If you take a look at all the data companies online with an app like Ookla Speed Test to see what websites are trending you might notice something that goes beyond the basic surface scope of e-commerce popular websites like Amazon.com, Alibaba.com, Ebay.com, Google.com, Apple.com, its a departure from Von Neumann computational architectures to convolutional neural networks on custom CMOS FPGP trained neural networks.
Consider the scope of CCD to CMOS image sensor development. In the former case of the CCD or charge coupled device, you have a rectangular array of photo sensitive capacitors which register voltage as photons hit these charged pixel sensors in the CCD. The logic then measures changes to the cells in the CCD to determine the color & intensity of the light hitting the sensor. This not very energy efficient because the CCD contains very little if any information processing power & basically a dumb sensor that just produces a stream of electrical signals that software can then assemble through custom gate logic into imaging at different frame rates.
In portable electronics the CCD never did well because they are energy intensive because of the need to actively energize all the CCD pixels. CMOS offered lower imaging performance at first, but as the technology improved CMOS gave the advantage of computational image processing in the imaging chip, such that a lot of the information processing required to turn the raw sensor data into a image file can be done in a massively parallel fashion like RISC GPU random X mining later supplanted by application specific ASIC compute that's massively more efficient with radically higher performance. In a cell phone analogy, CCD was the Feature Phone while CMOS was the smartphone equivalent.
So why does imaging matter anyway? Pictures are for the living & help big corporations sell large quantities of goods & services by performing mental inception using branding images with logos and names that have aspirational meaning through experience that often transcends the function of the product or service. Consider a luxury mechanical wristwatch that is less accurate with time than a cheap digital quarts plastic sport watch, that wearing it as a status symbol or for enjoyment or entertainment has more to do with a person's subjective appreciation for it. Few young children are able to appreciate what makes a Rolex Submariner or the Omega Seamaster special as mechanical automatic wristwatches.
TPU and Neuromorphic Compute
Trillions of operations per second in a smartphone. Camera's being the big app such that newer smartphones like the iPhone 14 line from Apple have large fractions of the SOC dedicated to computational photography such that the latest iPhones cameras have features and functions well beyond what is possible using the Sony BSI CMOS "complementary metal oxide semiconductor" actions. This means that iPhones can captures still images & video with superlative image quality, improved faster autofocus & subject tracking, artificial focus to accurately produce shallow depth of field portraits with tasty, elegant, blurred backgrounds.
Tensor Flow
When a large Alphabet Inc. company with a powerful product like Google Search wants to vertically integrate the development of software and hardware, this produces products like Tesla Autopilot that uses imaging sensors to identify pedestrians, road demarcation lane lines, stop signs, other vehicles, bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, pets and animals & many other objects or subjects that can spontaneously and unpredictably appear Infront of a moving vehicle. Consider how many fatal vehicle accidents there are every day worldwide.
We cant even making flushing toilets for 8 billion people, but we can bake a rolling data center in the latest Tesla Model battery electric car or SUV, automobiles popular in car crazy America where public transportation offers a slower less effective alternative than driving your own car, cars which often sit unused 90% of the time while the person working, sleeping, shopping, cooking, paying bills, making deals, trading, recycling, playing sports, hiking, working out, planning, reading, or any of the other activities that people regularly do. Tensor Flow a bunch of software tools from Google to allow you or anyone else to develop AI applications to improve your productivity or performance. This can enable you to make your company more profitable & improve customer service & customer experiences.
TSMC been deep 5nm EUV baking neuromorphic compute cores into Apple SOC since A11 back then! The latest iPhone 14 can make L & S band n52 contact to a constellation of Globalstar Inc satellites for Emergency SOS messaging where no other wireless services are available, like on the side of a stratovolcano where you might be hiking & become stranded because of a landslide or similar natural hazard or disaster like volcanic eruption & lahar flow of magma & trees & massive amounts of hot gas & soot & ash. QUALCOMM's latest 6nm 5G NR transceiver in the iPhone 14 so high performance that an oval plastic cutout on the right side of the phone covered with a plastic required, since the antenna lines and other RF features in the frame were not sufficient to support ultra energy efficient sub 6G beam steering or synthetic aperture beam control of the wireless to enable the iPhone 14 onward to connect to space satellites without a large clunky antenna.
V100 from NVIDIA
Bitcoin Mining on the latest Butterfly Labs ASIC rigs
Vehicle autopilot development
Customer analytics for enhanced sales & marketing
Rapid mass media brand programming of the public
Manipulating political systems & elections
Controlling currencies and stocks
Developing cures to common diseases with better biologics
Improving diagnostics in medicine to help figure out what is wrong with the presenting patient in the ER faster with greater accuracy and more effective treatments & better patient outcomes.
Improving education & healthcare
Lowering housing prices & making cleaner energy cheaper
Phasing out climate changing acid rain air toxic brown energy like coal power, diesel & gasoline & other carbon combustion technologies and energy legacy
Radically improving energy storage technologies
Radically disruptive battery commercialization
New and improved ways of doing all human activities
What we see echoing in these consumer electronics a reflection of the magic happening behind our eyes, the same eyes we use to watch YouTube videos that other peoples children are making with their latest Samsung or Apple smartphone as the camera. Besides, the most powerful camera is the one you have with you and since everyone seems to be carrying a newer smartphone, the smartphone imaging system reigns supreme as the big DATA app deluxe.
No comments:
Post a Comment