Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
I reprised my gig from last year and taught the course Platform-Spanning Systems at Uppsala university during the first quarter of 2025. It is always fun to get back the university and enjoy the atmosphere and the enthusiasm and fearlessness of students. The course went better than last year (in my opinion), in part thanks to the sponsorship from Bahnhof that provided us with virtual machines for the students to run their code.
Continue reading “Teaching Platform-Spanning Systems Again”
Last week, I visited the Embedded World (2025). Only the exhibition, not the conference part. It was great to be back again, meeting old friends and making new acquaintances in the embedded business. I already told you the dramatic story of how I got there. This blog is about what I saw at the show – trends and technologies.
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The fifth CaSA, Computer and System Architecture Unraveled, meetup took place on January 30. We finally gave in and joined the AI hype train, resulting in an event with a somewhat different audience and different discussions. More society and applications, less computer architecture. Our two presenters were Håkan Zeffer from SambaNova Systems and Björn Forsberg from RI.SE (doing his second CaSA presentation!). Håkan talked about the architecture of the Sambanova AI processors, and Björn about AI compilers.
Continue reading ““Unusual Perspectives on AI” – Computer and System Architecture Unraveled Event Five”
“Reasoning” models have become popular as a way to expand the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Such models take more time “considering” a prompt and iterating it through the model several times, with the goal of mimicking how a human might go about solving a problem by breaking it down into steps. I tried the reasoning QwQ model on the coding problems from my previous blog posts (1,2). Quite funny and elucidating; I will quote the replies in full as they are worth reading.
Continue reading “(Local) AI, Please Reason about Code”My previous blog post in this series tested the ability of a range of large language models to analyze a piece of C code and determine what a mystery function did. That was interesting and entertaining, but possibly not a particularly “fair” test of the models’ capabilities. Most of time, I think people use “AI” to help write code, not to understand some tricky piece of algorithmic code. Thus, I turn the problem around and ask the models to write code for the algorithm I previously asked them to analyze.
Continue reading “(Local) AI, Please Write some Code”Continuing my exploration of what a local AI model can do, I decided to test them on the task of code analysis. It would be so nice to have an AI model that is tuned and trained on a particular tool or programming system, and that can be distributed for users to run on their own on their local machine, server, or cloud VM. Avoiding the need to run and charge for a custom cloud service and ensuring confidentiality and availability.
Updated 2024-12-12 with Llama-3.3-70B
Continue reading “(Local) AI, Please Explain This Code”
In my previous blog post about the Intel AI Playground, I tested it by asking it to draw cars. In this post, I share some more exploration of these local AI models and their limitations. Turns out that cars are easy, other things not so much…
Continue reading “More Exploration of (Local) AI Models”I recently built a new desktop computer, featuring an Intel ARC 770 graphics card (just to be different). The card is supported by the Intel AI Playground, which is a software package that makes it dead easy to run AI/large language models (LLM) locally on my GPU. I was curious as to just what this could do, as compared to the big AI models that run on cloud servers.
Continue reading “Hi Local AI, Draw Me …”
The 2024 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference took place on October 15 and 16, in its traditional location at the Holiday Inn Munich City Centre. This year there was even more talk of artificial intelligence than last year, and quite a few sessions related to virtual platforms. And lots of other interesting presentations and discussions.
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2024 – AI and More”One of the nice properties of delivering software that users install on their own machines is that once the software has been built and shipped, the cost of running it is handed over to the user. The cost per installation and per user is minimal in terms of compute load on the developing company. Of course there are costs for things like support, but that is different. However, having the customer provide the compute resources is not necessarily that easy when it comes to AI-based setups.
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The Embedded Conference Scandinavia took place at Kistamässan in Kista, Sweden, on April 10 and 11 2024. This was a reboot of a show that used to run as a small tradeshow/exhibition plus technical talks until the pandemic hit. There was no Embedded Show anymore, just the Embedded Conference and its speaker program. The ECS was instead co-located with Elektronikmässan, the long-running and apparently thriving gathering for “electronics” companies in Sweden.
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The 2023 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference took place on November 14 and 15, in the traditional location of the Holiday Inn Munich City Center. This was the 10th time the conference took place, serving as an excuse for a great anniversary dinner. Also new was the addition of a research track to provide academics publishing at the conference with the academic credit their work deserves. This year had a large number of papers related to virtual platforms, so writing this report has taken me longer than usual. There was just so much to cover.
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2023 – 10th Anniversary Edition”
I attended a short Tech Tuesday morning session at IBM here in Kista, Sweden, where IBM presented their WatsonX-AI and related technologies. Tech Tuesdays is a monthly technical event organized by Kista Science City, where companies in Kista present some aspect of their technology in a 30-minute session. IBM managed to get an impressive amount of content into that time!
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The Swedish research institute RI.SE hosted an “Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science day” (AI and CS day) last week. RI.SE has a long tradition of hosting interesting open houses, both as RI.SE and in their previous guide as SiCS. The day was a mix of organized talks in the morning, and an open house where RI.SE researchers showed off their work in the afternoon. Most of the AI discussions were related to large language models (LLMs), but not all. I got some new insights about LLMs in general and using LLMs for coding in particular.
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In previous three blog posts (1,2,3) about ChatGPT in particular and large language models in general, I touched on what they can do, what they cannot do, what they seem not to do, how they fall down in funny ways, and why I think they are fundamentally flawed for many applications. There is one more aspect left to consider – the legal and licensing side. I am not a lawyer, I am not an expert, but it seems obvious that there is a huge problem. There are also clear questions about business morals and what the right thing to do would be. I also doubt the business viability of LLMs in the way they are currently trained.
Continue reading “ChatGPT and Legal”