Scope: Hot Chips, handset handwringing, more
Preview of the Hot Chips conference, slower growth for handsets, and, from 50 years ago in EDN, early computerized weapons.
Edited by Ron Wilson -- EDN, July 19, 2007
Looking Ahead: To Hot Chips
The IEEE Technical Committee on Microprocessors and Microcomputers again hosts the pre-eminent technical forum on high-performance processing ICs at Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA) Aug 19 to 21. Appropriately enough for the times, the conference will include three sessions on multicore architectures, one of which—a keynote—will examine the future of the x86 architecture. Recognizing the growing role of software in IC-architectural decisions, organizers have planned another session titled “Technology and Software Directions.” The forum will devote one session to exploring the IBM Power6 architecture. Sunday tutorials will include “Approaches to System Design for the Working Engineer” and “Enterprise Power and Cooling: a Chip to Data Center Perspective.” It's hard to find a more concentrated source of technical conversations on the chip architectures that are making the news.
Looking Back
: At early computerized weapons systems
Performing 136,000 mathematical steps in under one second, the Multi-Weapon Automatic Target and Battery Evaluator assists antiaircraft-operations-center officers in organizing defense against approaching enemy aircraft. The MATABE contains more than 20 miles of wiring in seven cabinets. Its heart is a Burroughs Corp-developed real-time electronic digital computer, capable of 200,000 multidigit additions per second. That speed allows the MATABE to calculate a missile's time-to-burst point, the response time of the missile battery, the missile-intercept point, whether that point is within effective range, the relative threats of targets, and which target should be attacked first. The machine keeps a running account of the firing history on each target and records this information on punched paper tape.
—Electrical Design News, July 1957
Looking Around
: For some missing cell phones
There is an intimate connection between the health of the cell-phone-handset business and the glow in the eye of the electronics industry. Nothing can absorb that many chips—RF chips, SOCs (systems on chips), system controllers and power chips, memory chips, plus a lot more—without having influence. So, when the Semiconductor Industry Association starts talking about slower growth in handset sales, everyone takes notice. The trouble is that at least one indicator suggests that the growth isn't slower; it's gone altogether. One analyst recently stated that, for the first time, shipments of displays for handsets fell compared with the year-earlier period. Because virtually every handset has a display, and because this industry is not famous for letting inventories get out of balance, it sounds like handset shipments may be in for a decline. That news could be sobering in a lot of areas.
