Brian's Brain
EDN Senior Technical Editor Brian Dipert exposes, analyzes and
opines on diverse topics in technology. Follow the Brian's Brain Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/BrianzBrain.
So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish
One of the things that’s always struck me in interacting with various folks over my time at EDN is how impermanent your careers have tended to be in comparison to mine. Many of you, for example, job-hopped a great deal during the dot-com-boom second half of the 1990s. And conversely, some of you have unfortunately also experienced layoff periods coincident with economic downturns, outsourci ...... Read More
Comments (14)Qualcomm's MSM8660: Does Dual-Core Hype Translate Into Practical-Benefit Reality?
Continued from ‘Qualcomm’s MSM8660: The Benchmark’s The Thing Wherein I’ll Crown The King‘… Here’s the Quadrant Advanced benchmark results screenshot of the MDP with Vsync on: And off: Next comes my Google Nexus One: And Motorola Droid: It’s now time to turn to the tablets. Starting with the smaller 7″ system, the NOOKcolor’ ...... Read More
Comments (0)Qualcomm's MSM8660: The Benchmark's The Thing Wherein I'll Crown The King
Continued from ‘Qualcomm’s MSM8660: Dual-Core ARM With Adreno 220 Graphics For The Performance-Hungry‘… What benchmark did I employ in this study? After much consideration and no shortage of gnashing of teeth, I reluctantly settled on Aurora Softworks’ Quadrant Advanced, one of the utilities which came pre-installed on the MDP. Quadrant is seemingly by far the mo ...... Read More
Comments (1)Qualcomm's MSM8660: Dual-Core ARM With Adreno 220 Graphics For The Performance-Hungry
Within my early-April cover story, ‘ARM versus Intel: a successful stratagem for RISC or grist for CISC’s tricks?‘, I discussed (among other SoCs) Qualcomm’s dual-core MSM8660. By means of review, the MSM8660 (befitting its prefix, which stands for Mobile Station Modem and is the successor to QSD aka Qualcomm Semiconductor) embeds a cellular baseband processor alongside ...... Read More
Comments (0)Sunday's Video Of The Day: Sony's PlayStation Network Goes Back Online
Hey, it only took a month… More on the mandatory firmware update and the state-by-state (and country-by-country) resurrection status specifics. Now the all-important question: how many people will give Sony yet another chance? ...... Read More
Comments (0)Implementing And Comparing Video Over USB: The Thunderbolt Back Story
Hopefully by now at least some of you have gotten a chance to peruse Cypress Semiconductor’s contributed feature story in the latest issue of EDN, which went live yesterday. I’ve been working with Cypress on it since early February, and as you’ll see when you read through it, the main article compares USB v3 against HDMI and DisplayPort as video connection candidates. Personal ...... Read More
Comments (4)Wednesday's Quote Of The Day: Google's Chrome OS On Openness
From Senior Vice President of Chrome, Sundar Pichai regarding today’s Chromebook news, 57 minutes (and a few seconds) into today’s Google I/O keynote…and also noted as curious by TechCrunch’s MG Siegler: Of course as you developers, we want to make sure you can completely jailbreak these devices. So my partners may not want to say it, but these devices have a full jailb ...... Read More
Comments (0)Wednesday's (Other) Video Of The Day: Google I/O Conference Day 2 Keynote
It’s a two-fer…following up yesterday’s heads-up… ...... Read More
Comments (0)Wednesday's Video Of The Day: See Apple (And Google) Sweat Regarding Privacy
Opening statements from yesterday’s session of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, which queried Apple and Google representatives regarding mobile privacy (as I previously discussed here), with thanks to The Loop for the heads-up: PDF transcripts of testimony provided by Apple, Google and other session participants can be accessed here. ...... Read More
Comments (0)Intel's Z68 Express: Sandy Bridge-Tailored Core Logic With SSD Finesse
Back prior to the start of CES 2011, my Intel Sandy Bridge processor coverage focused primarily on the CPU architecture, admittedly giving comparative short shrift to the companion ‘Cougar Point’ H67 Express and P67 Express chipsets. A glance at the respective system block diagrams: will reveal one reason for my lack of chipset enthusiasm; although they derive from a common silicon ...... Read More
Comments (1)Tuesday's Video Of The Day: Google I/O Conference Day 1 Keynote
With thanks to Slashgear for the heads-up: Also check out both my and Mike Demler’s Twitter feeds for live commentary. ...... Read More
Comments (0)Motorola's Xoom and RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook: Giving Flash Memory Firmware-Fueled Product Immaturity A Look
As I mentioned in last Friday’s writeup, I spent last Tuesday afternoon co-moderating (with iFixit’s Kyle Wiens) a teardown of the Nintendo 3DS portable gaming console. For those of you who were unable to be in attendance, I’ll post the video of the event when it’s available (as I did with Kyle and my earlier Microsoft Kinect teardown at DesignCon). To tide you over unt ...... Read More
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