Category Archives: Hardware

Eyeglasses: Extraordinary Ordinary Things

Ubiquity is dedicated to helping professionals and informed laymen better imagine and understand the future of computing. Extraordinary Ordinary Things (EOT) is dedicated to bringing to mind truly world-transforming things that have become so embedded in daily life that we scarcely even notice them. These two ideas may seem rather far apart, if not incongruous. In reality, they are quite close together, almost like conjoined twins. Computers today underly virtually everything that makes up the modern world, directly, but most often indirectly, by how they permit commercial, cultural, and scientific ideas to be converted into life-altering products and services. Extraordinary!

If you don’t have to wear eyeglasses, chances are you don’t fully realize the panic some people feel when they mislay them or leave them somewhere with little chance of recovering them. I know, because I have worn eyeglasses since the age of 10 to compensate for a serious case of myopia (U.K. = short-sightedness; U.S. = near-sightedness). Without my eyeglasses, I would be virtually helpless. Likewise for people with presbyopia (U.K. = long-sightedness; U.S. = far-sightedness).

Continue reading Eyeglasses: Extraordinary Ordinary Things

The 50-year Inflection Point

A strategic inflection point is a time in the life of business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end.

—Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive (1988)

In the late 1960s Intel sniffed the winds of change and made a dramatic decision to build microprocessors instead of random access memory, RAM. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove describes this abrupt change in Intel’s strategy as an inflection point. As we know from mathematics, the coordinates of an inflection point are where a curve changes direction—typically from up to down or the reverse. In the case of young Intel, the RAM business was no longer profitable, and yet, the profitability of microprocessor chips was totally unknown. It was a choice between dying along with the RAM market or possibly dying with an unproven product in a non-existent market. We now know Grove was right, but he could have been wrong. Such is the life of an entrepreneur.

It has been 50 years since Intel’s inflection point was recognized and then mostly forgotten. But the company and the industry it grew up with is facing another inflection point—the demise of Dennard scaling—the 1974 rule that the power consumption of CMOS chips remains constant as transistors are scaled down in size. Continue reading The 50-year Inflection Point

Is Computing in Reverse the Next Big Thing?

As Moore’s Law runs out of steam, and fabrication of Boolean circuits on silicon appears to be reaching its limits, some computer scientists and physicists are looking beyond the limits of current computing to “reversible computing.” That is, instead of one-way circuits that produce a deterministic output from given inputs, reversible computing works both ways: Inputs can be obtained from outputs by running the circuits in reverse. Generally speaking, computation runs in one direction, producing outputs from inputs, without the ability to run backwards and compute inputs from outputs. Continue reading Is Computing in Reverse the Next Big Thing?

Imitators and Innovators Adopt RISC

2015 marks 40 years since John Cocke of IBM Research introduced the idea of a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) to the world. It has been a long road, but today RISC architecture computer systems dominate the mobile computing landscape. More than 50 billion processors have been delivered to consumers through the purchase of products ranging from TV set-top boxes, tablets, and most significantly, cell phones. RISC is an overnight success story that took 40 years to be realized. Continue reading Imitators and Innovators Adopt RISC