Tag Archives: technology

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The Processor Wars

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There are many ways to make a profit; one of them is to make a better product than the competition, but sometimes that alone is not enough, especially when you make the components of complex devices like computers. So maybe you could think about building loopholes into your product that make the competition’s product look inferior when used in the same system? There are suggestions that’s what nVidia has been doing:

PhysX is designed to make it easy for developers to add high-quality physics simulation to their games, so that cloth drapes the way it should, balls bounce realistically, and smoke and fragments (mostly from exploding barrels) fly apart in a lifelike manner. In recognition of the fact that game developers, by and large, don’t bother to release PC-only titles anymore, NVIDIA also wisely ported PhysX to the leading game consoles, where it runs quite well on console hardware.

If there’s no NVIDIA GPU in a gamer’s system, PhysX will default to running on the CPU, but it doesn’t run very well there. You might think that the CPU’s performance deficit is due simply to the fact that GPUs are far superior at physics emulation, and that the CPU’s poor showing on PhysX is just more evidence that the GPU is really the component best-equipped to give gamers realism.

Some early investigations into PhysX performance showed that the library uses only a single thread when it runs on a CPU. This is a shocker for two reasons. First, the workload is highly parallelizable, so there’s no technical reason for it not to use as many threads as possible; and second, it uses hundreds of threads when it runs on an NVIDIA GPU. So the fact that it runs single-threaded on the CPU is evidence of neglect on NVIDIA’s part at the very least, and possibly malign neglect at that.

Whether it is malign remains to be seen (the use of Occam’s Razor may well apply here, but then again it may not), but this is still an interesting development: in a world where most new inventions are part of larger systems, the battle for sales isn’t simply a matter of making your own product better. Granted, talking down the value of a competitor’s product has been a core strategy of public relations for years, but actually attenuating that value in deployment strikes me as being something pretty new, if only because it wasn’t really possible before. Unless anyone can suggest a situation where this has happened before?

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The hopeful monsters: blimp freighters

Another trope from the future of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl is knocking on the door of tomorrow, as the UK government’s former chief science advisor suggests that blimps could take up the role of air freighters. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are apparently already on the case of modernising this old technology. But why stop at freight? Bring back the passenger blimps, I say! The steamtrains of the skies!

Interestingly, this suggests that progress along the Gartner Hype Cycle may run at extremely different speeds for different technologies, and possibly even be cyclic. Perhaps zeppelins have been languishing in the trough of disillusionment for decades (the Hindenburg probably didn’t help, I’m guessing), and is now getting a nudge up onto the slope of enlightenment courtesy of the (arguably shark-jumping) verdigris glamour of steampunk…

More interesting thoughts about the Hype Cycle (and “hopeful monsters”) at the BERG blog [via Bruce Sterling].

Blasphemous Geometries

Microsoft Kinect: The Call of the Womb

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Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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I have never been to the festival of hubris and chest-thumping that is the American video games industry’s yearly trade-fair E3 (a.k.a. ‘E Cubed’, a.k.a. ‘Electronic Entertainment Expo’), but the mere thought of it makes me feel somewhat ill. A friend of mine once attended a video game trade fair in Japan. He returned not with talk of games, but of the dozens of overweight middle-aged men who practically came to blows as they jostled for the best angle from which to take up-skirt photographs of the models manning the various booths.

As disturbing and sleazy as this might well sound, it still manages to cast Japanese trade shows in a considerably better light than a lot of the coverage that came out of E3. Every so often, an event or an article will prompt the collection of sick-souled outcasts known as ‘video game journalists’ into a fit of ethical navel-gazing: are their reviews too soft? are their editorial processes too open to commercial pressures? do they allow their fannishness to override their professional integrity? Oddly enough, these periodic bouts of hand-wringing never coincide with E3.

E3 is a principles-free zone as far as video game reporting is concerned: Journalists travel from all over the world to sit in huge conference halls where they are patronised to within an inch of their wretched lives by people from the PR departments of Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony. At a time when cynicism and critical thinking might allow a decent writer to cut through the bullshit and provide some insights into the direction the industry is taking, most games writers choose instead to recycle press releases and gush about games that are usually indistinguishable from the disappointing batch of warmed-over ideas dished out the previous year. At least the creepy Japanese guys had an excuse for wandering around a trade fair doused in sweat and sporting huge hard-ons.

Microsoft Kinect with Xbox 360

Continue reading Microsoft Kinect: The Call of the Womb →

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Auto-origami

Chalk another one up for the MIT ideas factory: ‘programmable matter‘ comprises sheets of composite material “edged by foil actuators – thin, solid-state motors – that contract or expand when they receive an electric current from flexible electronic circuits embedded in the sheets. After they achieve their preprogrammed shape, the sheets are held in place by tiny magnets on the edges of the fold joints.” [via SlashDot]

In other words, it’s automatic origami. Observe!

Clever stuff. I wonder how far up you could scale this phenomenon? It could make Ikea furniture much less of a headache to assemble, for a start… and Cisco’s city-in-a-box could really be supplied in a box.

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Laboratory lungs are go

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Almost exactly a year back, we mentioned that biologists were looking into the possibility of growing simulated lungs to use instead of rats for toxicology testing procedures. Today, The Guardian reports that working prototypes of these cheap and ethical lung analogues are well in hand. (Warning: article includes use of the colloquial “[x]-on-a-chip” buzzphrase which, if you’re anything like me, makes you want to punch kittens and cuss at nice old ladies.)

The work at Harvard will be used mainly for studying the workings of living lung tissue without having to open up people or animals. It could also be used to test the effects of environmental toxins or new drugs.

The lung-on-a-chip could predict how human lungs absorb airborne nanoparticles and mimic the inflammatory response triggered by pathogens, said Donald Ingber, the vascular biologist who led the work at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute.[…] The device was able to replicate many of the natural responses of lung tissue, such as detecting pathogens and speeding up blood flow so that immune cells can deal with the invaders.

And in the rather select category of “news also involving biology, lungs and rats”, a team at Yale has grown new rat lungs and patched them into test subjects, who are reportedly breathing just fine [via SlashDot]:

The team started with decellularized adult rat lungs, which retain the organs’ branching airways and blood vessel network, and added a mixture of lung cells from newborn rats. Niklason says that the crucial step was nurturing the would-be lungs in a bioreactor that circulates fluid—simulating what would happen during fetal development—or air through them. The cells stuck to the scaffold in the right locations and multiplied. After up to 8 days in the bioreactor, they had coalesced into what the researchers’ tests indicated was functional lung tissue.

How long until we can buy off-the-shelf replacement organs? Will they ever be cheaper (or more reliable) than back-street “donor” options sourced from underprivileged populations?