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Interview with Eben Upton on Studies, the Raspberry Pi and IoT

posted by janrinok on Friday November 08 2019, @02:07AM   
from the slice-of-pi dept.

canopic jug writes:

Physics World has a pair of articles on Eben Upton, co-founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. One is an interview about the growing role that Raspberry Pi computers has in industrial activities and the other concentrates on his background, which was originally in physics.

From the interview on the Raspberry Pi in industrial settings:

I'm seeing an increasing focus on communications, making it easier for computers to interact with the real world. There isn't so much excitement anymore in doing lots and lots of maths really fast on one computer in isolation, and we actually see this on the educational side of our business.

When we built the first Raspberry Pi, I didn't want to put input-output pins on it, because I thought kids would be interested in using them to write programs. Of course, what children actually love doing with Raspberry Pi is interacting with the real world, building weather stations and robot controllers and things like that. And maybe that was a harbinger of things to come, or the kids were attuned to the zeitgeist more than we were. The kinds of things they were interested in then are the things we're all interested in now, which is working out what problems computers can solve for you. And now that the era of free returns is coming to an end, I think we can broaden that question out a little bit.

From the article about his start in physics:

I'd been a computer programmer since I was a kid and, on some level, the Raspberry Pi is an attempt to recreate the positive aspects of how people like me learned computing back in the 1980s. I had a BBC Micro computer at school and at home, and a Commodore Amiga at home as well, so I had access to all these programmable machines starting from when I was about 10.

In my postgraduate work, I drifted into working purely on software, designing compilers and programming tools, but I probably went too far in the abstract direction. The place where I've ended up is closer to silicon engineering or electrical engineering. The former is kind of a software job these days, now that human beings aren't drawing polygons that turn into bits of masks on silicon chips anymore. Instead, they're writing descriptions of the chip's behaviour in high-level languages and leaving the rest up to the tools they've developed. But there's also an aspect of hands-on work in what I do – the actual grungy bit of getting a PCB [printed circuit board] and stapling stuff down on it to make a physical product you can sell. After a period of oscillation, I guess I ended up somewhere that's right for me.

Earlier on SN:
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Launched
Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge
Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership

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Original Submission

• epin (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday November 08 2019, @03:35AM

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday November 08 2019, @03:35AM (#917720) Journal

  The number of IoT objects you will have in your life as a consumer is going to be countable on the fingers of one hand. You might have a smart thermostat. You might have a digital assistant-type object like Amazon’s Alexa. You might have some home automation to turn lights on and off and open your garage door. But fundamentally, you only have so much time to interact with connected objects.

  Make the Wi-Fi/4G/5G/6G SoCs small and cheap enough, and you'll see more of them in things that are practically disposable.

  You won't have to interact with them... knowingly. Don't waste time worrying about it.

  For much of the history of computing, progress has been about making faster, more powerful computers. Is that emphasis changing and, if so, what does that tell us about the future direction of the field?

  I think the era of free returns in processor speeds is drawing to a close, because we’re running out of atoms. The smallest structures on silicon chips are now spaced around 7 nm apart, which is about 70 atoms, and at those distances both the physics and the economics of the system start to go awry. Our knowledge of the behaviour of semiconductors is based on a statistical model of each thousand silicon atoms having, on average, this many dopant atoms embedded within them. But of course, once you’re making silicon structures 70 atoms apart, it’s no longer a statistical process, so your assumptions start to break down on the physics side. At the same time, on the economic side, it’s becoming ruinously expensive to build faster chips.

  Does that mean that Moore’s law no longer holds?

  Moore’s law was only ever really an agreement between interested parties – chip designers, foundries and manufacturers of foundry equipment – that the number of transistors per unit area of silicon would advance along an exponential curve at a certain rate. It was kind of a consensus. But the trends that enabled that consensus are coming to an end, and that means we’re beginning to see a new focus on efficiency in software engineering. I’m excited by this because I’m still a software engineer at heart, and until recently it’s been very hard to argue for writing more efficient code because the doubling in computer power meant it wasn’t necessary. You just waited two years, and your code ran twice as fast.

  3D designs such as 3DSoC [soylentnews.org] will deliver vast performance increases (in the interim, 2.5D/3D stacking of DRAM near the CPU, or 3D TSV SRAM). They won't be "free returns", but we'll see computers with at least 10-100 times more single or multi-threaded performance. That means even more people will use smaller computers like SBCs or dockable smartphones without needing a beefy desktop. Or we can write even more bloated and inefficient code.

  Even without exploiting 3D, we'll get some nice lunch out of the transition from "7nm" down to "3nm" gate-all-around and maybe a couple nodes below that. We can also attach chip(let)s from different process nodes, as Intel is advertising with Foveros. So a 3DSoC made on a "90nm" node could be put on an interposer with completely different "7nm" components.

  That was an acceptable but lazy answer from Ebin mixed with his desire to see efficient software again, which we know most programmers won't care about. JavaScript is the language, the browser is the operating system. AI will learn to code™ and handle the efficient and highly multi-threaded stuff.

  Other than that, it is neat to see some of the industrial use cases out there, which are more creative than "cheapo desktop".

  Note that the boards are exposed (case lids partially removed) in the Sony factory photo. Those Pis are 3B+ or older, as you can tell from the full size HDMI and position of the Ethernet port. The heat issues from RPi4B have been toned down somewhat by firmware updates, but in general the trend has been towards greater power consumption [futurecdn.net] for new Pi models. I think that will come to an end. They jumped from the efficiency-oriented Cortex-A53 to the performance-oriented Cortex-A72 while moving from the "40nm" to "28nm" node. But now that they are on Cortex-A72, the ARM performance cores beyond that (e.g. A75 [wikipedia.org], A77 [wikipedia.org], A78/Hercules) add performance while increasing power efficiency over the A72. So with a newer design and a node shrink, power/heat should drop. They have made it sound like they could be on "28nm" for a long time (multiple models) like with "40nm", but I doubt it. "14/16nm" could happen (a node GloFo can actually produce chips on, and China is targeting that node). Finally, somewhere down the line, 3DSoC will replace everything and could drop power consumption to sub-1W.

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