Dell Keynote from NI week by Joe Strelow

Chances are pretty good you are reading this blog-site on a Dell computer. Dell now enjoys one third of the U.S. market for personal computers, servers and storage, and it has become the poster company for growth and efficiency. Jeff Clarke, senior VP of Dell spoke at NI Week 2005 and he had a lot to say about the value of standardization, and the evolution of technology from proprietary systems to standard commodity devices. What has this got to do with Sound and Vibration engineering? Read on.

It is early when Jeff takes the stage (alright it was a late night) and he soon wakes us all up with an almost unbelievable statistic: Dell ships over 100,000 computers per day-every day! They credit their success (and NI's success too) with the natural shift of markets from proprietary to standardized solutions over time. Markets do this because it ultimately delivers greater choices in vendors, increased flexibility in configuring the product solution, and reduces the complexity of the solution which always lowers the long term operating costs.

You can view the whole presentation at http://www.ni.com/niweek/keynote_videos.htm#thursday. He breaks his talk up into discussions around advances in compute power (CPU's, memory, storage), communication (I/O and network), and finally visualization. Some of the historic comparisons are a little tired, but overall it is worth listening to. And some of the content is good entertainment including a video mocking the Team America puppeteers with characters from the major tech companies doing battle against Big Iron (see it here without watching the whole presentation).

In his talk, Jeff describes the next wave of CPU advancement which will be a fundamental shift away from increased clock speeds. Relying on multi-core technology will rapidly gain performance (3X improvements in the next two years) while reducing power consumption. It will start in servers with the first chips shipping today, and be in our workstations and laptops very soon. Good news considering that engineering application software that can take advantage of this architecture should soon make processing data much faster.

The standard hardware communication protocol is shifting to PC-Express (not to be confused with PC-x) and will allow 10X gains in communication speeds over PCI and Cardbus (you may know this as the PCMCIA slot on your laptop). Coincidentally, NI has announced their first products supporting this new standard and Dell is committed to shipping a huge majority (I think I heard 85%) of their laptops with this interface by year end. This is a huge leap forward in protocols to support data acquisition applications in general, and our SV applications especially. Plus this means we should all be getting new laptops!! Hey boss!

The visualization part of the talk focused on the gaming world. Advanced texture mapping and shading algorithms are simply getting more realistic at a wicked pace. It strikes me that we have yet to realize the potential of this visualization technology in SV engineering applications. Maybe someone can point out some good existing applications to me, or offer suggestions how we (the engineering software providers) could take advantage of this technology somehow. Working as a marketing guy these days, I look at this and have to believe there is a killer application waiting to be born!

Have fun, - Joe