The Dirty Secret Behind the Salesforce $1M Hackathon

The Dirty Secret Behind the Salesforce $1M Hackathon

Salesforce has finally responded to the allegations of cheating, which they have termed “questions about why the winning team was allowed to submit an app that may have used pre-existing code.” They reference this answer they provided on their discussion board in response to a participant who asked for clarification about the rule “The application you or your team submits must have been developed solely as part of this Hackathon”:

The intent of that provision is that submissions would not be apps that have been previously released or in development. Reusing code you may have written before is fine, provided that you were the author of that code, it doesn’t comprise the majority of your app and its use does not violate any third party’s rights. You could modify an existing product to integrate with Salesforce and submit that, however you’d be judged on just that component, not the pre-existing product (emphasis mine).

From what I can tell, Upshot, the winning team, already had their product built before the hackathon was announced, so at most they made their app “mobile” for the purpose of this hackathon.

Upshot did not build a native app. For them, making it a mobile app meant that their app, by which I mean website, can now be (if it couldn’t be before) opened on a mobile device and look okay. Kind of. You can tell it’s not even done very well, because in the video the graph is still wider than the width of the phone screen, and they had to pinch the screen to see all of it. In four weeks, they couldn’t get the graph on the primary screen to resize properly? From their submission: “Our mobile web app is built using HTML5.” Maybe they should also have used some CSS3! (Sorry, had to get that jab in there.)

They also sped up the footage of the actual demo. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that it was done just to save on time, but it sure has the nice effect of making a mobile website appear faster than it actually is.

So according to the rules then, they should have been judged on their shoddy implementation of a responsive website. Pretty sure implementing a responsive CSS grid system doesn’t rank anywhere on any of the judging criteria.

This is all moot, though. The judges can all claim plausible deniability that they had no idea what was implemented before or after the hackathon started, and no one’s going to go through Upshot’s commit logs, so Salesforce is just going to hang on to their straw man and wait for this to blow over.

But I’ll leave you with this: There are obviously a whole bunch of Salesforce users who think this Upshot reporting tool is a godsend, because creating and editing reports is such a pain in Salesforce. Yet the CTO of Upshot was the “Tech lead for Custom Report Types and many other reporting features” at Salesforce for, presumably, multiple years. You’d think his job description would include making creating and editing reports not such a pain. If I was Salesforce, I’d be pissed an employee was so bad at his job he left a gaping hole in the product, then he leaves and starts a company that conveniently fills that hole? Yet, Salesforce gives him a million dollars. Either Salesforce is an investor in Upshot, or they’re dumb.

Inside Metal: How Apple plans to unlock the secret graphics performance of the A7 chip

Feature

Among the surprises that Apple unveiled at WWDC 2014 is the company's new Metal framework and shader language, aimed at radically enhancing the hardware accelerated graphics potential of the A7 Application Processor powering the company's latest iOS devices.

Introduced during the WWDC Keynote by Apple's software chief Craig Federighi--who is said to be a particular fan of metal rock--Metal as a technology applies to the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) of Apple's new 64-bit A7 Application Processor used in its newest iOS devices: iPhone 5s, iPad Air and Retina iPad mini.

The new technology's name actually derives from the fact that it provides "close to the metal" graphics performance by slimming down the overhead imposed by existing graphics libraries like OpenGL. Metal speeds up 3D rendering and general compute tasks while freeing up the CPU to handle additional work, such as more sophisticated physics modeling or audio processing in video games, for example.

In an initial WWDC session devoted to Metal, Apple's GPU software engineer Jeremy Sandmel stated, "we're incredibly excited" to outline the new technology for developers, noting that "we believe it's literally going to be a game changer for you, your applications and for iOS."

Note that the engineer presenting Metal wasn't speaking eloquent marketing language to a crowd of potential customers; he was outlining new technology that developers can use to gain dramatic increases in performance, something that will benefit their apps and Apple's ecosystem. If it doesn't benefit developers' apps enough for them to use it, Metal won't benefit Apple either.

We will soon see whether Metal is a meaningless marketing term like "Intel Inside," that was just invented to sell otherwise undifferentiated hardware, or whether it is a truly new technology that people notice because it is producing a new class of mobile games that can't be matched elsewhere.

So far, Apple has already taken over the high end of mobile video games, with lots of exclusive titles that aren't available on Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone (and in the future, won't be available on Tizen). That fact that Android doesn't get many high end games is well known enough for AnandTech to observe with rather brutal honesty that "the games that benefit the most from Metal are also the games least likely to be on Android."

Radical new hardware needs radical new software

In the desktop PC world, Macs and Windows PCs have incrementally delivered performance jumps by installing faster and faster CPUs paired with video cards outfitted with increasingly faster dedicated GPUs. Apple's new Mac Pro actually pairs two fast GPUs alongside the main CPU as standard equipment, with one GPU dedicated to video performance and other available for advanced rendering tasks and general compute acceleration. All three processors are cooled by a central heat sink (below).

However, under iOS and the constraints of mobile design--where battery life, heat dissipation and a compact thermal envelope and are critically important--there's a need for rethinking how the latest blazing-fast GPUs are driven. To deliver impressive mobile graphics, a more specialized approach is required because the pure horsepower of a desktop machine is physically too big.Under iOS and the constraints of mobile design--where battery life, heat dissipation and a compact thermal envelope are critically important--there's a need for rethinking how the latest blazing-fast GPUs are driven

Additionally, today's mobile GPUs are now so fast that the CPU cores often have trouble feeding graphics tasks to them fast enough. Once the CPU cores are maxed out, the GPU is left sitting idle, waiting for new work to be dispatched to it by the CPU.

In this area, the general purpose design of OpenGL is reaching the limits of what it can do, largely because it hogs up so much time on the CPU with tasks like state validation and GPU shader compilation.

That's the case particularly in the field of video games, where the target frame rate needs to consistently remain high in order to deliver a fluid experience.

It's also important in the realm of general compute functions, including tasks like encryption or audio and video processing. Apple hasn't yet made OpenCL available for public developer access on its mobile devices, but Metal solves that problem too, because it works with both GPU and "GPGPU" (General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units) tasks.

With Metal, Apple has targeted the overhead baggage of OpenGL for bypassing with a highly optimized new framework to allow mobile developers to coax the best possible performance from its new A7 (and of course, future A-series chips using the same types of advanced GPU technology).

Precompiling GPU code with the Metal Shader Language

Metal works in part by identifying the tasks that can precompiled in advance so they they can execute without delay at runtime. This involves Apple's new Metal Shader Language, which is used to write "shaders," the specialized computer programs designed to be rapidly run by a GPU.

Initially, a GPU shader described how to apply the smooth shades of color needed to create realistic surfaces on a 3D model. In today's more general terms, a shader can be any sort of image or video processing, from calculating the geometries of an animated 3D model, to rendering individual pixels of a scene, or creating a motion blur effect to an existing frame of video. Shaders can also be used to package general computational tasks for rapid execution on the GPU.

Apple's new shader language for Metal defines both typical GPU graphics operations as well as general compute functions, using the same data structures and resources for both to make things easy and constant for developers. This makes it an efficient, A7-optimized alternative to both OpenGL and OpenCL.

Like Swift, the new programming language Apple created to enhance the compiling performance of code built around Cocoa frameworks, the equally new Metal Shader Language is designed to compile shader code efficiently via LLVM and, whenever possible, in advance of runtime.

For example, a video game could deliver precompiled Metal shaders within its app that are ready to run on the A7's GPU immediately without further processing. By precompiling as much of the shader code as possible, the CPU is freed from having to compile it during game play, saving precious milliseconds of processing time that can now be used for other tasks. By precompiling as much of the shader code as possible, the CPU is freed from having to compile it during game play, saving precious milliseconds of processing time that can now be used for other tasks.

The more general-purpose OpenGL is designed to compile shader object code on the CPU into GPU machine code before it can run. This enables it to support a wide variety of different GPUs, each of which needs to have the required shaders compiled specific to its chip architecture.

This is comparable to the cross platform "Just In Time" interpreting architecture that JavaScript uses to run HTML5 apps on different browsers running on different hardware, or that Java and Android's Java-like Dalvik Virtual Machine use to run code across a widely fragmented array of hardware.

The downside to running everywhere is that the code doesn't run particularly fast anywhere. Code optimized for a particular architecture inherently runs faster and can be optimized further. Even when running cross-platform is important, such as for a ubiquitous service like Facebook, native apps have proven to be far superior to web apps. In video games, where performance is paramount, optimized native code is quite obviously even more critically important. That's the role of Metal in iOS 8.

Metal readied for A7, A7 ready for Metal

In addition to compiling many shaders in advance of runtime, Metal also works to strip away much of the overhead imposed by the general purpose structure of OpenGL, particularly with respect to "state vector," or all of the details associated with each draw call prepared by the CPU and handed to the GPU. This process involves a lot of expensive "bureaucracy" under OpenGL.

Because Metal is optimized specifically to run code on Apple's A7, it doesn't have to deal with all of the various differences in competing GPU designs. That allows Metal to focus exclusively on building and optimizing code targeting the A7's unique architecture. At the same time, Apple is also adding new support for modern GPU features, enabling developers to access more cool new stuff while dealing with less legacy overhead related to supporting outdated architecture cruft.

This hyper-optimization of Metal is possible because Apple develops its own Application Processor chip designs and then standardizes the tens of millions of its latest devices to all use the same hardware. While Apple has customized Metal to wring every drop of performance out of the new A7, it also designed the A7 specifically to excel at running Metal code optimized by the LLVM compiler.

One of the most perplexing conundrums of the iPhone 5c Failure Myth, which insists that Apple was upset to find that it was selling mostly higher end iPhone 5s models rather than its middle tier model, is that the iPhone 5s not only costs more, but also installs a new A7 user. The more higher-end A7-powered phones Apple can sell, the faster and easier it can keep itself differentiated ahead of the "carrier friendly, good enough" sort of models that its competitors are pushing to achieve volume sales.

That's because A7 devices can do things that yesterday's 32-bit chips paired with value engineered ARM Mali integrated graphics can't. And a large installed base of A7-class iPhones and iPads will create a market for A7-optimized apps. Metal is one of the technologies Apple is using to advance the A7's lead even further, creating a stark contrast in sophistication for buyers to notice.

In addition to the surprise of delivering a modern, 64-bit ARMv8 CPU architecture paired with an advanced 6series Rogue GPU, Apple's A7 also incorporates an integrated memory architecture between its CPU and CPU cores. This allows Metal to coordinate the CPU's feeding of the GPU with instructions without needing to constantly pass data back and forth between a central system cache and a dedicated graphics cache.

Apple didn't announce any of that when the A7 was first introduced. Not even the experts at Chipworks could identify what all the silicon on the A7 was doing (above), and there continues to be some controversy about why the A7 would need "over one billion transistors."

The A7's billion transistors puts it in the same category as Sun's UltraSparc T3 16-core server CPU (really). A 6-core Gulftown Intel Core i7 has 1.17 billion transistors. An Intel Core 2 Duo has 291 million, while the original Macintosh was powered by a Motorola 68000 with a mere 68,000.

It turns out that Apple had all sorts of big surprises up its sleeve, and it kept a very straight face while a series of clowns began issuing their ignorant opinions about what they thought the A7 was.

A series of big surprises from Apple's A7

Recall that when Apple first introduced the iPhone 5s' advanced A7 chip, it was first greeted with media skepticism wondering if it was even "truly 64-bit," followed by a communal (and wholly incorrect) story that suggested 64-bit mobile chips didn't matter until devices had "4GB of addressable RAM," and that, in the most extremely ignorant coverage, the A7 was "marketing fluff and won't improve performance."

Meanwhile, there were additional months of unanimous media agreement that the power of the A7 "wasn't even necessary" for a mobile device, and that the real excitement of the mobile industry instead revolved around Google's efforts to make very low priced Motorola devices as well as Google's plans to scale back its previously ambitious plans for Android 5.0 to instead deliver Android 4.4 KitKat with the primary goal of running on low end products (albeit only ones sold in the last 18 months, excluding even its own Galaxy Nexus).

It wasn't just Google that was focusing Android on the low end. Throughout 2013, Apple's primary rival Samsung was shipping the majority of its "smartphones" as low end devices, eroding its "Galaxy" brand from meaning "premium iPhone-class devices" to instead referring to virtually everything it sold with Android on it, mostly low end products that are less sophisticated than Apple's now entry level iPhone 4 from 2010.

Apple was laying the foundation for a series of advances in secret while media pundits and financial analysts were collectively agreeing with each other that Apple was "no longer innovating" throughout most of 2013, just because those individuals weren't aware of what was going on.

The new architecture of the A7 already delivers a significant performance boost when running existing OpenGL code (as shown below, running GFXBench).

Now, after selling tens of millions of A7-equipped devices, Apple is revealing that its mysterious A7 chip has a radically untapped potential to deliver--via the new Metal--graphics performance that's ten times greater than even its already impressive OpenGL benchmarks originally indicated.

Additionally, the company signaled to its WWDC attendees that they have a window of opportunity to build Metal-enhanced games and other apps that in a few short months will have a broad installed base of tens of millions of iOS 8 users bearing A7 brains. Apple didn't trumpet any of this, because it wanted to make sure that Samsung, Google and everyone else using Android kept on cranking out yesterday's 32-bit phones with no attention to delivering an installed base of mobile devices with advanced graphics capabilities.

Samsung likes to tout the high (2.5GHz) clock rate and "eight cores" of its latest Galaxy S5. However, the device still uses either Adreno graphics or ARM Mali graphics (depending on where the model is sold.) Not only do both versions deliver only basic graphics performance, but the split divides the installed base for either chip architecture, making it difficult to impossible for Samsung to get developers to really coax the full performance from either one with some specialized software similar to Apple's Metal.

Unlike Apple's flagship iPhone 5s which makes up the majority of the company's smartphone sales, Samsung's Galaxy S5 represents only a fraction of the smartphones it sells. Even if Samsung decided right this instant to copy Apple, it would still be a year behind in starting to install a user base of smartphone customers with A7-class hardware.

While Samsung is widely known to be over a year behind in delivering a 64-bit CPU, it's also at least as far behind in building an installed base of advanced GPUs too. And the fractured way that Samsung (and every other Android licensee) rolls out new technology is much slower. In stark contrast, next year most of Apple's installed base will have 64-bit CPUs paired with advanced PowerVR 6series GPU graphics.

Rapidly creating a large installed base of mobile devices with advanced hardware (far superior to its existing peers) is what made the iPhone App Store wildly successful while at the same time making other platforms like Palm OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian look old and saggy. Customers noticed the cool new iOS software and apps, but it was Apple's great leap in hardware that was exclusively able to power that software. The A7 is both literally and figuratively a game changer.

Android's ability to match (and often exceed) the hardware sophistication of Apple's iPhones has allowed it to catch up. But over the past two years, Android has been cultivating a mass market volume play, rather than keeping pace with Apple's high end mobile devices.

That's most obviously the case in the Application Processor's CPU and GPU features, and that's clearly why Apple has been investing so much into creating its own proprietary chip designs capable of staying far ahead of the status quo. The A7's sophistication goes beyond processing speed to also greatly enhance camera performance and integrate a secure implementation of Touch ID.

For "smartphones" that are used as basic feature phones, or tablets that are primarily used as personal TVs, the A7's advantages won't matter much. But for the cream of the mobile market, a premium segment that plays video games and cares about powerful mobile apps (segments that include education, government, and corporate enterprise), the A7 is both literally and figuratively a game changer.

Who's going to listen to Metal?

There's no need to worry that the gaming industry is going to abandon OpenGL for Metal. Many large games developers often do try to reach the largest audiences with their apps, something that ostensibly precludes them from adopting Apple-specific technologies, including Swift or Metal. Most of these will certainly continue to use OpenGL along with similarly platform-agnostic gaming frameworks (like Unity) that allow them to target both iOS and Android (as well as the current majority of iOS devices that lack an A7-class chip).

However, for developers who want to stand out in the App Store, Metal promises a dramatic, order-of-magnitude improvement in performance, delivering frame rates, creature swarms and new levels of gaming sophistication that would be impossible without the specialized Metal framework even on the A7, let alone the grab bag of low end, "good enough" GPUs present on the majority of Android phones.

The decision to support Metal isn't necessarily all or nothing; the A7 installed base is already large enough to be able to entice developers to create a Metal-enhanced port of their existing titles to offer an optimized version for A7-equipped devices.

For example, a developer like Epic Games--which brought its Unreal Engine to iOS to deliver a trio of "Infinity Blade" games (below) that each launched exclusively for iOS--Metal offers a new way to deliver even more impressive, iOS-exclusive titles.

Epic founder and Unreal co-creator Tim Sweeney appeared on stage during the WWDC keynote to show off the Metal-enhanced Unreal Engine 4 in a demo title named "Zen Garden," created entirely to display an outrageous number of drifting cherry blossom petals, an unreal swarm of koi fish, and throngs of thousands of interactive, flittering butterflies.

Electronic Arts, well known as a cross platform games developer, also appeared on stage to demonstrate its own Frostbite, a "console level" graphics engine that it said it did not anticipate being able to directly port to a mobile device. Thanks to Metal, it can. In a Metal demonstration of its latest installment of "Plants vs. Zombies," EA noted at one point that there were "1.3 million triangles on the screen."

Crytek demonstrated its Metal-enhanced version of "The Collectables," capable of "4,000 draw calls per frame." In the game, users navigate a team of mercenaries through a battlefield where exploding vehicles can throw over a hundred chunks of debris into the air as they explode, delivering an immersive new level of gameplay.

Thanks to Apple's new era of openness surrounding WWDC, additional details about Metal and its the new Metal Shader Language are available for any developers interested in implementing Metal's features to get the best performance possible on Apple's latest gear.

The Key To Making Smart Money Decisions

I bet you’d like to make wiser decisions about money and get better at making your retirement portfolio grow.

There’s one way to do it that doesn’t require becoming an investing savant or getting a certified financial planner’s license: Figure out your life values then manage the way you spend, save and borrow accordingly. If you have a spouse or partner, multiply this advice times two.

Take the LifeValues Quiz

My suggestion for sussing out what really matters to you is to take the free interactive online LifeValues Quiz on the Smartaboutmoney.org site and complete the accompanying LifeValues Exercises, which help you see how your childhood affects your current relationship to money. Smartaboutmoney.org is operated by the nonprofit National Endowment for Financial Education, or NEFE, and designed to help people make sound financial decisions.

(Next Avenue’s “What’s Behind Your Financial Decisions?” has a link to the 20-question quiz, one of the most popular features on Smartaboutmoney.org.)

The LifeValues quiz and exercises were created by social psychologist Lois A. Vitt, chair and founding director of the Institute for Socio-Financial Studies in Charlottesville, Va. They’re somewhat similar to the Interactive Money Mind Analyzer created by The Money Code author Joe John Duran, which I recently blogged about.

(MORE: The Secret to Financial Happiness)

In case you think Vitt’s work sounds a little touchy-feely, it’s worth noting that she formerly supervised financial advisers and says she was the nation’s first female mortgage loan officer.

Part of a Growing Money Psychology Movement

And other money experts echo the importance of marrying your values to your financial planning.

Chris Farrell, economics editor for APM’s Marketplace Money and a regular contributor to Next Avenue, says you must know your values to plan for retirement wisely. There’s even a Financial Therapy Association, whose website has a directory of pros you can hire to deal with your money-psych issues.

“I think financial advisers are moving in this direction,” says Patricia Seaman, NEFE’s senior director of marketing and communications. “Knowing the values of their clients provides a more complete understanding of them.”

How the LifeValues Quiz Can Help You

After using Vitt’s system to score your life values, you may be surprised at the results — I was. They may cause you to rethink the way you manage your money.

And if you’re married or in a serious relationship and both of you complete the drill, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll wind up having fewer fights over household finances.

“Usually when couples take the quiz and the values-framed exercise," Vitt says, "they see each other through new eyes and better understand where each of them is coming from.”

The 4 Key LifeValues

Vitt’s quiz measures the true importance to you of four values, assigning points to every answer; the higher your score in a category, the more you care about that value. A “high” LifeValues score means that nine or more of your answers matched the category; a “low” score means four or fewer did. The values are:

Inner LifeValues These are personal, psychological and spiritual questions that get at your desire for security, control over your life and the need to achieve. Vitt says your inner values can help you survive a sudden money crunch that blindsides you.

Social LifeValues These deal with the importance you place on family, friends and community. Your social values are revealed, partly, by how strongly you feel about providing for others and, if you’re in a relationship, whether you budget jointly and share expenses.

Physical LifeValues These might not be what you expect. They’re about what Vitt calls “the tangible aspects of life” and range from your health to your desire for comfort at home to how much the style of clothes and cars matters to you before buying those items.

Financial LifeValues They reveal what you think or believe about money and how you value what it can do for you. These values are unrelated to the amount of money you have and don’t necessarily reflect how much you know about finances. They get at how much you’re concerned about whether you have enough money, how long it will last and if you’re making smart financial decisions.

(MORE: The Holistic Approach to Retirement Planning)

What Your Quiz Results Mean

There are no right or wrong answers to the LifeValues quiz. “Certain values matter more to some people than others,” Vitt says.

Some people don’t care about money, she notes, and they typically score low for financial values in the quiz. Those with high scores for physical values tend to be creative and are “the kind of people who like the lines of a car, but don’t care how it runs,” Vitt says. Teachers, firefighters, doctors, nurses and others who Vitt calls “helpers of humanity” tend to have high social scores. If you have a very high score for inner values, she says, “you want to control people and might be a megalomaniac.”

The Quiz Can Show Reflections and Mismatches

After taking the quiz, you may find your scores can serve as a reminder about the things that matter most and least. Then you can shape your financial decisions accordingly or, as Clayton Christensen, author of How Will You Measure Your Life? says, “allocate your resources properly.”

Seaman, the project manager who turned Vitt’s work into the interactive quiz on Smartaboutmoney.org, says her results reflected a mirror image of herself.

“I got a high score for financial values, a middle score for inner and social values and a low score for physical values,” she says. “I wasn’t too surprised about the low physical score. We moved into our house four years ago and still have paint swatches on the wall because I haven’t made a decision about them yet.”

(MORE: What’s Your Money Mind?)

After taking the quiz, you might, however, discover a mismatch between your values and your financial situation that requires remedying. “If you find you really love comfort but don’t make enough money for the lifestyle you want," Vitt says, "you can say: 'OK, I have two choices. I can reduce my lifestyle needs or I can save more money and plan to manage my finances better.'"

If you score low for financial values, you may want to hire a financial planner who’ll devote more attention to your money than you do.

Have Your Adult Children Take the Quiz

As useful as the LifeValues quiz is for people in their 40s, 50s and 60s, I think that if you’re a parent with adult children, you might want to have them complete it, too. Then talk with your grown kids about their results.

You may discover they score so low on financial values that you should educate them about the importance of budgeting, saving and debt or perhaps hook them up with a money pro.

How I Scored on the LifeValues Quiz

As for my scores, well, Vitt thinks my high figure for financial values makes sense since I’m the editor of the Money & Security and Work & Purpose channels for Next Avenue. “I’d be surprised if that score wasn’t high, because you think about finances a lot," she says.

But Vitt was a little concerned about my low score for inner values. “That’s unusual,” she said. “Most people have inner values higher than yours.” Guess I may need to give myself a values check.

Eisenberg is the senior Web editor of the Money & Security and Work & Purpose channels of Next Avenue. Follow Richard on Twitter @richeis315.

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