A 60 GHz phased array for $10
hscott.net
hscott.net
Meanwhile, some Google engineer realized you could solve 90% of phone-to-TV streaming applications and 100% of the hard technical problems by just telling the TV to download and display the YouTube video itself. Genius!
Any real-time or interactive display will need to be able to stream at sub-frame latencies. At 60fps that means less than 16ms, at VR friendly refresh rates ~90fps that means 11ms.
While their approach works beautifully for their core competencies, static and non-interactive streaming content, it doesn't really work for any other application.
The limitation on speed there was the ISPs insane peering scheme - Orange Poland is a dinosaur so everything cross network (that does not pay their scalper peering rates) got routed out of country and back.
Certainly the concerns and dynamics of the situation are different now than in the 70s and 80s, but some of the thought processes are the same. People want to stream video games because they don't have $2000 up front to lay out on a gaming PC. Streaming lets them pay $5 a month instead, and unlike credit, there is no commitment. That's valuable. Greed is another reason for the cloud. There is no reason why someone should pay $10 per month for Photoshop, but since it's the only option, people do. That's free money for Adobe's shareholders.
I can see why people try to poo-pooh this stuff; computing is built on hobbyist experimentation, and the cloud takes all that away. You can't write your own video game. You can't tweak settings, or make mods. You just get a game that someone else made. But from a technical standpoint, streaming stuff is probably going to work. I have less than 1ms ping to a nearby datacenter (speed of light distance: 8 microseconds), and so do 10 million of my neighbors, so it's probably quite profitable to have a collection of high-density GPUs and CPUs rendering games for a few peak hours a day and then training machine learning models outside those hours. The technical challenges are minimal; the idea has been around for 50 years. The actual challenge is getting the people who own the cables in the ground between your house and that datacenter to actually switch packets quickly enough to make it all work. When you were connecting a mainframe in the basement to terminals upstairs, you made it work because it was your job. But now, one company owns all the cables and another wants to make content to send over those cables, and the incentives no longer align. Sure, Spectrum COULD update their core routers... but they could also not do that, and then your video game streaming service is dead. (Meanwhile, they dream of showing up and making their own video game streaming service. They have as much time as they want, because they own the cables!)
Airplay: 2010
Miracast: 2012
Google Cast/ChromeCast: 2013
A renderer is a device that receives commands to go pull some media from somewhere and start playing it. And that can include video.
So the concept has been around a long time.
I also remember in 2008 hearing about how RFID would soon be ubiquitous on consumer products like UPCs and you could just load up a cart with groceries and walk out the door without scanning anything. That one may actually pan out, but it is much later than it was supposed to be.
holographic displays would use eye trackers to show each eye a different image. Solid state zoom is maybe a bit of a stretch, but it would involve pixels becoming sensitive to angles more inward or outward from the sensor's center.
Phased arrays admittedly use the wave theory in a way which is geometrically simple. Maybe "far field" is the way to describe it.
There are practical problems with the technology though, as light sources we can currently make have some minimum size limitations, and incoherent optical behavior starts to degrade at very small lens size (at or below micron scale I guess).
[1] You could probably create a good approximate phased array optics with led-scale (~ 10 micron scale) coherent lasers as light sources, but again I don't see any application that's not scientific
Perhaps actual phased array optics wouldn't have that issue?
For those just entering this thread, [1] is an example of a rudimentary microlens array display.
This is one thing that really pisses me off. Time and time again you've got small(ish) companies doing interesting stuff, succeeding and then they step on a landline. They do something that gets them in the cross hairs of a big company and suddenly BOOM big company buys small company for ridiculous money and then inexplicably shuts down 90% of what the small company was doing. The sale happens for a nice premium and yet the second the sale is closed 90% of the things that the company did that made it valuable are jettisoned. How can it be that these companies can afford to buy companies at a premium, throw away massive parts of the value of the company and yet: this obvious value destruction seems to be standard operating procedure for large companies.
It is not a matter of a blacksmith hanging up their hammer but boardrooms playing wealth games. I wouldn't shed any tears for restrictions and obligations on the actions put on the latter.
It's almost like the lack of robust anti-trust prosecution by world governments have so enriched large, rent-seeking companies that they can literally afford to burn money and still come out ahead...
what's the old saw? "now we're just haggling over the price"...
IIRC Zuckerberg had the option to relinquish control of his company but other than taking that sweet sweet In-Q-Tel dollar still did his best to stay at the helm.
Good luck solving that problem. (Honestly, I wish good luck to anyone trying to solve it. Corporate tax is fucked.)
What should be more surprising though is how e.g. Google has ties to USG (through Schmidt) but can still escape harsher taxation. At the same time – maybe that's why they can escape harsher taxation... because USG benefits by other means.
The issue isn't large amounts of money. The issue is large amounts of idle money.
The only way to make your money useless is to hold cash since it's designed to decrease in value over time. Pretty much everything else is promoting some kind of innovation/growth.
The point is that the way banks or other consolidated funds allocate this funding to corporate accounts, can be either inefficient or misanthropic if you take a certain stance toward innovation, namely that innovation isn't quite the same as rent capture and should be more than just efficiency for existing processes.
Share price can decouple from the actual profitability of a corporation which gives the bank the option of either selling or providing a cash injection if the corporation risks solvency. And then if they run out of everyone else's cash they can ask the Fed to print more just so that they can continue the cycle of ownership for that corporation.
But all that does for the economy on a whole is (a) raise the total rate of inflation for everyone, including people who aren't invested in the bank and (b) consolidate more and more assets into the holdings of these banks, and by association the actual wealth (while not actually creating anything that can give you more money than you put into it, otherwise you wouldn't need the cash injection).
This is what 2008 gave us: a feedback loop where more growth of non-profitable companies needs more inflation, and more inflation requires more growth from your holdings.
If Uber and Amazon are anything to go off of this strategy is actually preferred, probably due to the thesis that "software can eat the world" and you ought to lose as much cash as possible to "innovate" new interfaces to commodity industries at any cost, which essentially optimizes existing supply chains instead of finding use for novel technological capabilities.
Maybe I have the wrong idea that innovation and profitability go hand in hand? Or that the tech industry should be about tech?
This doesn't have anything to do with the Reserve but it's still an illustrative example: we've been here with WeWork where the business failed and yet the CEO was rewarded billions of dollars on exit. Who knows what he intends to do with that money now as a failed innovator. In hindsight maybe the reason that Adam was given such a large exit package was because of how he facilitated one of the fastest foreign asset takeovers of the last 40-50 years?
We've seen so much wastage from the prevailing financial model in SV tech.
In this specific case I guess we don't know the full picture of what Lattice Semiconductor intends to do, but there are many examples in software of startups getting acquihired and then the team dissolving into new projects that are more familiar or closely aligned with the pre-existing business model of the company.
Since it's always possible to just turn the startup into a subsidiary I'm sometimes confused as to why this happens, unless if it's an issue of maybe brand dilution or the market opportunity being too small to be worth the overhead of keeping a separate entity tied to a larger one. Which is a part of why more opportunities for low-growth or long-tail companies would be important, since now in the case where the means for bringing the IP to the market are eliminated no one gets anything at all.
If you are demonstrably developing a piece of technology, kudos. It's yours, you bought its owner.
If you are not doing anything with it, you're required to offer FRAND license terms to anyone interested in the technology.
Would at least make the tech available that's currently getting tossed in a corporate closet in the basement.
So a bit of a red herring.
If it were valuable they wouldn't be jettisoned
The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf. They do a sketchy reduction to an extremely stylized model of the market from the knapsack problem and 3-SAT.
https://www.amazon.com/Efficiently-Inefficient-Invests-Marke...
The EMH does not imply that any particular market is efficient, and if the market isn't efficient, the EMH doesn't apply.
Lots of people do appear to assume the axiom "All markets are efficient", but that is plainly incorrect.
I think at that point, the burden is on the company to prove its value.
Maybe a dumb question, but how is it even possible to do SDR with 60GHz signal on a ~4GHz CPU via a 5Gbps USB3 connection?
EDIT: I guess via down-conversion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_down_converter
Or, do what old computer architectures did when their CPUs were slower than their DACs: add a Programmable Interval Timer (i.e. a very simple synthesizer) in between, such that you just send a few commands and it adds together some 60GHz triangle and square waves to achieve the signal shape you want. Maybe even add a sequencer, and then stream it some 60GHz MIDI files!
TX/RX rates are thus independent to the carrier frequency. Only local oscillator must to be able to be configured to the correct carrier frequency.
https://techdocs.altium.com/display/FPGA/NEC+Infrared+Transm...
That explains how close together the antennas are - close enough compared to wavelength to be able to beamform.
Edit: also explains why it would be extremely difficult to build something yourself at 60GHz - where every wire needs length to be matched to submillimeter length, and a submillimeter tail acts as an antenna and as an electronic component.
It still gets me the level of miniaturization that happens when you come back to an idea 20 years later, instead of watching the incremental changes along the way.
It sounds like it would be very suitable for a VR headset.
In the parent's case, 20ms latency from movement to visible motion is part of the pipeline that:
- reads input
- evaluates solution
- returns solution to your screen
All kinds of things add to this latency: polling frequency of your input device, bus speed of the device, how fast you can update the world, how fast you can render the update, how quickly that updated image can be sent to the screen, how quickly the screen is able to turn this into visible light. etc.
EDIT: To clarify what I meant, HMDs typically use techniques like ATW/ASW/etc (link posted by Rebelgecko) to do just-in-time correction of the rendered image. The end-to-end motion-to-photon latency of the entire pipeline grows but the part that generates "sick" is very short.
I believe RTL SDR did extend the RTL products end of life much further.
COuld this occur with this (or similar) phased array chips?
https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/acconeer-ab/A111-0...
(Disclaimer: I've never actually used that chip or reference design and have no idea how well it actually works in practice. I just think it's really neat that mmWave radar chips are readily available at very affordable price points.)