Each time it comes out of hibernation those routines are executed in a lot of cases. Plus during critical procedures you must always disable interrupts, hence it's a very common procedure. And you forget that your computer also contains several microcontrollers, like the 8051 is often used as USB host.

Microcontrollers are present in huge numbers, the most executed code is probably somewhere in a 4-bit microcontroller in your washing machine or microwave oven. As such my entry for this one is the start-up sequence of a microcontroller: disable interrupts, configuration code, enable interrupts. Another likely candidate is the 8051 series microcontroller, that one has been around for decades and it's still being made and improved. So to be precise, configuring the timers and interrupts of the 8051 family.

You must realise most graphics cards actually don't execute that many instructions. A graphics card can process a lot of data at once, sure. But it's a case of SIMD more often than not. So the actual number of instructions executed is quite limited versus the amount of data.

Well, it really depends on the algorithm I'd say, simple things are easy enough to estimate depending on if you wish to run it in parallel or not. But if they come to you to ask for it that's usually not the case I figure.

Haven't tried it, but Cadence's C to Silicon might be up for the job. Also keep in mind that in hardware you have very different requirements than in software, and parallellisation has interesting effects on the number of gates. The best option is to get an EE, preferably with experience in digital design, to take a look at it. Other options are SystemC compilers, but they're not really up to production use yet as far as I know. And it is also very technology dependant, sometimes complicated logical functions that are common are implemented directly. This isn't something you can just wing!

Yeah, you know what would have been really funny considering the sort of PR they were aiming for. If they would have been saved by a Russian nuclear powered ice breaker.

Just select your dataset yourself and throw out the statistical tests compared to the measured data, seem to be practice on both sides of climate "science". Until they stop messing around with statistics I'm not going to believe either side, got better things to do like restarting my CFC production plant!

But to be serious for a minute here, climate science really annoys me at times. Many times you e-mail authors, and I'm talking about both sides, to request more information about their datasets they either say it's confidential (really???), lost, destroyed, ... or they don't respond at all. Those that do have either an inconclusive end result or questionable practices. If you cherry pick your data to lead to your result it's not difficult to come up with the conclusion you want, combined with the staggering lack of statistical background knowledge. It's one thing to remove noise from your data, almost all researchers do that when they publish. If you're measuring over a few months or years you're bound to have a few extreme values that aren't representative. But then you should also mention what you did, why, and what the influence on the overall dataset was.If you go further then you should execute the right statistical tests to verify if the chosen samples are representative for the entire dataset. And until they properly do that I'm not taking either side serious.

It's still scary how many of them want to use several large breadboards filled with expensive components to do things that you can do with a single operational amplifier. Also annoying is their hate for SMD components, considering those are actually easier to solder...

If I may be so bold as to state this, calling social sciences books information is a bit of a joke in my opinion. I generally consider such books a good way to start a barbecue in fact. And actually, a lot of engineering related information on the internet is incorrect due to Arduino users making uninformed statements about mass production consumer electronics.

Blade servers start at about 3000 USD for the enclosure, and 1500 USD per server board. Performance is unmatched though, and if you buy several servers at once you can usually negotiate the price down quite a lot if you're willing to listen to the sales speech first.

And anyway, all resource intensive applications we use run on servers. At our office everybody has a cheap, small, energy efficient Dell mini desktop. if you flip the case on it's side it's the perfect height to park a monitor on so it comes on eye level. Plus very handy to attach post-its to! The servers which have a large, efficient cooling plant and the necessary hardware to run all of the stuff are neatly hidden away. So is there any real use left for a macpro like this? Not really no, since it's useless for putting in a data centre and you can't effectively hook it up to a cooling system either.

He also manages to talk about wearable electronics without ever mentioning the main research institutes driving the technology development for it.

What a glorious rant, guess what. If you're against this then you should also refuse modern medicine, electronics, any cheap reliable form of heating your home, etc. Be realistic before you start of on rants like these.

Yeah especially considering the sort of energy you'd have to pump into it to cause such an effect on that type of range. Additionally this no longer qualifies as a near-field application either, so it'll make the ISM band useless near it. Yay!

He also has no clue about ASICs, lets take a look at this line: "Nor do they offer the ability to split processing duties into parallel tasks,"
If there is one thing you can do on an ASIC, it's parallelisation. Application specific cores are small, very small, standard multi-project wafer run technologies have a good number of metal layers so routing isn't too problematic, etc. So you can actually fit a whole lot of cores on a small silicon area in a modern technology. The main issue is the cost of the hardware designer, EEs sufficiently skilled in HDL to take on such a large project are an expensive commodity.

Depends on your definition of cheap, they're down to 3600 USD for the slow "table-top" lab models.

We had a tektronix in our lab that actually broke. Somebody dropped it from a table, mind you it was a 500 MHz 4-channel scope. Not actually a field unit eh. But in its half fixed state it was still more reliable and easier to use than a Hameg. And they'll find my old thinkpad 760el with that tek scope. 15 years old, works like a charm, rare case where the copper traces are holding the pcb together (there's a crack down the motherboard). Also the battery still lasts half an hour. But to get back to the point. Scopes are very versatile. A good 4 channel scope often doubles as logic analyser. Plus a scope can often be made to trigger on very exotic events if you're a bit handy. Not to mention eye diagrams to study clock jitter. But I can't live without my spectrum analyser and network analyser either. A network analyser is potentially one of the most powerful tools in a designer's arsenal IF he knows how to use it. Coupling between lines, impedances, modulators, delays (tdr, which the high end units are very very good at), etc. Another must have is a good signal generator, even for digital design. Replacing your onboard clock with a reliable one is very useful, and for analog design it might be even more important than a scope. Another great tool is a can of freeze spray!