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The Future of Hardware Is Software

octoml.ai

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Re: The Future of Hardware Is Software

#31

Post by TaylorAlexander »

fxtentacle wrote: post #27
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm building custom electronics for a new type of 3D camera I would love to know more. I am working on an open source farming robot and vision is an important component. Are you able to share more?

We're using the camera for an autonomous toy car racer, so I need reliable and real-time depth estimates. Existing cameras such as the Stereolabs ZED max out at 1080p @ 30 fps and they use rolling shutter which isn't even perfectly hardware-synchronized. Plus those sensors are tiny and, hence, as noisy as a laptop webcam. The result is that the Stereolabs AI needs to be extremely lenient when doing the stereo matchin…

Very cool! Thanks for the details. I love Kicad. I presume your designs are not open source? But I am curious which cameras/sensors you are using, and any other chip specifics you can share.

Re: The Future of Hardware Is Software

#32

Post by fxtentacle »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #31
fxtentacle wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're using the camera for an autonomous toy car racer, so I need reliable and real-time depth estimates. Existing cameras such as the Stereolabs ZED max out at 1080p @ 30 fps and they use rolling shutter which isn't even perfectly hardware-synchronized. Plus those sensors are tiny and, hence, as noisy as a laptop webcam. The result is that the Stereolabs AI needs to be extremely lenient when doing the stereo matchin…

Very cool! Thanks for the details. I love Kicad. I presume your designs are not open source? But I am curious which cameras/sensors you are using, and any other chip specifics you can share.

Sadly, i can't share much there. NDAed Sony sensor with NDAed Infinion FPGA. Manufacturing was interesting because I didn't get export permissions for sending the FPGAs to China for pcb assembly. Eurocircuits got the job done but was kinda slow to work with.

Re: The Future of Hardware Is Software

#33

Post by TaylorAlexander »

fxtentacle wrote: post #32
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool! Thanks for the details. I love Kicad. I presume your designs are not open source? But I am curious which cameras/sensors you are using, and any other chip specifics you can share.

Sadly, i can't share much there. NDAed Sony sensor with NDAed Infinion FPGA. Manufacturing was interesting because I didn't get export permissions for sending the FPGAs to China for pcb assembly. Eurocircuits got the job done but was kinda slow to work with.

Sure I understand. Well best of luck with the project!

Re: The Future of Hardware Is Software

#34

Post by xscott »

aidenn0 wrote: post #28
xscott wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are already DSPs for this purpose I should've been more clear: Most open source projects, or my projects for the customers I used to have, can't/couldn't rely on a DSP chip or card being installed. If Itanium had gone mainstream, I could've counted on it's VLIW instructions. We can /almost/ count on a GPU nowadays, but programming in Cuda ties you to NVidia, and OpenCL doesn't seem to have taken off the same…

> I should've been more clear: Most open source projects, or my projects for the customers I used to have, can't/couldn't rely on a DSP chip or card being installed. If Itanium had gone mainstream, I could've counted on it's VLIW instructions. So to sum up: you can't convince customers to buy special hardware and neither could HP/Intel?

> So to sum up:

I wish it was possible to have a discussion that wasn't about who could get the best zinger in to burn the other person. This isn't Reddit, and you aren't in high school.

Re: The Future of Hardware Is Software

#35

Post by aidenn0 »

xscott wrote: post #34
aidenn0 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I should've been more clear: Most open source projects, or my projects for the customers I used to have, can't/couldn't rely on a DSP chip or card being installed. If Itanium had gone mainstream, I could've counted on it's VLIW instructions. So to sum up: you can't convince customers to buy special hardware and neither could HP/Intel?

> So to sum up: I wish it was possible to have a discussion that wasn't about who could get the best zinger in to burn the other person. This isn't Reddit, and you aren't in high school.

I agree my response was snarky, I disagree it was shit. I wasn't looking for a "sick burn" sort of reaction.

Here's a slightly longer and more boring version of what I posted:

Itanium came out at the tail-end of a long movement from special-purpose to commodity hardware; servers and workstations were moving from 68k/MIPS/Sparc to PC-based hardware. It was a DSP that ran general-purpose loads "okay" when most people were looking for a general-purpose CPU that ran DSP type loads "okay" (i.e. the various SIMD extensions to x86 and POWER).

Anything that starts with "If Itanium had gone mainstream" is a counterfactual. Maybe it would have delayed GPGPU as the performance advantage of programmable shaders over running on CPU would have been smaller and maybe without AMD's competition, it would have allowed Intel to keep bus-speeds lower for longer.

My original point that Itanium was a failure to deliver the hardware people wanted rather than the failure of software to appear on said hardware stands.

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