The latest from phyBlog

At the beginning of January a few of my colleagues and I attended CES. We were blown away with how prevalent AI, Machine Learning, millimeter wave, and 5G were at the show. Most of us, in the industry, feel entrenched with the importance of these trendy technologies but we were surprised to see them start to turn to a mainstream audience (consumers). We did notice many of the demonstrations and applications were running on power-hungry X86 systems, cloud compute systems, and custom built silicon. In fact, we rode in a self-driving Lyft and the first thing I noticed was the considerably loud fan noise of whatever machine was in the trunk. One can admire the massive compute power of these systems but at the same time also question their efficiency and physical scalability (scaling down, not up). Many silicon vendors, such as Texas Instruments, are trying to address this concern. Moving intelligence to the ‘Embedded Edge’ allows reduced data transferred over networks, reduced power consumption, distributed, and balanced computing.