6 Nov 1935 the American inventor Edwin Howard Armstrong patented the technology, which later formed the basis for FM radio. He single-handedly described the principles of frequency modulation, which in the era of dominance of AM radio (amplitude modulation) was not taken seriously.
Armstrong went to his invention sequentially, in 1918 he invented the superheterodyne receiver, is able to convert the original signal into a fixed intermediate frequency. In comparison with existing receivers, the invention seemed too difficult, and the level of acceptance of inferior predecessors, but such a component radio made the main thing — gave radio listeners in high quality audio.
The inventor of FM radio Edwin Howard Armstrong
Shortly before the official announcement of his invention, Armstrong organized an experiment, and from the roof of a major broadcasting company RCA conducted a stream organ concerts in FM and AM modes. The difference in frequency coverage between the old format (up to 5 kHz) and new (50 Hz — 15 KHz) was impressive, after which the transfer of all available radio stations on the FM band was only a matter of time.
However, the broadcasting networks were in no hurry to pay the scientist for the new connection standard: business organized a new verification of Armstrong’s patents, demanding that the Federal communications Commission to revoke the license for the invention. Radio new sample multiplied like mushrooms after rain, and their Creator at this time for years was spent in court fighting off lawsuits and accusations that FM is not a new kind of radio, but only “filter to eliminate noise in the generally accepted standard AM”. In part, this opposition of the broadcasters arranged for at first not to invest in alteration developed infrastructure of the AM-band under the new standard.
Legal expenses even forced the inventor of FM radio to ask to borrow money from his wife. Once a legitimate scandal wife left the inventors her sister. Driven to poverty and despair Armstrong stepped from the window of his apartment on the 13th floor. And radio broadcasting network RCA, which stole his invention, and later reported record profits in the entire history of its existence.
November 6, 1995, the company 3dfx released the first 3D accelerator, capable of treating complex scenes in high resolution. This event can be called the starting point in the history of the gaming graphics cards and gaming PCs.
The famous card was called Voodoo graphics and created a furore in the computer industry. Almost all the major game developers have announced support for a new accelerator in new and future games, and the graphics in computers has reached what is today called “next-gen” (next generation). The most popular use Open GL port of Quake shooter.
Accelerator Voodoo Graphics
Sensational video card 3dfx
During the year, graphics cards 3dfx Interactive was settled in the leading slot machines and gaming computers of the time. Voodoo graphics potential was obvious — in computers finally, the notion of “shaving” the frame rate in games increased, and the number of colors in the games increased from 256 to 64 thousand. It’s now in games, those years seem equally ugly, but in 1995, after years of looking at individual pixels advantage. for gamers was evident.
Unfortunately, the company quickly lost his grip and went bankrupt in early 2000. All of her valuable assets were sold to NVIDIA. The glorious past of 3dfx can be found here.
Graphics in games with the Voodoo graphics card was considered phenomenal by the standards of the 1990s
November 6, 2012, the company ARM has released details of a new architecture for mobile multi-core processors called big.LITTLE. Information about the new type of CPU was released after the conference after the conference, ARM Tech Con 2012. Today according to this principle are the chips in most smartphones and tablets.
The principle of operation architecture big.LITTLE
The essence of the concept lies in the fact that the mobile chip has two (or more) block of cores: voracious and powerful core come into work when scheduled high load, and the corresponding block of economical cores saves battery power in the case where device use is limited to phone scripts, reading books, watching videos or listening to music.
Due to alternating the blocks of the kernels achieved a balance between efficiency and power multi-core processors in smartphones and other mobile gadgets. This scheme of work illustrates the commercial.
For a long time, fine-tuned ARM architecture and not used in serial devices. The first smartphone on the chip with a new architecture became the flagship Samsung Galaxy S4 is its processor Exynos 5410, it was said, four efficient Cortex-A7 with a block of four productive cores Cortex-A15.
Samsung Galaxy S4 — the first production smartphone with a processor on the hybrid architecture