My first post from the ARM Blogs about the communities work on free Java a.k.a. OpenJDK is here
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Saturday, April 17, 2010
Monday, September 28, 2009
The best form of flattery
Recently I gave an update presentation to the staff of the ARM San Jose Office on Web 2.0 technologies and why they are important to ARM and what we doing to enable them. I also managed to fit in quick overview of what Augmented Reality is from a mobile perspective and how Web 2.0+ARM will totally change the way in which we look at the world around us.
I was delighted how many people showed up, and as I expected with an audience with such a broad range of skills, the questions ranged from the technical details of what we are doing with JITs to concerns regarding the privacy of Social Networking sites. However it wasn’t until a week later that I got a question which completely stumped me.
My colleague in the next cube said simply: “What do you think of Chrome OS? I’ve tried it out and it seems pretty fast even running in VMWare.”
I was somewhat phased.
He went on: “I downloaded it and tried it at the weekend and it’s really quite fast, but seems just to be a cut down version of Linux with the Chrome Browser stuck on top of it.”
“Er… um. You are running Chrome OS!!! on your Mac in VMware?” I was rather shocked, as I really hadn’t been expecting a preview release to occur without much fanfare and excitement from Google itself. Surely this could not be true? However, here I was being told by a very credible source 6ft from me that he had it up and running.
So like any good researcher I started Googling and discovered that there were in fact a plethora of YouTube Videos and preview versions of Google Chrome OS out there on the Internet. The only problem was they were all FAKE!
And no I am not going to give any of them credence by posting links on this blog.
But surely this must be the first time an OS has warranted such fervent speculation, such desire to part of the buzz and such opportunity to get the last laugh, that people actually go to the length of making not just slide shows and YouTube videos but actual Linux binary distros (if that’s not an oxymoron) of something that has yet see the light of day.
Wow!
I was delighted how many people showed up, and as I expected with an audience with such a broad range of skills, the questions ranged from the technical details of what we are doing with JITs to concerns regarding the privacy of Social Networking sites. However it wasn’t until a week later that I got a question which completely stumped me.
My colleague in the next cube said simply: “What do you think of Chrome OS? I’ve tried it out and it seems pretty fast even running in VMWare.”
I was somewhat phased.
He went on: “I downloaded it and tried it at the weekend and it’s really quite fast, but seems just to be a cut down version of Linux with the Chrome Browser stuck on top of it.”
“Er… um. You are running Chrome OS!!! on your Mac in VMware?” I was rather shocked, as I really hadn’t been expecting a preview release to occur without much fanfare and excitement from Google itself. Surely this could not be true? However, here I was being told by a very credible source 6ft from me that he had it up and running.
So like any good researcher I started Googling and discovered that there were in fact a plethora of YouTube Videos and preview versions of Google Chrome OS out there on the Internet. The only problem was they were all FAKE!
And no I am not going to give any of them credence by posting links on this blog.
But surely this must be the first time an OS has warranted such fervent speculation, such desire to part of the buzz and such opportunity to get the last laugh, that people actually go to the length of making not just slide shows and YouTube videos but actual Linux binary distros (if that’s not an oxymoron) of something that has yet see the light of day.
Wow!
Monday, September 21, 2009
Flash 10 on ARM Powered Devices
I thought this was good overview of why Adobe is focusing so much effort with ARM on getting Flash 10 onto ARM Powered Devices.
And Yes the entire Adobe building really is Energy Star Compliant!
And Yes the entire Adobe building really is Energy Star Compliant!
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Firefox 3.5 ships!
Today saw the release of version 3.5 of the Firefox browser from the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox has been the most popular alternative browser to Internet Explorer (IE) for many years and with this release it pulls significantly ahead of IE both in terms of JavaScript performance and support for HTML 5.0 web standards. I’m personally very excited to see this release as it brings all of these new features to ARM-based devices as well as Intel.
Over the past year we’ve been working with the guys at Mozilla in a couple of areas to enhance the performance of Firefox: In the summer of last year Mozilla announced a new high performance JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey that uses a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler to compile and execute frequently executed JavaScript sequences in the processors native code rather than interpreting it. TraceMonkey uses a code generator called Tamarin to generate the native code and over the past 12 months the guys at ARM have been working to enhance the code it produces for our latest processors. The project is still ongoing and because it is open source it will benefit not only Firefox but other open source projects that use Tamarin such as Adobe Flash.
The other area we’ve been working on is enhancing the performance of the Cairo 2D graphics library which is used by Firefox and some versions of Webkit. Modern day ARM processors contain a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) processor called NEON that lends itself quite well to pixel manipulation and so we have been recoding parts of Cairo’s Pixel Manipulation Library (Pixman) to make use of NEON and improve the performance of web page rendering and the Firefox user interface.
Firefox 3.5 is a big leap in version numbers from 3.0 and big leap in features too. I’ll post more on the enhanced features later this week.
Over the past year we’ve been working with the guys at Mozilla in a couple of areas to enhance the performance of Firefox: In the summer of last year Mozilla announced a new high performance JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey that uses a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler to compile and execute frequently executed JavaScript sequences in the processors native code rather than interpreting it. TraceMonkey uses a code generator called Tamarin to generate the native code and over the past 12 months the guys at ARM have been working to enhance the code it produces for our latest processors. The project is still ongoing and because it is open source it will benefit not only Firefox but other open source projects that use Tamarin such as Adobe Flash.
The other area we’ve been working on is enhancing the performance of the Cairo 2D graphics library which is used by Firefox and some versions of Webkit. Modern day ARM processors contain a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) processor called NEON that lends itself quite well to pixel manipulation and so we have been recoding parts of Cairo’s Pixel Manipulation Library (Pixman) to make use of NEON and improve the performance of web page rendering and the Firefox user interface.
Firefox 3.5 is a big leap in version numbers from 3.0 and big leap in features too. I’ll post more on the enhanced features later this week.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Friday, March 27, 2009
The future is now- Sekai Camera Demo on Tegra
Following on from my post on Sekai Camera this week I went to the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco and got talking to NVidia and the Khronos Group about some of the emerging standards for graphics and Web 2.0. It is really exciting where this stuff is going.
The interesting thing for me is that combining this with other standards such as the BONDI OMTP initiative that allows access to a mobile devices assets and ambience in Web 2.0 applications will help make the whole Sekia Camera experience a (virtual sic) reality on mobile devices in general, rather than just a specialty application that runs on a couple of smartphones. And after all that is what needs to happen. Like any social networking platform this kind of location based social tagging application needs a critical mass of users to be useful and therefore get a user base who contribute to the critical mass of users who... You get the idea.
At the end of our meeting the NVidia chap said "Oh would you like to see demo."
What he showed me blew me away... and here is the same demo on YouTube. See what you think.
The interesting thing for me is that combining this with other standards such as the BONDI OMTP initiative that allows access to a mobile devices assets and ambience in Web 2.0 applications will help make the whole Sekia Camera experience a (virtual sic) reality on mobile devices in general, rather than just a specialty application that runs on a couple of smartphones. And after all that is what needs to happen. Like any social networking platform this kind of location based social tagging application needs a critical mass of users to be useful and therefore get a user base who contribute to the critical mass of users who... You get the idea.
At the end of our meeting the NVidia chap said "Oh would you like to see demo."
What he showed me blew me away... and here is the same demo on YouTube. See what you think.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
The future is now- Sekai Camera
It was one of those moments where I felt humbled. One of the those moments where I realized once again that while I may well live in Silicon Valley, there are indeed many more technologically advanced places on the planet. The moment in question took place on my recent tour of the Far East- I’d been spending the first week of the tour in Japan talking to various companies about Adobe’s Open Screen Project of which ARM is an active member. All-in-all it was well received and there was a lot of enthusiasm around the concept of applications being no longer PC bound, that could scale across multiple devices and allow collaboration via the Cloud. This was also the first week I had started using my iPhone and I had been enthusiastically geotagging my Tweets to allow recipients to see where I was Twittering along with pictures on Twitpic. (If you want to know where you can drink 20 year old coffee in the Ginza check it out).
As the week drew to a close I sat in the office with my Japanese colleague going over all the collateral I had put together over the past year around Web 2.0 technologies on mobile devices. He listened attentively, asking a lot of good questions and I felt I had new convert to my vision of the future Web; a world which will see the collision of multiple technologies from massively multiplayer “serious” gaming, Web n.0, location-based social networking and ambient computing to provide users with a significantly enhanced view of their surroundings through their mobile device. My captive audience of one sighed politely (as the Japanese do so well) and quietly said “Oh, you mean like Sekai Camera?”
“Like what?”
“I think that is what Sekai Camera is doing here in Japan already. It will tag everything and allow you to hold up your iPhone to buildings, objects and people and see additional attributes of them.”
I was stunned and as I have said humbled by this revelation. The technology of Sekai Camera is definitely headed in exactly the direction I have been thinking about, but I hadn’t realized just how far ahead Japan had gotten. Upon reflection a society of over 100 Million people condensed into a relatively small (in US terms) area is the exactly the place where this kind of project can prove itself. America is simply too big and spread out for a pilot, (although Google is certainly doing a good job with more rudimentary technologies around mapping).
Sekai Camera started out targeting the iPhone exclusively, but last week they announced that it would be available on Android as well.
As the week drew to a close I sat in the office with my Japanese colleague going over all the collateral I had put together over the past year around Web 2.0 technologies on mobile devices. He listened attentively, asking a lot of good questions and I felt I had new convert to my vision of the future Web; a world which will see the collision of multiple technologies from massively multiplayer “serious” gaming, Web n.0, location-based social networking and ambient computing to provide users with a significantly enhanced view of their surroundings through their mobile device. My captive audience of one sighed politely (as the Japanese do so well) and quietly said “Oh, you mean like Sekai Camera?”
“Like what?”
“I think that is what Sekai Camera is doing here in Japan already. It will tag everything and allow you to hold up your iPhone to buildings, objects and people and see additional attributes of them.”
I was stunned and as I have said humbled by this revelation. The technology of Sekai Camera is definitely headed in exactly the direction I have been thinking about, but I hadn’t realized just how far ahead Japan had gotten. Upon reflection a society of over 100 Million people condensed into a relatively small (in US terms) area is the exactly the place where this kind of project can prove itself. America is simply too big and spread out for a pilot, (although Google is certainly doing a good job with more rudimentary technologies around mapping).
Sekai Camera started out targeting the iPhone exclusively, but last week they announced that it would be available on Android as well.
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