Blog
ISC 2016
Recently I attended ISC 2016 in Frankfurt. Here are a few of the talks that grabbed my attention. One of the highlights was the Workshop on Energy-Aware High Performance Computing (EnA-HPC). I particularly enjoyed Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos’s keynote on exploiting approximate computing and resilience to reduce energy consumption. The talk focused on two approaches: firstly, […]
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Open for Business 2016, Mon 5th Sept
Following the success of the inaugural event in 2015, the BCS Open Source Specialist Group and Open Source Consortium will for the second year host the Open for Business conference in September, running again as part of the Wuthering Bytes technology festival in Hebden Bridge.
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Recent Updates to SDCC in Release 3.6.0
The Small Device C Compiler (SDCC) is a free optimizing standard C compiler targeting various 8-bit architectures. At FOSDEM 2015, I gave talk about SDCC. This guest blog is a quick summary of what has happened since up to the release of SDCC 3.6.0.
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RISC-V Compiler Performance Part 1: Code Size Comparisons
RISC-V is an open-source Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that was originally developed for teaching and research in computer architecture. It is rapidly moving towards becoming a standard architecture for industry applications, with Version 2.0 of the user-level ISA finalised, and a draft specification for the privileged-mode ISA. The base architecture consists of a 32- or […]
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Open Source and Electronic Systems
In his keynote at last year’s NMI Industry Summit, Keith Williams, VP Intelligent Systems at Altran, identified open source as one of the four key pillars underpinning future growth of the electronic systems industry in the UK and beyond. Let us put that into context. In its 2014 annual report, ESCO noted that the industry […]
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Embecosm is Recruiting!
If you are a talented software engineer who is passionate about open source and compilers, we should love to hear from you. Embecosm provides services developing free and open source (F/OSS) compilers for companies around the world. The architectures for which we develop compilers range from the smallest deeply embedded processors to the largest high […]
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See you at Embedded World
This week is a first for Embecosm. We’ll be exhibiting at Embedded World in Nürnberg, Germany. If you are visiting, come and see us at booth 546D in Hall 4, where we are part of the GREAT Britain Pavilion. The UK is overall the fourth largest exhibitor at Embedded World — a reflection of this […]
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How similar are GCC and LLVM: The user perspective
One of the goals of LLVM is to offer as much GCC compatibility as is feasible. In this way migration from GCC is made easier. But just how compatible are they? From the user perspective, this is primarily down to equivalence of the user interface and I’ve carried out some experiments to see how close […]
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FOSDEM 2016 Day 2: More talks that made me think
Notwithstanding the Brussels public transport system, we made it to Day 2 good and early. At 9AM I turned up to hear Carlos Machado speak about Sign Language Free Linguistic Resources. Unfortunately, Carlos did not arrive— presumably a victim of the public transport roadworks program. However, the replacement was an informal presentation of the work […]
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