A Digression on Marketing

In my previous post on Larrabee I talked about the marketing of an ancient HP workstation. I ended with, “If anyone wants to confirm or deny, great!”

Followup from a reader: the story misses 3 additional changes to the machine. The more expensive business machine had: a bigger cabinet, more flashing lights on the front, and required 220 power. Apparently the business market wouldn’t take the machine seriously unless it required special power and wanted something with flashing lights so it looked more like a computer. The lights were completely random and the engineers wanted to hook them up so you could at least use them to see what was going on with the machine. And, no, the engineers didn’t win.

By the way, this isn’t meant as a diss against HP: I have two HP computers at home and love them, they make quality products. I’m just pointing out that even HP (which used to be known as the company that would market sushi by calling it “raw dead fish”) finds that marketing that contravenes rational thought is sometimes necessary. The “blinkenlights” story is a common theme, because it’s true. I recall an article (which I wish I had saved) from the early 90’s in the Wall Street Journal where people running the Social Security program were duped into thinking a computer company’s offerings were ready by being shown empty boxes with blinking lights inserted. “See, the computer is computing right now”. It was quite the scandal – front page news – when this ruse was uncovered.

Bonus quiz question: In researching (if you can call it that) this story, I ran across this site, which had an excellent question, “what was the world’s first personal computer?” Answer here. I was way wrong with the Altair. The answer, a computer I hadn’t heard of before, even bears on interactive computer graphics history, as it was the first computer experience for a famous graphics pioneer.

More on Larrabee

I wrote earlier on Larrabee being delayed. A coworker pointed out this article from Jon Peddie Research, who know (and usually charge) more than I do. It makes a plausible case that cancelling this first version of Larrabee was the correct move by Intel, and that the experience gained is not wasted. JPR argues that the high-performance computing market is also high-margin, so needs fewer sales to be profitable. There are other gains from the project to date – anyway, a worthwhile read. I’ll be interested to see what’s next for Larrabee.

The magic of marketing and price differentials is fascinating to me. Books like The Underground Economist have some entertaining tales of how prices are set. Here’s a marketing story I heard (elsewhere), and it might even be true: HP had two versions of the series 800 workstation in the late 80’s/early 90’s, the only difference being, literally, one bit on a ROM chip. If the bit was set, then HP-UX could not be run on the workstation. Amazingly, the price for this version of the workstation was higher, even though it was seemingly less capable. This version was marketed to hospital administration, which at the time didn’t use HP-UX (so didn’t care); the workstations that could run HP-UX were sold to engineers. HP could honestly say there was a difference between the two workstations, say that one was tailored to hospital admin and the other to engineers, and so justify the price differential. If anyone wants to confirm or deny, great!

HPG and EGSR 2010

Information on the 2010 iterations of the High Performance Graphics conference (HPG) and the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) is now available online.  The two conferences will be co-located in Saarbrucken, Germany in late June.  Fortunately (and unlike HPG’s co-location with SIGGRAPH this year) there is no overlap between the two – EGSR immediately follows HPG.  These are both excellent conferences with strong (albeit in HPG’s case, short) histories of high-quality real-time rendering work. For many of our European readers, the combination of the two conferences should prove irresistible.

Update: the HPG website and CFP are up.

Larrabee Chip Delayed/Cancelled

The news for the day is that the current hardware version of Larrabee, Intel’s new graphics processor, for the consumer market has been delayed (or cancelled, depending on what you mean by “cancelled”). Intel is not commenting on possible future Larrabee hardware, so the Larrabee project itself exists. I don’t see an official press release (yet) from Intel. The few solid quotes I’ve seen (in CNET) is:

“Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we hoped to be at this point in the project,” Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer said Friday. “As a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product,” he said.

along with this:

Intel would not give a projected date for the Larrabee software development platform and is only saying “next year.”

The Washington Post gives this semi-quote:

Intel now plans its first Larrabee product to be used as a software development platform for both graphic and high performance computing, Knupffer said.

See more from The Inquirer, CNET, ZDNet, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Many more versions via Google News.

In my opinion, Intel has a tough row to hoe: catch up in the field of high-performance graphics, when all they’ve had before is the ~$2 chip low-end GMA series. This series probably has a larger market share in terms of units sold than NVIDIA and AMD GPUs combined (basically, any Intel computer without a GPU card has one), but I assume makes pennies per unit and by its nature is limited in a number of ways. Markets like high-performance computing, which make the most sense for Larrabee (since it appears to have the most flexibility vs. NVIDIA or AMD’s GPUs, e.g. it’s programmable in C++), is a tiny piece of the market compared to “I just want DirectX to run as fast as possible”. The people I know on the Larrabee team are highly competent, so I don’t think the problem was there. I’d love to learn what hurdles were encountered in the areas of design, management, algorithms, resources, etc. Even all the architectural choices of Larrabee are not understood in their particulars (though we have some good guesses), since it’s unreleased. Sadly, we’re unlikely to know most of the story; writing “The Soul of An Unreleased Machine” is not an inspiring tale, though perhaps a fascinating one.

Real-time Mandelbulb visualization with GigaVoxels

See this post on Cyril Crassin’s blog (I just saw it linked on Tim Farrar’s blog and had to mention it here since it is wicked awesome and I wouldn’t want anyone to miss it).

Cyril is the primary inventor of the Gigavoxels technique which has been the subject of several recent publications.  The Mandelbulb is similar to the Mandelbrot set, but in 3D.  Cyril evaluates the Mandelbulb on the fly to fill the brick cache used by the Gigavoxels.

Mandelbulb + Gigavoxels = real-time Mandelbulb visualization = pure win.

Rendering-related papers of the past 350 years

The Royal Society (full name: Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge) is marking the start of its 350th year by putting pdf versions of 60 notable papers from its journal, Philosophical Transactions (founded in 1665) on the web.  Although all the selected papers are crucial to the history of science, I wanted to call out those particularly related to the fundamentals of rendering.

Almost all of Ke-Sen’s pages now up

Ke-Sen Huang has put up almost all the remaining pages that were taken down, after revising them according to ACM’s requirements:

The only pages not up yet are those for ACM’s Symposium on Solid and Physical Modeling (SPM) for the years 2005-2008.

More of Ke-Sen’s pages are back up (+ a new one)

Following the reinstatement of the SIGGRAPH 2009 page a few days ago, the following paper pages have been modified to the new ACM guidelines and are now back up:

This is a little less than half the pages that were taken down.

All this and Ke-Sen has also started to collect the Eurographics 2010 papers as well – the man’s a machine!

Things I learned from the ACM

Well, not just from the ACM, but also from people involved in the Ke-Sen Huang and ACM Publications situation.

  • ACM SIGGRAPH membership also gives you access to just about all computer graphics papers in the ACM Digital Library. This I knew already, but found that others haven’t realized it. Any conference sponsored by SIGGRAPH is available, from what I can tell, e.g. I3D. I noticed a few weeks ago that the SIGGRAPH 2009  Posters were not accessible to me through this benefit; the ACM fixed this problem when I reported it.
  • Deep linking, where one site links directly to content on another site, is not illegal. The EFF notes that deep linking has not yet been found to be illegal by the courts. However, linking to sites providing infringing (illegal) copies of a work for download is contributory infringement.
  • “Sweat of the brow” compilations, such as the white pages of phone books, are not copyright. There is no original expression involved, so the Supreme Court ruled such are not protected. Paula Samuelson’s article in the Communications of the ACM (Google Scholar hits here) is a fascinating overview. Titles are not copyright. Elements such as the order in a Table of Contents are in a gray area, from what I can see. The ordering and grouping of the articles into sessions may be copyright protected – the courts have not ruled, as far as I know. Changing that order on an external web page would then not be copyright, since it would be a different “original” expression. Alphabetized or numerical ordering is not copyright protected.
  • You do not need to enforce your copyright to maintain it, unlike a trademark. You can ignore an infringement and not lose your rights. So the argument that a copyright must be protected now in order to preserve it in the future is incorrect.