The telegraph was the first effective electronic system for communicating over long distances, but it was inconvenient to use and required specialized training. It wasn't until the emergence of the telephone that consumers appreciated the benefit of easy to use, ubiquitous communication. In the past decade, the typical PC has emerged as the new household tool for communication, whether through email, web browsing, or file sharing. However, for most consumers, the PC is an awkward first-generation system that is complex and unreliable.

A new generation of digital entertainment and information appliances will be entering our homes over the next decade that will truly unleash the power of broadband network connectivity for consumers. They will enable consumers to access vast commercial collections of music and video content; manage personal collections; communicate with friends; and receive personalized information from any location within the home. These new devices will resemble traditional entertainment platforms rather than computers, but will provide all of the advantages of a networked client-server environment.

This talk will describe the capabilities of an early adopters home several years from now and describe key applications and algorithms that will make this possible. I will also show some of the first generation of broadband-enabled home entertainment appliances. I will then focus on specific performance and physical requirements for processors in these applications and suggest which microarchitectural approaches should be investigated in order to meet the requirements of these emerging applications.

Bio:

Andrew Wolfe is Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Officer at SONICblue Incorporated. He is responsible for product strategy and for mergers and acquisitions. He holds an undergraduate degree from The Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon. From 1991 through 1997 he taught Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. He is currently a Consulting Professor at Stanford University where he periodically teaches Computer Architecture. He is on the advisory boards of Intellon, Inc., Comsilica, Inc., Entridia, Inc., Siroyan, Ltd., and BOPS, Inc. and a director of several private companies. His research interests are architectures and design tools for embedded systems and VLIW architectures for signal processing.