Application Expectations built on Touch

windows8logoI recently made my first acquaintance with Windows 8, having bought a new Sony ultrabook for the family. Including a touch screen. The combination of the touch-based interface and the phone-like look of Windows 8 even on a PC has led me to think about the (unconscious) expectations that I have come to have on how systems behave and how services are accessed, from how smart phones and tablets have come to work in the past few years. In particular, where are web-based services going?

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The First 64-bit Phone

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Apple just released their new iPhone 5s, where the biggest news is really the 64-bit processor core inside the new A7 SoC. Sixty four bits in a phone is a first, and it immediately raises the old question of just what 64 bits gives you. We saw this when AMD launched the Opteron and 64-bit x86 PC computing back in the early 2000’s, and in a less public market the same question was asked as 64-bit MIPS took huge chunks out of the networking processor market in the mid-2000s. It was never questioned in servers, however.

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Wind River Blog: UEFI on Simics

150px-Uefi_logo.svgSimics can run and debug UEFI BIOSes, and that is the topic of my latest blog at Wind River. UEFI is actually pretty interesting once you get to know it, and building a good debug experience for UEFI took a bit of work. Still, it was built as just another target for the standard uniform Simics debugger, which is not the way most other UEFI and BIOS debuggers are built. I guess in that in the past, debugging a BIOS required such specialized tools that it made sense to also build a custom specialized frontend for the  purpose. With a simulator as the backend, things do become simpler and more uniform, and Eclipse CDT is a actually a very good basis for a debugger for any kind of C and C++ code.

For more reading on UEFI itself, I can recommend the 2011 Intel Tech Journal on the topic.