Geek talk: The future of computing: Embedded Systems

Well, let's talk like a geek for a while. You can skip reading this post if you are bored by the topic already.

The future of computing.
Everyone keeps saying their PC is not fast enough. ppl always want faster computer. But the fact is: we wont have anything a lot faster than 3GHz in the near future. So, wut can we do to build more powerful computers? The simple solution: multi-core computing. In a talk from an MIT professor in the multi-core conference, he stressed that it's unavoidable to have more complex, high density systems built into a single silicon chip. Having more stuff on the chip can directly translate to having more work done from the increased processing power.

But then, the next question comes: wut do you wanna put on the chip? You dont wanna put the same thing over and over again on the single chip. You want a chip to have multiple functions, that's when embedded system comes into play as pointed out in this article from the EE times. Using embedded systems like NIOS from Altera, complex systems can be put together a lot easier since embedded software can be written and programmed into the system for controlling, debugging, and changing the functionality of different cores on the circuit on the fly, providing huge flexibility and reducing the development time for the system.

I kinda of love and hate this software-hardware development platform at the same time. I love it becuz it's just so freaking easy to just write a software program, and dump it into the embedded system for anything u wanna do. The reason for hating it? It's hard to incorporate exact timing constraints when the software needs to interact with other dedicated hardware components on the chip. These reasons are from my direct experience on working to build an MP3 player using dedicated hardware, while using NIOS to control the data transmission between the core and other peripherals.

In the future, due to the rise of smart home and fancy mobile devices, I forsee that all the resource intensive jobs will be run on clustered PCs embedded in homes and offices, while the mobile devices are used as interfaces to the computing resources. In this case, battery power on the handheld devices can last longer, while computing resourses can be utilized more efficiently.

Just imagine: the power of super computers all around you, and available on your fingertip! Wont you just love that?