Sercan Külcü

Sercan Külcü

Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering, Giresun University

Blog Posts

Google Reveals Imagen

3 minute read

Published:

Google Research published the Imagen paper on May 23, 2022, alongside a website showing examples — but without releasing the model or a public API. Imagen combined a frozen 4.6-billion-parameter T5-XXL text encoder (the same language model used for NLP tasks) with a pipeline of three cascaded diffusion models: a base model generating 64×64 images from text, then two super-resolution diffusion models upscaling to 256×256 and 1024×1024. The T5-XXL encoder had been trained on text only, not image-text pairs, and Google’s finding was that using a large language model’s text representations as conditioning signals produced better text-image alignment than training a custom CLIP-style encoder specifically for image generation — suggesting that language understanding, not vision-specific training, drove Imagen’s prompt adherence. Read more

Generative Image Models Are Getting Hard To Ignore

1 minute read

Published:

Image generation from text has improved remarkably quickly. Systems such as DALL-E 2, announced by OpenAI this year, can create images from written descriptions with a level of coherence that would have looked much less convincing only a short time ago. Read more

Elon Musk Reaches an Agreement to Buy Twitter

3 minute read

Published:

Elon Musk disclosed a 9.2% stake in Twitter on April 4, 2022, making him the company’s largest shareholder, then reached an agreement to acquire Twitter for $54.20 per share — approximately $44 billion total — on April 25, 2022, after initially being offered a board seat. Musk financed the deal with $21 billion in equity (his own funds and co-investors including Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who committed $1 billion), a $12.5 billion margin loan against Tesla stock, and $13 billion in bank debt underwritten by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and others. Read more

How Can I Stay Up-to-date With New Technologies And Best Practices?

5 minute read

Published:

Software development changes quickly enough to make almost everyone feel behind sometimes. In early 2022, there is Rust gaining serious traction for systems work, TypeScript becoming the default for large JavaScript projects, Kubernetes appearing in most deployment discussions, and a growing set of AI-assisted coding tools that did not exist two years ago. Meanwhile, fundamentals like data structures, networking, and operating systems are unchanged. Read more

NVIDIA Introduces the Hopper GPU Architecture

2 minute read

Published:

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced the Hopper GPU architecture at GTC (GPU Technology Conference) on March 22, 2022, during a keynote delivered in a chip fab-styled theatrical setting featuring a life-size H100 GPU prop. The flagship H100 (die GH100) was manufactured on TSMC N4 (4nm class) and contained 80 billion transistors — 2.6× the transistor count of the Ampere A100 (54 billion on Samsung 8nm). H100 SXM5 (the high-performance server module) shipped with 80 GB HBM3 at 3.35 TB/s memory bandwidth (vs A100’s 80 GB HBM2e at 2.0 TB/s), and delivered approximately 3.35 TFLOPS BF16/FP16 dense training throughput (vs 312 TFLOPS for A100) — roughly a 3× improvement in raw training arithmetic. The 4th-generation Tensor Cores added FP8 support, and the Transformer Engine (a hardware-software co-design) automatically selected between FP8 and FP16 precision on a per-layer, per-tensor basis during transformer training — using FP8 where precision loss was acceptable (typically activations and gradients after normalization) and FP16 where it was critical (typically weights and output projections), without requiring model developers to manually annotate precision choices. Read more

Valve Releases the Steam Deck

2 minute read

Published:

Valve began shipping Steam Deck units on February 25, 2022, fulfilling reservations placed starting July 2021 in order of the $5 deposit queue (over 100,000 units were pre-ordered in the first 48 hours). The hardware was built around AMD’s “Van Gogh” APU (internally codenamed “Aerith”): a Zen 2 quad-core/8-thread CPU (2.4–3.5 GHz) paired with an RDNA 2 GPU with 8 compute units (1.0–1.6 GHz, 1.6 TFLOPS FP32), 16 GB LPDDR5 RAM in a unified memory architecture, and a 40 Whr battery providing roughly 2–8 hours depending on the game’s GPU load. Three models shipped: 64 GB eMMC at $399, 256 GB NVMe PCIe 3.0 at $529, and 512 GB NVMe at $649. The 7-inch 1280×800 IPS display ran at 60 Hz with 400 nits brightness. All models included the same APU and memory — only storage and screen coating differed. Read more

Microsoft Announces Its Plan to Acquire Activision Blizzard

3 minute read

Published:

Microsoft announced the acquisition of Activision Blizzard on January 18, 2022 for $68.7 billion in cash — $95 per share, a 45% premium over Activision’s closing price on January 14. If completed, it would be the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history and the largest in gaming history, surpassing Take-Two’s $12.7 billion acquisition of Zynga (also announced January 2022). Activision Blizzard’s portfolio included Call of Duty (the best-selling annual game franchise globally), World of Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, Candy Crush (King subsidiary), Hearthstone, and StarCraft. CEO Bobby Kotick, who was facing shareholder pressure over workplace misconduct allegations at Activision Blizzard, would eventually exit after closing. Read more

FAQ Of Student Software Engineers

5 minute read

Published:

Students who want to become software engineers ask many of the same questions. Here are the ones I hear most often, answered as directly as I can. Read more

Log4Shell Exposes the Risk of Ubiquitous Dependencies

2 minute read

Published:

The Log4Shell vulnerability was disclosed in December 2021 in Log4j, a Java logging library embedded in an enormous number of applications. The flaw became critical because a specially crafted string could trigger JNDI lookups that, in vulnerable configurations, led to remote code execution. Read more

AWS Announces Graviton3

2 minute read

Published:

Amazon Web Services announced Graviton3 at re:Invent 2021 (December 1, 2021, Las Vegas) as its third-generation custom Arm server processor. The chip used 64 Arm Neoverse V1 cores (a high-performance variant of the Armv8.4 ISA, compared to the Neoverse N1 cores in Graviton2) manufactured on TSMC’s N5 (5nm) process versus Graviton2’s TSMC 7nm. AWS claimed 25% better compute performance, 2× better floating-point performance, 2× better cryptography performance, and 3× better machine learning performance compared to Graviton2 (the last comparison due to Graviton3’s support for BF16 and INT8 matrix multiply instructions via Arm’s Scalable Vector Extension). Graviton3 was also the first AWS-designed chip with DDR5-4800 memory support — a full year before DDR5 became widely available in consumer desktop platforms — yielding 50% higher memory bandwidth than Graviton2’s DDR4. AWS claimed 60% better energy efficiency versus comparable x86-based EC2 instances in the same workload category. Read more

Windows 11 Is Released

2 minute read

Published:

Windows 11 released on October 5, 2021 as a free upgrade for eligible Windows 10 PCs, with a phased rollout that Microsoft controlled through hardware compatibility scoring — PCs meeting all requirements received a notification over weeks rather than all at once. The visual design replaced Windows 10’s left-anchored Start menu with a centered taskbar and Start button (repositionable to the left via settings), added rounded window corners, a redesigned Snap Layouts interface (Windows key + Z showing snap zone presets for 2–4 windows), and a new Widgets panel (news, weather, and calendar tiles). The Microsoft Store was rebuilt to accept Win32 applications (not only UWP apps), and Microsoft added DirectStorage API support — the same technology in Xbox Series X/S that allows the GPU to decompress NVMe SSD data directly, bypassing CPU and reducing game load times. Auto HDR automatically upgraded DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games to use HDR color on supported displays. Read more

Apple Introduces the A15 Bionic

2 minute read

Published:

Apple announced the A15 Bionic on September 14, 2021 with the iPhone 13 lineup: iPhone 13 ($799), 13 Mini ($699), 13 Pro ($999), and 13 Pro Max ($1,099). The A15 was manufactured on TSMC’s enhanced 5nm process (N5P), containing 15 billion transistors compared to the A14’s 11.8 billion. The CPU used 2 Avalanche high-performance cores and 4 Blizzard efficiency cores — Apple claimed 50% faster CPU performance than competitors at the time (targeting Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888, which used Samsung 5nm and measured roughly 30–35% behind the A15 in single-thread benchmarks). The 16-core Neural Engine delivered 15.8 TOPS, up from the A14’s 11 TOPS, supporting the new Cinematic Mode video feature. Read more

Grady Booch, A Pioneer Of Computing Technology

4 minute read

Published:

Grady Booch is one of the most influential people in the history of software engineering, but his contributions are sometimes reduced to “he helped create UML,” which understates both what he built and what he argued for. I want to give his work more space. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2021?

3 minute read

Published:

In 2021, it is difficult to find an important technology that does not involve computing. Cloud platforms run global services, artificial intelligence is entering more products, and the global semiconductor shortage has reminded everyone that software still depends on physical hardware. Read more

The Metaverse Is Still More Question Than Answer

5 minute read

Published:

The word “metaverse” comes from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, where it describes a persistent virtual world accessible through goggles — a shared space where people can walk, talk, and conduct business as avatars. The term has been sitting in technology culture since then, invoked occasionally, not quite arriving. Read more

Apple Announces CSAM Detection Plans

1 minute read

Published:

Apple announced plans in 2021 for child-safety features that included on-device detection of known child sexual abuse material before images were uploaded to iCloud Photos. The announcement immediately became one of the most difficult privacy debates in consumer technology. Read more

Some Of Popular Java Developers

4 minute read

Published:

Java has existed since 1995, and in 2021 it is releasing a new version every six months, with Java 17 arriving later this year as the next long-term support release. The language has changed significantly over that period — records, sealed classes, pattern matching, text blocks, and a new approach to concurrency through Project Loom are all reshaping what Java code looks like. Behind that evolution are people who made specific technical decisions that influenced how millions of developers think and write code. Read more

Steam Deck Is Announced

3 minute read

Published:

Valve announced the Steam Deck on July 15, 2021 and opened reservations the following day. The handheld PC came in three storage configurations: $399 (64 GB eMMC), $529 (256 GB NVMe), and $649 (512 GB NVMe). The device used a custom AMD APU — codenamed Aerith — with four Zen 2 CPU cores at up to 3.5 GHz, RDNA 2 graphics with 8 compute units, and 16 GB of unified LPDDR5 memory. The 7-inch 1280×800 touchscreen was rated at 60 Hz. First units shipped to customers beginning February 25, 2022. Read more