Life by bits & numbers
Very energizing and inspiring video about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor with the Adreno GPU. Wide deployment of the SnapDragon processors (including in the new iPhone 4S) makes it so more attractive to develop for.
If you are a game developer watch the video and get inspired!
Click to view in the full post
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So I just heard about the upcoming “contracts” concept for future versions of Microsoft products (the contracts will probably get propagated at least partially into virtually all Microsoft products like Windows Phone, XBox, Tablet OS versions etc). The general idea seems to be that various applications will be able to share data and communicate otherwise not really disclosing too much about their functionality.
It is exciting news yeah, but why does it so painfully reminds me of Android “intents” system? To me it is exactly the same. Although some sources say it has some ideas similar to what former Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s proposed as the “universal clipboard” concept — dating back to 2006. I still find it hard to see how this is different from Android’s intents system. It would be interesting to watch who sues who over that if at all. The huge piles of patents Google and Microsoft have do not make much sense to go to war over this.
It is interesting though to see how one of the most important features/ideas of Android OS gets propagated into other operating systems.
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Using the latest version of Google Goggles on Android, you can automatically solve Sudoku. This is what a little creativity paired with technology does – it brings fun and innovation!
Check out the video of this in action!
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I needed recently to basically remove my app installation from the Windows Phone 7 emulator. I could not find how you can remove the app from the emulator, but I found a way to reset and force the Windows Phone 7 emulator to cold boot.
You can clear the windows phone emulator state, by deleting the saved state file in:
%ProgramData%\Microsoft\XDE\*.dess
You can just hit the windows key on your keyboard and paste this “%ProgramData%\Microsoft\XDE\” and you will be taken to the right location.
Delete the *.dess files. This will force the emulator to reset and run the cold boot sequence.
Too bad, it’s not possible to do simulator reset right from the development tools. Here’s hoping that Windows Phone Tools development team will improve that situation in the future releases.
Please share your thought in comments.
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It seems that GPU computing is becoming more and more ubiquitous. Tools are becoming better and better, the applications are becoming wider and wider and the hardware is becoming faster and faster too.
CPU are steadily gaining in productivity. It’s a steadily rising curve. Is it good news though? Depends how you look at it. It’s good that the speeds and efficiency are improving, but apparently CPUs are improving much slower than GPUs. GPUs computational power for suitable problems (like number crunching) was apriory much higher to start with, but what’s really important is that GPUs are moving much faster i.e. the curve of the speedup is much sharper than that of CPUs.
For about $500 you can get the Nvidia GTX 480 right now with 400+ cores and super fast memory. GPUs in general also require much less space and power and thus are in general much more efficient for heavy number crunching computations than CPUs. Of course GPUs are quite limited in their capabilities and are really suitable for specific tasks, but there are more and more areas where people are starting to employ the power of highly parallel GPU computing with lightweight threads.
There is another caveat with GPU – it’s the slow bus connection. The bus is too slow for the speeds of GPU and there is nothing you can do about it at the moment. One thing that can be done since GPU has so much computing power in parallel, is to compress the data that is passed between the GPU and the rest of the system. 1 to 10 ratio is the standard compression ratio of text, so you can increase the throughput of the bus by a factor of 10 using compression. Of course there is still some overhead and you should make an experiment and see whether this is beneficial in your setup.
Overall though, it seems pretty exciting area at the moment and the true technoratis should definitely pay attention to that area.
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