Samsung 11.8 tablet key for signal processing

The Samsung 11.8, information about which came out of the Apple lawsuit, is a good match for in-the-field scientific/data acquisition/NDT applications.  Why?  Because it will be the first tablet with an ARM Cortex-A15 processor, specifically the Samsung Exynos 5.

It's just an ARM processor, right?  ARM is extremely low power consumption, but mediocre computational performance, right?  Wrong -- ARM has grown up.  ARM has maintained its extreme low power consumption while catching up to Intel performance.  And the Cortex-A15 is a huge step forward in that regard.  It features NEON, which is the ARM equivalent to Intel MMX/SSE/AVX vector processing, which speeds up by multiples the signal and image processing used in scientific computing.  And the NEON in Cortex-A15 can do double-precision.  Oddly, the current generation Samsung Galaxy tablet, 10.1, dropped NEON even though its even older predecessor had it.  But the Samsung 11.8 Cortex-A15 NEON has 128-bit ALUs instead of the 64-bit ALUs that the earlier ARM NEON processors had.

The Samsung 10.1 has thus far escaped injunction from Apple, so there is hope the 11.8 will as well.  The iPad won't get Cortex-A15 until the iPad 5.  There is hope that the Samsung 11.8 will be unveiled tomorrow at the Unpacked event in Berlin.

C++ regex source string cannot be a temporary

regex is new to C++11 and was available via Boost before then.  In playing around with it, I could not figure out why the following worked sometimes, but not all the time:

// Bad code
smatch sm1;
regex_search(string("helloworld.jpg"), sm1,
             regex("(.*)jpg"));
cout << sm1[1] << endl;

Then, thanks to stackoverflow.com I learned that smatch retains just pointers to the source string "helloworld.jpg" and not actual substrings.  So when the temporary object string("helloworld.jpg") gets released, the smatch pointers are left pointing to released (and thus undefined) memory.

The correct code is:

// Good code
smatch sm1;
string s1("helloworld.jpg")
regex_search(s1, sm1, regex("(.*)jpg"));
cout << sm1[1] << endl;

Now, in real code you wouldn't pass a hard-coded temporary object, but during debug/development you might to test out how regex handles different scenarios, which is what I was trying to do when I ran into this.