The Tech Specs Podcast
99 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 4 years ago - ★★★★★ - 6 ratingsA podcast covering a broad array of topics in consumer technology.
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Episodes
Design—you’re complaining about it wrong
November 19, 2019 03:58What is minimalism? Simplicity in form, with nothing to excess, right? Let’s assert however that there can be two kinds of minimalism: structural, and affective. Let’s also assert that this distinction reflects two primary concerns of design philosophy. The following quadrant of design choices represents the resulting output space. The experiential axis signifies the canonical conflict between function and form: do you design for a purpose, or to direct the focus of the user? Do you make ...
Interview with Tyler Pruitt of Portrait Displays
November 07, 2019 04:09I really enjoyed this nice, breezy interview with Tyler Pruitt of Portrait Displays on display calibration on the AVForums Podcast. I especially love that he immediately complained about HDR10 and its lack of a reference tonemapping standard to start the interview. A man after my own heart. Permalink
HDR and the dwindling technical superiority of PC gaming
December 25, 2018 18:23There has been a rather interesting shift over the past few years that has gone largely unnoticed by tech and gaming enthusiasts: I don’t believe that PC gaming represents a clearly superior technical proposition compared to console gaming anymore. Three big changes took place to alter the technical gaming landscape: HDR, W-OLED, and the Xbox One X. To make my case, I will first elaborate about each of these. HDR is deeply underappreciated High dynamic range display essentially consists o...
"David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architectures and Software Languages"
September 18, 2018 03:25This is the new reality of computing. Permalink
Oculus Research’s presentation at Display Week 2018
July 16, 2018 17:24Douglas Lanman of Oculus Research gave an awesome talk about reactive displays at the Society for Information Display’s Display Week 2018. Watch it if you want to learn why the future of displays is VR and wearable technology. Permalink
MLPerf benchmark suite for machine learning announced
May 02, 2018 18:35This is awesome to see. The state of deep learning benchmarking is still dreadful, and I think most observers don't know even the most basic details about how it should be done properly. For more, see Wave Computing's press release. Unfortunately there are some big names not yet listed among the supporters. That includes NVIDIA, unsurprisingly. Update NVIDIA (and many, many other companies) joined later, thankfully. Permalink
"MIPS Announces I7200 32-bit CPU With New nanoMIPS ISA"
May 01, 2018 16:47Nobody cares but me, but I do care. Permalink
"U.S. Said to Investigate AT&T and Verizon Over Wireless Collusion Claim"
April 20, 2018 21:31No surprise here. Permalink
Linux virtualization on Fuchsia
March 20, 2018 16:21Cool. There's also support for Debian. This will obviously be rather useful for developers. I hope a mobile Gaussian blur implementation would somehow be light on GPU utilization. Permalink
About Moore’s Law—it’s dead
February 14, 2018 18:56I've been waiting for someone of sufficient stature to publicly convey this. If you’re not sure what all this means, look at the graph. While Intel’s 10nm was the canary in the coal mine, it has taken a couple years for the industry to fully grasp the sheer wall it has hit, and how the other foundries would hit it just the same. Cannon Lake’s extreme delay and Apple’s middling A10X and A11 single-threaded performance improvements (despite what it did with the latter's core) were leading ind...
About Moore’s Law — it’s dead
February 14, 2018 18:56I've been waiting for someone of sufficient stature to publicly convey this. If you’re not sure what all this means, look at the graph. While Intel’s 10nm was the canary in the coal mine, it has taken a couple years for the industry to fully grasp the sheer wall it has hit, and how the other foundries would hit it just the same. Cannon Lake’s extreme delay and Apple’s middling A10X and A11 single-threaded performance improvements (despite what it did with the latter's core) were leading ind...
"Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability: Which is More Important to You?"
February 01, 2018 21:42All hardware is degrees of broken. I've unfortunately found, however, that many vendors are happy to advertise their silicon as fully functional despite shipping broken implementations or disabling IP or features outright. And in the case of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, most modern CPUs were deliberately designed with what ultimately proved to be a poor balance between security and performance in regards to their speculative execution implementations. Permalink
"HiSilicon Kirin 970 — Android SoC Power & Performance Overview"
January 22, 2018 20:30If you want to learn about the state of mobile chipsets, AnandTech’s power and performance overview of HiSilicon’s Kirin 970 is a good place to start. It’s not intended to be a comprehensive overview of the SoC, but it’s also easier to read than such a piece. While you may not care about Huawei or Chinese silicon vendors — you should! — it’s important to follow HiSilicon’s SoC implementations and results, as they among others serve as a barometer of the state of the ARM ecosystem and all mo...
About Fuchsia
January 19, 2018 20:42I've mentioned this before for subscribers, but I may as well say it here: it seems obvious to me that we'll see Fuchsia/Zircon devices this year. Think months, not years.
David Kanter on Intel's 22FFL process
January 15, 2018 18:42I heard Intel say many promising things about 22FFL at TechCon 2017, but it has quite a lot to prove when it comes to SoC processes and winning clients for Custom Foundry. In-depth public analysis of foundry technology is rare, so I'm grateful that David has written about this important topic. Permalink
Treble and Fuchsia
December 27, 2017 04:25If you had to combine Android and Fuchsia, how would you do it? This article is available for subscribers on Patreon. Permalink
"Apple Confirms CPU Limitation In Ageing Devices"
December 21, 2017 16:07Welcome back, Andrei. Now you know why I am no longer worried about quality mobile technical coverage. Permalink
VESA announces DisplayHDR test specification
December 12, 2017 17:57These standards are abysmal. Maximum luminance below 1,000 nits for LCDs shouldn't be considered real HDR. Permalink
Ending subscriptions
December 11, 2017 17:48I have decided to end subscriptions for Tech Specs. Existing subscribers for this month will be refunded at the end of the month, and all subscriber articles will still be accessible until the end of the month. Tech Specs will not necessarily end as a blog, but as of now I don’t know what its future will hold. I want to reenter the tech industry for full-time work, and understandably employers generally don’t allow employees to blog. If I can continue to write in some capacity, I will, but ...
Intel, AMD, and the future of the PC
December 08, 2017 05:25This article is available for subscribers on Patreon. Permalink
"Evolution of the img tag: Gif without the GIF"
December 05, 2017 01:10Everyone loves GIFs, but they're technically awful. This replacement implementation is awesome. The WebKit/Safari team's work has been absolutely amazing in recent years, especially in regards to energy efficiency improvements. Also: Aside from not having a formal standard, animated WebP lacks chroma subsampling and wide-gamut support. Permalink
Intel's mobile problem
November 29, 2017 19:50This article is available for subscribers on Patreon. Permalink
HDMI 2.1 released by the HDMI Forum
November 28, 2017 23:56Here's the overview of the specification. There's a lot to look into and study. Quick Frame Transport and Quick Media Switching are of particular interest to me. Permalink
VESA announces DisplayID 2.0
November 27, 2017 17:36I somehow missed the announcement of this extremely important standard. Permalink
"Process Technology Limbo"
November 22, 2017 21:30These are some highlights from Greg Yeric's keynote presentation at ARM TechCon 2017. Greg leads the Future Silicon Technology group within ARM Research and is as qualified as anyone to speak about the industry's current challenges. It's a bit of a scary time for the silicon industry. Progress is slowing down in many areas, and it's unclear to everyone what technologies and processes will successfully drive advances in the future. Permalink
Introducing The List
November 17, 2017 21:37With the increasing popularity of UHD TVs in the market and the Xbox One X’s awesome backwards compatibility support, I’ve been working on a small side project over the past few months to make sense of the increasing complexity of console and handheld gaming. Today I’m launching a public spreadsheet which I’m calling The List. Consider it a console gaming “optimization” guide. The List is linked under a new Reference section of the blog, which I will be expanding over time to include variou...
Initial impressions of the iPhone X
November 15, 2017 18:11This article is available for subscribers on Patreon. Permalink
How not to CPU
November 03, 2017 22:52This article is available for subscribers on Patreon. Permalink
"Games Look Bad, Part 1: HDR and Tone Mapping"
November 01, 2017 22:44This is a great article on a very underappreciated topic — how poorly game developers implement HDR and tone mapping. It makes me very sad that the video game industry uses ACES. Permalink
Guesting on the Android Central Podcast
October 30, 2017 16:06Thanks to the fine folks at Android Central for hosting me on last week's episode of their podcast. We talked about the color accuracy of both Pixel 2 displays, factory panel calibration, software mitigations for burn-in, color management, Google's statement on the Pixel 2 XL, and more. Check it out if you're interested in a more in-depth discussion on the topic. Permalink
Assessing the Pixel 2 displays
October 20, 2017 16:36There has been an absurd amount of misinformation circulating about the displays of Google's new Pixel phones. I’ve written hurriedly elsewhere about this, but one point I want to stress is that sRGB has little to do with anything. The devices run Oreo and are thus color managed. To be completely clear, the 2 XL's panel is really bad, but we've also effectively known this was going to be the case for months based on the LG V30. After discussing with some smart folks, I’ll go ahead and specu...
"Oculus' John Carmack Explains Virtual Reality in 5 Levels of Difficulty"
October 19, 2017 02:55John Carmack is a national treasure. Permalink
Google's Pixel 2 event
October 18, 2017 01:51This article is available for subscribers on Patreon. Permalink
John Carmack’s Oculus Connect 4 keynote
October 13, 2017 03:58This was yet another brilliant talk by John. Topics include: content and app marketing, focusing on the user, the ninety-ninety rule*, software optimization, the end of Moore’s Law, the Oculus Go, OLED displays vs. LCDs, immersive media, and of course quite a lot on VR. * (As applied to game development.) Permalink
Resonant Qi and the iPhones
October 10, 2017 21:48I previously did a really poor job of explaining the new iPhones’ wireless charging support, so I would like to rectify that. The new iPhones are Qi 1.2.3 devices, but the iPhone 8 currently only supports Qi 1.1.X. This means inductive-only charging, and no fast charging. The resonant extension of the Qi standard was introduced with 1.2 in 2014, and compatible chargers have been available for years. Qi 1.2 also supports simultaneously charging multiple devices with optional WP-ID unique ide...
"How Google Built the Pixel 2 Camera"
October 05, 2017 18:31This is an excellent visual overview of smartphone camera imaging. It even covers demosaicing and how vendors perform objective robotic testing. “There’s a saying in engineering: if you haven’t really tested, it’s broken.” Uh huh. Permalink
Untrustworthy sources
September 28, 2017 02:10This article is available for subscribers on Patreon. Permalink
"New Theory Cracks Open the Black Box of Deep Learning"
September 26, 2017 18:51Here is the video of the talk, and here is the associated paper on arXiv. Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer of deep learning who works at Google and the University of Toronto, emailed Tishby after watching his Berlin talk. “It’s extremely interesting,” Hinton wrote. “I have to listen to it another 10,000 times to really understand it, but it’s very rare nowadays to hear a talk with a really original idea in it that may be the answer to a really major puzzle.” Also worth noting: Tishby’s work wasn...
"Why You Shouldn't Charge Your Mobile Phone Overnight"
September 25, 2017 17:45An accurate article on battery charging in the mainstream press? Kudos to Time. (I try to avoid charging any of my devices overnight.) Permalink
Apple discusses its 2017 silicon
September 15, 2017 16:26There are several errors in this article, one of which is a bad one — the CPU is not 70% more efficient. Nonetheless, I appreciate when Apple's silicon team provides some information. I think the only technical disclosure in this piece is the redesigned secure element (the Secure Enclave, or SEP). I believe we already knew everything else, if I'm not mistaken. A three year design lead period for the Neural Engine is to be expected. Apple's "fully custom" GPU is still using tile-based defer...
Thoughts on the iPhone X
September 13, 2017 19:21Yesterday Apple revealed the iPhone X, which had been hyped to an extreme degree for years. The highlight feature of the phone in my opinion is clearly its HDR display. Apple is the first mobile vendor to ship end-to-end support for HDR, while Samsung’s Galaxy S8 was the first device to at least feature full hardware support. I wrote about this at great length over the past couple months, so for all the details check out these three articles. The first article was mostly wrong about the UI ...
Cellular smartwatches
September 08, 2017 22:09This article is available for subscribers on Patreon. Permalink
"Hardware Architectures for Deep Neural Networks"
September 06, 2017 19:21This presentation from MIT provides an excellent overview of current techniques and hardware implementations for efficient deep learning computation. There is also an associated paper. The material requires familiarity with the basics of deep learning and its terminology. Provided you are familiar, though, the presentation is very accessible and easy to follow even if you aren't a machine learning researcher. Permalink
“How is ARCore better than ARKit?”
September 01, 2017 16:46These are basically the same conclusions I’ve drawn over the past couple days and shared with subscribers. Despite the insecurities of fanboys on both sides, ARKit and ARCore seem pretty comparable overall. It’s refreshing to see technical blogging that’s fair to all sides, and thus actually accurate. The statements made also match up completely with my limited understanding of AR and hardware product development. I recommend reading the entire article to see what I mean. I did a little di...
Will the iMac Pro throttle?
August 29, 2017 19:14As was expected to happen at some point, Intel today introduced its new Xeon-W workstation CPUs. Intel has had to overhaul its product portfolio due to the massive challenges and delays of its 10nm process. Apple actually pre-announced these new Xeons at WWDC while giving minimal detail. It was clear, however, that the CPUs would essentially be Skylake-X. Xeon CPUs are not “faster” than Core CPUs, because they use the same microarchitecture. Xeon chipsets, however, come with important feat...
Movidius' Neural Compute Engine
August 29, 2017 06:38This article is available for subscribers on Patreon. Permalink
"Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers"
August 25, 2017 01:29This article is available for subscribers on Patreon. Permalink
Example of a design win leak
August 19, 2017 19:28This article is available for subscribers on Patreon. Permalink