EETimes.com has a fairly entertaining and interesting read titled “How to keep engineers happy.” Why is it entertaining? For one, while some of the quotes seem right on, a few are questionable at best and a few others promote old and mostly ineffective management doctrines. Take, for example, the following quote by Andrew Iserson that is mentioned in the article: “Most workers would rather not change jobs,” unless influenced by external factors. A terrible generalization by any means, but especially inaccurate when applied to younger workers that have graduated in the last ten years or so. Most young engineers that I have encountered in my career don’t see any problems changing companies. As a matter of fact, the majority views changing companies as one of the best ways to obtain a significant salary boost, gain new skills as well as experience, and to broaden their professional network. This is especially true for engineers that are not tied down by families or are located in booming economies.  Furthermore, many younger engineers have witnessed major semiconductor companies cut down on pension plans and other benefits, at a time when startup companies in related fields such as computer-science and bio-engineering were luring workers with significant perks, thus further decreasing employee loyalty. This leads directly to one of the major points that the article fails to address: nobody wants to work for a “cheap” company. There is a proper time and place for cost-cutting, but if a company’s major plan for increasing profits is cost-cutting of office supplies and coffee stirrers, and not a good strategic roadmap for future products, the company should really not be surprised if their top talent decides to jump ship. Anyhow, be sure to check out the charts that accompany the article as well, since they yield some interesting information about general hiring practices.

Companies, such as Sun and HP, seem to have tried many times before to get rid of office PCs by replacing them with thin clients whose sole purpose was to connect to the datacenter that hosted all the necessary applications, and server them to employees. Well, most of the initial experiments in this area don’t seem to have worked out very well, given the fact that the majority of office cubicles still host a PC or its equivalent; however, a startup called Taradici out of Vancouver, Canada hopes to change this in the near future.  Other than the fact that the company name sounds more like an Italian restaurant than anything else, the technology that Teradici has developed seems rather interesting. The idea behind the company is that through the use of specialized image-processing algorithms, in combination with a custom silicon implementation, the above mentioned concept will finally be realized. The image below, taken from their website, gives a nice little illustration about how this is going to work:

Teradici claims several major advantages, including: patented display compression and propagation over networks, hardware bridging for peripherals and audio, wire-speed encryption of all data traffic, and complete operating system independence. Additionally, due to the proprietary image data handling, the theoretical distance between the portal and the host can be extended by several orders of magnitude. All the above is implemented through a custom chipset, implemented in 130nm,  that comprises the TERA1100 PC-over-IP Portal Processor and the TERA1200 PC-over-IP Host Processor. The TERA portal as shown in the image above, consumes only 15W of power, which is significantly less than a standard desktop. But what about companies that give their employees laptops instead of desktops? Laptops already consume significantly less power, and using VNC or similar software, a datacenter hosting applications can be reached without a problem. Will Teradici be able to convince employers that their TERA portal is a better solution? This leads to an interesting questions: could an even lower power version of the TERA1100 processor be developed to be integrated into notebooks? This would enable employees to work better remotely because of the reduced application lag that is commonly associated with VNC over VPN connections. Further, security could also be improved because of the integrated encryption, and all this while leaving the workforce nice and mobile at the same time.

There were several announcements and articles during Intel’s developer Forum in Beijing in April regarding FPGA-FSB; however, it seems the excitement seems to have settled since then. This frankly is a little puzzling, considering the fact that Intel is allowing for others to use their FSB to communicate with the rest of the systems, which seems rather exciting. Usually, the barrier to entry for developing high-performance components to work with the rest of the system was pretty high. One could either opt to develop an entire board that would plug into one of the existing slot on the motherboard, or one could go the external route and interface through one of the external connectors. But for really high-performance computing, neither of the beforehand mentioned solutions was really a good answer. With this new plug-in possibility, a company only needs to obtain one of the socket compatible FPGA chips and then they can develop from there. The FPGA already contains all the functionality to connect with the Intel FSB, so the developers can focus on the actual co-processing they want to provide, and on the software which will take advantage of it. While the barrier to entry is still not as low as that for internet applications and a dot-com style gold rush is not to be expected, potentially several new startups could emerge that could take advantage of the fact that any new hardware designs they might conceive off could be prototyped and interacting with the rest of the systems in a rather short time. The idea itself of having an FSB compatible FPGA chip is not exactly new, a company called DRC Computer has been providing such chips for multi-way AMD Opteron systems now for over a year; however, Intel’s adoption of the concept has significantly expanded the market for potential startups.