Blog archives for April, 2005

Viacom launches podcast-only radiostation

Figuring out it couldn’t get any worse, Viacom is turning an underperforming talk radio station in San Francisco into podcasting central. KYOU Radio performed so poorly in the ratings that it would not even show up on the official Arbitron radio rankings for the city of San Francisco. Now the Web site of the station owned by $56.5 billion corporation features a hip young look and claims to be the Open Source Radio. Visitors can upload the podcasts of their own in MP3, AIFF, AVI or WMA formats (no OGG support by someone who’s so accepting of open source).

Nuclear fusion discovered

Both USA Today and The New York Times are reporting on research group from UCLA led by Seth J. Putterman discovering nuclear fusion. The impact of the discovery?

While the device is probably too inefficient to produce electricity or other forms of energy, the scientists say, egg-size fusion generators could someday find uses in spacecraft thrusters, medical treatments and scanners that search for bombs.

The findings are published in Nature magazine.

A humble home theater system for do-it-yourself types

Steve’s Home Theater is a site dedicated to building one nice home theater. Steve Jenkins carefully notes the equipment used, as well as lists software and components used to build the system. The theater took 18 months to complete.

Cell microprocessor architecture

David Wang from Real World Tech provides a very detailed overview of Cell microprocessor architecture:

The fundamental task of a processor is to manage the flow of data through its computational units. However in the past two decades, each successive generation of processors for personal computers has added more transistors dedicated to increasing the performance of spaghetti-like integer code. For example, it is well known that typical integer codes are branchy and that branch mispredict penalties are expensive; in an effort to minimize the impact of branch instructions, transistors were used to develop highly accurate branch predictors. Aside from branch predictors, sophisticated cache hierarchies with large tag arrays and predictive cache prefetch units attempt to hide the complexity of data movement from the software, and further increase the performance of single threaded applications. The pursuit of single threaded performance can be observed in recent years in the proposal of extraordinarily deeply pipelined processors designed primarily to increase the performance of single threaded applications, at the cost of higher power consumption and larger transistor budgets. The fundamental idea of the CELL processor project is to reverse this trend and give up the pursuit of single threaded performance, in favor of allocating additional hardware resources to perform parallel computations. That is, minimal resources are devoted toward the execution of single threaded workloads, so that multiple DSP-like processing elements can be added to perform more parallelizable multimedia-type computations. In the examination of the first implementation of the CELL processor, the theme of the shift in focus from the pursuit of single threaded integer performance to the pursuit of multiply threaded, easily parallelizable multimedia-type performance is repeated throughout.