Jon Peddie Back Pages - It's all about the pixels

The overal CG market will exceed $100 billion in 2014

Posted by Jon Peddie on August 26th 2011 | Discuss
Tags: market graphics mobile software

The computer graphics industry has been a growth industry since it was established the late 1970s. Weathering the storms of the recession of 2009, the CG industry is back on track and showing new invigorated vitality and potential. Computer graphics hardware market reached $53 billion in 2010 and should exceed $67 billion in 2011. The market for CG software was worth $13 billion in 2010 (not counting services, maintenance and other related businesses). CG software is expected to grow to $14.8 billion in 2011 as the industry shakes off the remaining effects of the recession and customers start replacing software tools.…

Discretes are dead–long live discretes

Posted by Jon Peddie on August 9th 2011 | Discuss
Tags: gpu nvidia amd market graphics cpu

The death of discrete GPUs by integrated graphics has been predicted every year for the past ten years and every year for the past ten years, the reports of death have been highly exagerated — even this year. If you look over time at the ratio of discrete GPUs to integrated GPUs (including the embedded GPUs in CPUs like Fusion and Sandy Bridge) you can see an obvious trend. (I’m using the term “GPU” liberally to represent all graphics controller/processors. In reality, we didn’t have GPUs prior to 2001.) But what the chart doesn’t show is the effect of a discrete…

How remote can we get

Posted by Webmaster on July 28th 2011 | Discuss
Tags: ati mobile tablets media pc

In our future world, which seems to arrive every day we are at first amazed by the newest development and then soon jaded and waiting for the next. We live Moore’s law, only faster. (I wonder if Gordon Moore lives Moore’s law, now that’d be ironic.) We know our future world will be one where everything that uses electricity and most things that have warm blood will be connected to the Internet. That will be so we can communicate with them, and they with each other. My car will have conversations with my media server and my calendar and they will…

The Wintel hegemony in the PC industry may be ebbing

Posted by Jon Peddie on July 11th 2011 | Discuss
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With announcement at CES by Microsoft that Windows 8 will run on ARM, thereby enabling another processor to run Microsoft applications, the world shifted. That was the promise with Windows NT back in 1993 when Microsoft declared it would run on the popular processors of the time which were Alpha, AMD64, IBM, Intel MIPS, and Motorola. That didn’t quite happen. Now Microsoft seeing the extraordinary growth of ARM-based mobile phones, and having tried three times to get into that market, has declared that Windows 8 and associate applications (like the Office suite) will run on ARM, and x86. So far MIPS…

We are in thrall and enslaved by the carriers ... So what are we going to do about it?

Posted by Jon Peddie on June 30th 2011 | Discuss
Tags: apple mobile windows microsoft computers

I recently got a new phone, a Motorola Droid X2 to be precise. I have a few other phones, a Nokia N95, an iPhone, and a Sony Ericsson Xperia Play. Because of tariffs and roaming charges I maintain a US phone (that was the iPhone’s job) and a European phone (the N95). The N95 has a SIM and a SD slot, and a removable battery. But it’s older technology, and the N95 has the lame Symbian OS—time to move on. So the Xperia Play has become my international phone. That took nothing more than moving the SIM from the N95 to…

Faster than a speeding bullet or Moore’s law

Posted by Jon Peddie on June 15th 2011 | Discuss
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Ever since the GPU up-ended the FLOPS curve and pointed it skyward we’ve been measuring ourselves by how we’re moving erlative to Moore’s law GPU technology is moving faster than the development of process technology that fuels the products that accelerate us ahead. But what’s accelerating faster than semiconductor technology? Social networks and bandwidth (notice I did not mention software development, which can’t seem to keep up with Moore’s law). What’s running almost at the speed-of-light is information and even faster than that, the speed of thought. You can find several metrics for it—the number of emails, the number of SMS…

Looking into things

Posted by Jon Peddie on June 3rd 2011 | Discuss
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As I was registering at the Dimension3 stereovision conference in Paris last week I did a double take when I looked at a large (42-inch) display next to the counter that was showing a black and white image of a woman and table behind her and man in a chair behind the table. It was a beautiful image with at least 1024-shades of grey and looked like a window into a room—the depth was incredible. It was an Alioscopy multi-view display and it was captivating. I know the Alioscopy people and what they make and so I had to move back…

Psst buddy, wanna free story?

Posted by Kathleen Maher on May 24th 2011 | Discuss
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As we were putting this issue together The Burson-Marsteller FaceGate scandal was just breaking. At the time it seemed like a very big deal, but as of print time, the stench is already evaporating. I’m not quite ready to give it up though. To recap: Apparently Facebook hired marketing firm Burson-Marstellers to place negative stories about Google’s So- cial Networking technology. When the news broke, Burson-Marstellers were so appalled at themselves that they said they’d never do a thing like this, except this time, and they haven’t the faint- est idea what possessed them to do it (outside a bunch of…

Tablet sale; the benefits of being a late adopter

Posted by Jon Peddie on May 18th 2011 | Discuss
Tags: market tablets amazon

Last week’s announcements about new tablets, were hardly news. There are announcements every week now about new tablets. The latest announcement from Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos saying his company will release a tablet based on Google’s Android platform just seemed to ratchet up the silliness quotient. In an interview with Consumer Reports, Bezos said to “stay tuned” on the company’s plans for a multipurpose tablet product. He suggested that such a device would supplement but not replace the popular Kindle. Bring ‘em on. As the number of suppliers proliferate in a mad rush for market share, prices will plummet as feature…

The death of dead

Posted by Jon Peddie on May 3rd 2011 | Discuss
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We're only a third of the way into 2011 and already it's been marked with tremendous and sometimes horrendous events; earthquakes, tornados, civilian uprisings, killings by terrorists and the killing of a terrorist, and changes in consumer attitudes and buying patterns. And yet in the midst of all this turmoil AMD, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and others have managed to report record quarters and helped lift the DJIA past 12,800 while slowly adding jobs. Still with all the good news, and there's plenty even in face of national disasters and man's cruelty to man, there are those who see their role in…