

—–

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Post tags: Bunnie's Blog, chip design, Chris M. Evans, Commodity hardware, Custom ASICs, custom hardware, electronic engineering, FPGAs