Because everything we’re doing is open source, you are free to make it perfect yourself. You want to change something? Go right ahead. And when you do, we’re hoping you share your improvement with everyone else so we all benefit. It’s why we call our work community electronics instead of simply consumer electronics. We, Bug Labs, don’t own the keys to your satisfaction, you do. And this, in our humble opinion, is how it should be.

Bug Blogger: Worth a Thousand Words

via Futurismic and TechCrunch

marks another step towards the kind of software-hardware relationship I think needs to develop. Sun’s next generation T2 has also been open sourced and should have a significant impact. There’s also a pdf with design details

.

• IDaSS – Interactive Design and Simulation System
• JOP – Java Optimized Processor
• Hardware Objects

The ability to turn a design drawing into a visualization that mimics reality is an invaluable tool for troubleshooting a design, convincing a nervous client or helping to promote a design firm’s capabilities. This segment of the CAD software industry continues to grow and evolve, with rendered visualizations becoming more sophisticated.

While this trend is indeed a positive one, it is fundamentally constrained by an exclusively designer-centric perspective. This view understandably stems from the historical hardware constraints which made customer/end user access to the CAD data prohibitively expensive. However, as can be seen in the high end, proprietary CAD/PLM offerings of Dassault, this tradeoff is not an inherent requirement. In a rhythmeering environment integration is needed for manufacturing, maintenance, supply chain, marketing analysis – throughout the complete product lifecycle. In order to achieve this level of deep integration, the underlying information models for CAD have to become features of the operating system and eventually the hardware. Open source platforms like Croquet point the way.

… virtualization technologies should be pushed down further into the iron and sold in volume. In short, there should be some way to make these technologies a low-cost part of the system, … it should be made in an on-demand fashion, activated with a key for a nominal fee, complete with physical-to-virtual conversion tools and virtual-to-physical tools to undo the virtualization if customers decide to do that, too.

The Unix Guardian: Virtualization belongs in the system, not in the software

The effect of free, hardware based virtualization which is automatically there would make for very interesting x86 servers. Even more so with a few on-board, fully virtualized, multi-fabric I/O channels. Kind a baby mainframe.

Maybe it’s a crazy idea. Maybe its a vision of the future of computing.

Is this a crazy idea?

Now, in the aftermath of the VMWare IPO, we’re seeing it unfold.

“With virtualization, where you can run any operating system on top, it seems a lot more logical that it would be effectively a layer sitting on top of a server,” said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. “Why wouldn’t it be supplied with the server?”

XenSource announced XenExpress OEM Edition last week, and market leader VMware this week is announcing VMware ESX Server 3i at its VMworld conference. The products run from flash memory built into a server instead of being installed on the hard drive.

The embedded versions aren’t just a fantasy. VMware has partnerships with IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Network Appliance. “We expect them to begin integrating ESX Server 3i into their servers later this year or early next,” a VMware representative said.

The move has strategic importance in these relatively early days of virtualization, elevating the profile of virtualization specialists’ products. Getting a foot in the door could help the virtualization specialists get a foot in the doors of customers who might be interested in higher-level products to manage the increasingly sophisticated computing infrastructure that can be built atop virtual machines.

Virtualization has been around for decades, but its inclusion in mainstream computers with x86 chips is bringing it out of the shadows. And the money is following.

Virtualization: A feature of the hardware, not the OS? | CNET News.com

There are a number of trends interrelated to this many of which are growing exponentially. Kansas has left the building.

“We have the view that we have to become a software company,”

Cisco CEO John Chambers at the Networkers Conference via PC World

In our bodies ice is non-existent. Throughout the ecosystems we typically frequent each day, liquid water is more abundant and useful than ice. The same should be true of software and hardware but today’s hardware dominates the information ecosystem. This prematurely crystallized software frequently serves as an impediment to innovation.

Hardware is really just software crystallized early. It is there to make program schemes run as efficiently as possible. But far too often the hardware has been presented as a given and it is up to software designers to make it appear reasonable. This has caused low-level techniques and excessive optimization to hold back progress in program design. … In short, most hardware designs today are just re-optimizations of moribund architectures.

Alan Kay: The Early History of Smalltalk

The software that best serves human interests needs to change rapidly. From individuals to Google, new code shows up on the Internet daily, but the pace of innovation is throttled by the slower changes in operating systems which in turn are constrained by horribly inflexible hardware designed independently of the software. We are not confined to speculation regarding alternatives since as far back as 1961, Burroughs computers provided competitive, software driven hardware architectures:

The B5000 was revolutionary at the time in that the architecture and instruction set were designed with the needs of software taken into consideration. This was a large departure from the computer system design of the time, where a processor and its instruction set would be designed and then handed over to the software people.

Wikipedia: Burroughs Large Systems

While it never dominated the marketplace(a topic for another entry), this architecture remains viable and competitive within it’s niche to this day with the Unisys ClearPath mainframe computers. In addition, the B5000 influenced the emergence of the personal computer at Xerox in 70′s, inspiring a much more fluid, organic approach to systems architecture:

Instead of trying to build the complex artifacts from
scratch—like trying to build living things cell by cell—many of
the most important projects built a kernel that could grow the artifact as new knowledge was gained—that is: get one cell’s DNA in good shape and let it help grow the whole system.

For example: Chuck’s beautiful and parsimonious architecture
for the Alto allowed most functions that were normally frozen in hardware to be re-microcoded at will as new ideas came forth, without requiring the low-level HW to be redesigned and built.

Alan Kay: The Power of the Context(emphasis mine)

The chips that have and continue to power PCs are general purpose devices whose capabilities are etched in silicon and cannot be modified to address new needs. Traditionally, the rationale for this has been economic. Chips are expensive to design and fabricate so they have to serve a broad spectrum of needs in order for vendors to be able to produce a large enough volume to recoup development costs. For many products where requirements can be predetermined, application-specific chips(ASIC) offer higher performance and/or lower cost. However, ASICs are just as inflexible as general purpose chips. Moreover, this economic rationale represents stale, industrial era thought. It overlooks the high costs of brittle designs, longer production introduction times, less engaging products and lost opportunities, Fortunately, change is underway. After 20 years more flexible hardware such as the Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA) is finding it’s way into broader use. The capabilities of an FPGA chip can be modified after its creation to meet new needs. Previously FPGA usage tended to focus on very specific kinds of tasks but more general purpose applications have been emerging. One approach is a hybrid design in which FPGAs work in tandem with general purpose chips. Cray’s XD1 supercomputer was:

Designed from the outset to incorporate the FPGAs, the Cray XD1 system tightly integrates FPGAs through hardware, operating system and communications management software.

Application Acceleration with FPGA-based Reconfigurable Computing

Similarly, Intel competitor AMD’s Opteron chips can be customized with FPGA co-processors. This shift is a good one but more is needed for individuals, organizations and society at large faced with the challenges of the emerging meshverse. For a human-centric future, we need more software and less hardware – the Machine should be like us – lots of water, no ice.

Innovative
We create breakthrough solutions for silicon technology and business processes that result in product successes for our customers.
Innovation can happen in a more predictable manner than invention, with a shorter time-to-profit
Key components of innovation are motivated people plus an open environment
Our ability to innovate is tested daily by our customers

Collaborative
People are the foundation of our organization. We empower teams to be business owners, foster boundary-less organizations, and embrace diversity. We enjoy working in partnerships, both internally and externally.
Working together toward collective goals
Being a “team player”
Working with customers and for customers to achieve optimal solutions

Agile
We are quick, resourceful, and adaptable; completely focused on meeting customer needs. We do this by:
Listening to customers and doing our best to meet their needs
Being flexible in business negotiations to create mutually beneficial partnerships between Jazz and its customers
Thinking “outside the box” to arrive at creative solutions for our customers, their end products, and their design needs

This synergy isn’t surprising given the close relationship between hardware I recently posted on in The Roots of Hardware. Wozniak, the hardware genius behind the original Apple computer appears to be very involved, holding three positions:

• Executive Vice President
• Chief Technical Officer
• Chief Visionary Officer

Very interesting given the musical relationship between the counterculture of the 1960′s and technology – Apple was born out of that counterculture .
Jazz

Wozniak

Apple