Jon Peddie Blogs

Gaming PCs and consoles; those damn numbers

Posted by Jon Peddie on August 24th 2010 | Discuss (1)
Categories: Blogs, Games
Tags: pc gaming console shipments console gaming pcs vs. consoles game developers gaming machines

Someone said you can make statistics prove anything you want and that person is right. It all comes down to what you use for definitions of the item under scrutiny.  It also has to do with how you count things. The PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA) recently put out a press-release that stated, “Annual shipment volumes for the PC Gaming hardware market in 2009 were over two times larger than the combined Wii, PlayStation  2, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 console units shipped in the same period. They then estimated the worldwide number of consumers gaming with discrete graphics solutions on their…

Quadrillions and Quadrillions of Cycles

Posted by Jon Peddie on July 24th 2010 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: rendering, processors, cloud computing,

The number of processors, both x86 and GPU, available for rendering has been increasing exponentially. Rendering is one of the applications that can soak up all the cycles that are available to it, which is an example of Peddie’s first law – In computer graphics, too much is not enough. We looked at the installed base of x86 and GPU processors, applied a factor for the average number of cores and developed the following chart. Cores alone don’t tell the whole story, the real measure is how millions of operations per second can the processor execute. A general figure of merit…

The New Visualization

Posted by Jon Peddie on July 10th 2010 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, VIZ-SIM
Tags: nvidia ati amd radeon eyefinity 3d surround quadro large scale visualization add-in-boards evans & sutherland

In order to design automobiles, airplanes, search for oil (or contain it), and examine artifacts like a 2000-year-old mummy, large scale visualization systems are needed.Visualization system can mean different things to different people so a little definition is required to avoid confusion and controversy.I make a distinction between large-scale and localized visualization systems. A localized system, by my definition, is a single monitor used by an investigator and may be shown to colleagues, on occasion. Visualization systems employing voxels for medical research is a typical example, as are individual product lifecycle management (PLM) visualization systems. Visualization systems are also often confused…

Nintendo goes with DMP for S3D graphics engine

Posted by Jon Peddie on June 20th 2010 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: nintendo, 3ds, 3d, gaming, stereographic, autostereoscopic

Today, DMP announced in Japan that Nintendo has adopted DMP OpenGL ES 1.1 compliant PICA200 for the 3DS. The new Nintendo 3DS is an amazing little device. The DS has already been a beloved machine attracting over 100 million users since 2004. Not many products (that I can think of, at least) can match that volume of enthusiasm or the customer base. And it’s self perpetuating because the installed base attracts developers which create new games which attracts new consumers – it is a perfect ecosystem. Nintendo has experimented with S3D for years, starting with the Nintendo Virtual Boy monochrome system, and…

E3 Press event – press need not attend

Posted by Jon Peddie on June 16th 2010 | Permalink
Categories: General Interest, Show reports
Tags:

Against my better judgment I went to E3 two days early so I could attend the “press events” of the console companies. These events are often associated with some form (ahem) of entertainment. They are also oversubscribed, overcrowded, and usually uninformative. Why then are these megamillion dollar extravaganzas held? What’s the ROI for Microsoft, Nintendo, or Sony? Good question. It’s a matter of impressions PR people live for and get measured by the number of impressions they deliver for the dollar. An impression is measured by taking the readership of a magazine, website, radio show, etc, and dividing the costs of…

Playing with six monitors—is that a “full deck?”

Posted by Jon Peddie on March 8th 2010 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Content Creation
Tags: ati amd eyefinity multi-monitor mt. tiburon testing

Here at Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs we’re testing a lot of stuff as usual. However, the one system that will get a lot of attention from us and our readers is the six-headed ATI-based EyeFinity. The system consists of six 22-inch 1920 x 1080 displays - yes, that’s 5760 x 2160 resolution in a 3 x 2 array 61 x 24 inches, backed up by a 2GB GDDR5 graphics board, running on a 3.7GHz 4GB RAM, SSD, Nehalem system, with of course, great sound. When the system is first brought to life it is six duplicate displays The next step is…

Jon’s tortuous path to the iPhone

Posted by Jon Peddie on February 11th 2010 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, General Interest
Tags:

I proudly consider myself a geek and an early adopter. When the slick N95 from Nokia first came out I knew I had to have one. The unit wasn’t yet available in the United States, but that wasn’t going to be a problem for me. My colleague and longtime friend’s daughter in England works for Vodafone and Vodafone was the carrier that was offering the N95.I had long used two mobile phones, one for the US and one for rest of the world because the US had been so late to adopt the higher-speed digital systems like GSM and 3G. The…

Intel Will Never Buy Nvidia

Posted by Jon Peddie on December 9th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags:

Someone just sent me an email and asked if I thought Intel might buy Nvidia now that Larrabee is dead. I would have just answered it and then disregarded it if I hadn’t gotten a phone call asking the same dumb question. Intel won’t buy Nvidia for the following reasons: Larrabee isn’t dead - there will be a Larrabee graphics chip, based on x86 architecture. There will be a whole family of Larrabee chips. Wishful thinking won’t make Intel or its ambitions go away. The company has, and continues to make, huge investments in the graphics technology and space. Intel believes…

Larrabee past, present, future

Posted by Jon Peddie on December 6th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: amd intel larrabee cpus gpus

“Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we hoped to be at this point in the project,” said Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffe. “As a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product.” (December 4, 2009.) After three years of bombast, Intel shocked the world by canceling Larrabee. Instead of launching the chip in the consumer market, Intel will make it available as a software development platform for both internal and external developers. Those developers can use it to develop software that can run in high-performance computers. The following is an excerpt from an…

Nvidia and Starting the Next Age of Super Computing

Posted by Jon Peddie on October 7th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: nvidia opencl directx cuda compute fermi

“I believe that we need something big and new every four years or so.” – Jen Hsun Huang Nvidia has been planning to be in the super computer business for the past three years. The company has had stellar growth since the internet melt down in 2001, and it has come to dominate almost every market it has entered, but Nvidia is now facing limited growth opportunities in its classical markets and new competition. Its main rival for graphics chips ATI has renewed itself with a winning and very challenging price/performance product design and positioning. Nvidia’s integrated chip business is declining…

Siggraph!

Posted by Jon Peddie on August 10th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: General Interest, Show reports
Tags: graphics siggraph rendering jon peddie

For a recession, in an off-the-beaten-track southern city, in the dead of summer, Siggraph had a robust turnout, My guess was that about 18k pixel-loving souls made the trek, but the actual count was a little over 11k. I saw a lot of old friends, some from Japan, some from Redmond,  some from Holland, France, and Finland – so the show was enough of a magnet for some people to make that kind of time and money investment in these challenging economic times. The emerging technologies had its usual array of wacky wonderful weird things; one of the most impressive was a huge feathery…

Chaos in stereovision land

Posted by Jon Peddie on May 28th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, The Market
Tags:

This is moment of great opportunity I’ve been attending and speaking at stereovision conferences for the past year or so. As a matter of fact, I just spent three days in Paris at the Dimension3 Conference and Expo where there was a lot of great information shared by people actually trying to make stereovision work. As it turns out I have a lot to say about the subject having worked in and with stereo for several decades. As I and others have reported there are conflicting proposed standards in the cinema, for the TV, the PC, and handheld devices. All four…

My life on free; why Gutenberg and a bunch of monks are rolling in their graves

Posted by Jon Peddie on May 24th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, The Market
Tags:

Let me tell what I did for a few hours today. I opened up a short story I wrote seven years ago. I used Open Office Writer, a free and very powerful, fully compatible, word-processor to do do my edits. Then I went to Wordpress and registered for a blog page. Then I installed in my free Firefox web browser (I have three actually, Firefox, Opera, and Safari) a tool for converting from “word” files to HTML for blog entries, called ScribeFire. I took my word-processor file, which I had saved in Word 2007 format and and dropped it in Scribefire.…

Rating of AIBs and motherboards and the new consumer

Posted by Jon Peddie on April 20th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Benchmarking
Tags: nvidia amd aib motherboards benchmarking

We have all seen the excellent work various web site and analysts (including us) have done over the years in comparing the latest graphics AIBs, and more recently the new graphics enabled motherboards. Some have been more thorough than others, but all contain performance measurements from 3Dmark/Vantage and/or FPS in game play. And for the high-end game enthusiast where performance is everything, that’s enough. But is it enough for the rest of us? Now that the world is starting to come out of the financial shock of 2008 we (analyst types) can see that there will be a new consumer for…

Ion arrives

Posted by Jon Peddie on April 7th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, The Market
Tags: nvidia notebooks acer lowcost pc

We have just learned that the illegitimate, and subsequently abandoned child of Creüsa, daughter of Erechtheus and wife of Xuthus, Ion, has been seen in Taiwan hiding in a slick looking blue box that… What?  Oh. Never mind, wrong Ion. Let’s start over.   The dark chocolate found in stores all over Greece is being melted into a new blue box from…  OK, I got this time – don’t interrupt me again. Acer is going to build a really slick little blue box with a positively or negatively charged atom in it, and a regular Atom, which Acer will call AspireRevo.…

The hammer falls – Intel hits AMD and Nvidia – who’s next?

Posted by Jon Peddie on March 18th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, The Market
Tags:

Intel hits AMD and Nvidia 64-bit x86 could be withdrawn -  this is MAD. Remember all those clever comments about how Intel is a hammer so everything looks like a nail to them? Well the hammer is smacking its competitors. First up was VIA who just threw in the towel and gave up on the chipset business. Next was Nvidia who were told they couldn’t interface to QPI – which would shut them out of the chipset biz. Today’s nail was AMD and they were told they’ve got 60 days to get out of Dodge and to stop building x86 parts.…

I love Stereovision – I hate stereovision

Posted by Jon Peddie on February 4th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Games
Tags:

I’m all for anything that will make gaming more fun. For the past ten years that has been primarily more better’er GPUs and APIs to be able to get at them. Great sound with true 5.1 positioning came online and added life to games around five years ago. About four years ago we began playing with better physics, and somewhere in the shadows of the PC gaming industry AI work was advancing too, but not as widely discussed. A sub set of the AI and physics was rag-doll and Natural Motion so the AI would behave more, ah, naturally. So what’s…

The Blu ray factor: If Microsoft come out with a BD accessory, where’s Sony’s advantage?

Posted by Jon Peddie on January 8th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, IDTV
Tags:

First off let me make it clear I am not a Sony basher, I like Sony, and I love the PS3. I also like Microsoft and the Xbox360. Sony has said they won’t drop the price of the PS3, and has even stopped building the lower cost smaller disk version. Why, in a world of economic turmoil would Sony seem to be swimming against the tide? For one thing Sony believes, and I agree, that the PS3 represents value for money. One of the main values of the PS3 is the Blu-ray (BD) player in it. The PS3 is a fully…

Intel’ s Core i7 is FAST but getting there isn’t

Posted by Jon Peddie on November 19th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags:

I was invited to the Intel Core i7 victory lap party in way, way downtown south of the biotech area that’s exploding in San Francisco known as the dogpatch, is an area filled with old warehouses now used by film and art studios, and a few software development firms. On my way to the Intel i7 rollout I was making a left to the designated parking area – parking being the most unavailable thing in this area of empty lots – go figure, and when I got to the right lane of on-coming traffic (the left two lanes were stopped waiting…

New Laptops defy dim market expectations

Posted by Jon Peddie on November 17th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: General Interest, New product showcase
Tags:

Figure 1: Market share of laptop and desktop PCs. (Source: Jon Peddie Research) Figure 2: Market share of laptop and desktop GPUs. (Source; Jon Peddie Research) Figure 3: Market share of laptop GPUs (IGP and Discrete). (Source: Jon Peddie Research) There were some interesting announcements last week in Laptop Land as the manufacturers geared up for the impending holiday madness, although it does appear that the global recession worries, and general lack of consumer confidence may dampen some of the dreams of the suppliers. Typically, in times of economic depression non-essential purchases are postponed, or at best case, the consumer looks…

Nvidia laid off?

Posted by Jon Peddie on October 25th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, The Market
Tags:

Having been in this industry almost as long as Gordon Moore and Jerry Sanders I have gotten to know a lot of people in it. And having known Nvidia since before it was Nvidia, I have gotten to know every single employee in the company and all who once worked for the company.  In fact, other than Jen Hsun Huang, I’m the only one who sends them all a Christmas AND birthday card every single year for the last fourteen years – do you have any idea what that costs me in postage? And I get thank you notes back from…

Larry’s Bee - Part Two

Posted by Jon Peddie on August 7th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: The Market
Tags:

Last week I posed a postulate that Intel could justify the investment in Larrabee (Larry’s Bee) on the basis of obtaining some level of parity with the incumbents, mainly ATI and Nvidia. And in my rush to post and then catch an airplane, I included the total discrete graphics semiconductor market, not just the desktop discrete market – sigh. OK, I’ll eat a little humble pie, give you the right numbers but more importantly suggest something bigger. First the numbers I mistakenly used the total GPU (desktop and notebook) in my calculation of Intel’s TAM – although the charts revealed the…

Why not Larrabee?

Posted by Jon Peddie on August 1st 2008 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, The Market
Tags:

Anyone not stuck in outer space or maximum security knows Intel is going to introduce a new chip code named Larrabee. At Siggraph they are going to reveal, after almost two years of teases and leaks, the architecture of the device. It is not a GPU as many have mistakenly described it, but it can do most graphics functions, Intel says it can do all, we’ll have to wait for proof. Right now its slide-ware, but development systems are supposed to become available in November. ATI and Nvidia will be very busy discrediting the device and pointing out its shortcomings. They…

Paranoid protectionists Prima Donnas of the press plead for protection

Posted by Jon Peddie on July 9th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: The Market
Tags:

We recently sent out about a zillion invites to the press to invite them to our luncheon in LA during Siggraph. Aside from finding out who’s not working (out of the office till…) and who’s not employed (permanent failure party does not exist) we also learned that there’s a whole bunch of press people who just can’t cope with email, especially from strangers (given such an attitude, I would guess their friends list is small) These timid and violated poor souls seek refuse from the onslaught of email from strangers offering millions from Nigeria, sex forever, and new hair in places…

iPhone breaks Moore’s law

Posted by Jon Peddie on July 5th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: The Market
Tags:

My new phone cost more than my PC or TV I’m getting ready to buy the iPhone. I mean buy it, not lease it from AT&T. I’ve been saving my allowance, and taking bottles and cans to the recyclers, and I’m getting close to the $700 needed (plus taxes) for the 16 GB 3G iPhone, I can hardly wait. While I’m waiting I watch a little TV on my new 32-inch HD LCD TV that only cost $449 from Circuit City. And when I get bored with TV, I turn to my new $649 Dell Inspiron notebook with a 15- inch…

Attempted rapprochement

Posted by Jon Peddie on June 20th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: The Market
Tags:

Rumor has it there was an attempt at rapprochement. Long annoyed with The Inquirer’s loose cannon Charlie Demerjian, Nvidia has been shunning him and took him off the invitee list of most events. Water to a duck in the case of Charlie, he has so many sources the only reason he goes to any event is to score food and babes – he does better on the food as not many babes go to those things either. So Derek Perez, Nvidia’s boss of PR and infamous for having a knife fight with a former competitor and now employee Brian Burke, thought…

This is a rant about spin - Intel extends command in fast-computers tally

Posted by Jon Peddie on June 18th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: The Market
Tags:

The annual supercomputer conference was just held in Dresden Germany. At it they show off the top 500 supercomputers. Usually there are two or three new ones at the top and the rest shift downward till they fall off. Look at how the AP reported this event: Intel extends command in fast-computers tally Associated Press 06.18.08, 9:14 AM ET Microprocessors from Intel Corp. run more of the world's fastest computers than ever, according to a report released Wednesday that tracks progress in the computing industry. The latest list of the world's 500 most powerful computers, published twice a year by academic…

How many FLOPS?

Posted by Jon Peddie on May 24th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: Engineering and Development
Tags:

FLoating point Operations Per Second – FLOPS, one of the more obscure acronyms in our lives, and one of the oldest ones. It’s since been modified with a prefix of M (mega), G (giga) and most recently T (tera). A Terra is a million millions, one trillion (1012) a whole lot of anything, whether its cycles (Hertz), Bytes, dollars, or FLOPS. (And note - the ‘S’ in FLOPS is capitalized.) So I was asked recently, how many TFLOPS in all the game consoles? There are two answers to that question. Do you mean in all the ones built, or just the…

Moore’s law violated by inflation – your new laptop will cost more

Posted by Jon Peddie on May 22nd 2008 | Permalink
Categories: The Market
Tags:

Another contributor to sluggish PC sales for this year Even though one of the applied tenants of Moore’s law is that prices will drop over time (Moore never said that, it’s just a statement that has been applied to his original observation about feature size shrinkage over time), it appears the rising price of oil will change that as nations around the world grapple with inflation. Prices will rise. This appears to be showing up first in laptop costs as reports of higher priced magnesium-aluminum alloy chassis are coming out of China with cost increases of 10% due to rising metal…

Come together ... over me

Posted by Jon Peddie on May 20th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: IDTV
Tags:

Common people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another - for a while… We’re getting closer to the dream, the vision, of ubiquity mutual connectivity in the home – and maybe beyond a bit. My vision, since 1999, has been that everything in the home will talk to everything in the home. Everything that can will be a server, and everything will be a client. Since 1999 I’ve had to modify my vision a bit, I’ve had to learn a strange new alphabet, B, A, C, U, and then N – what’s that all about?…

Educating the next crop of engineers

Posted by Jon Peddie on April 7th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: Engineering and Development
Tags:

As I pondered this ponderous title and the challenge it represents for me to lead the round table at COFES it got me thinking about how we learn. Studies have shown that children learn fast and do so until they become 19 to 20 years old, then their brains become less flexible and learning takes longer, and it’s more difficult. By the time one reaches full adulthood and middle age  you really have to work at it to learn new things; languages are particularly difficult because of the contextual and grammatical differences, they don’t easily fit our well honed models and…

Special Glass

Posted by Jon Peddie on March 30th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, IDTV
Tags:

Actually this entry should be named Special Plastic, because we don’t really use glass in our displays anymore do we? But we do specialize because one size doesn’t fit all (needs.) I have eight screens that I use. I watch TV on my 32-inch LG LCD.TV. I watch movies with either my PS3 for HD, or my Xbox360 for regular DVDs, or on my eight-foot projector screen. I watch YouTube videos, do email and other office things on my 17-inch laptop I play games on my Skulltrail PC with a Dell 30-inch display. I read books on my six-inch E-ink Kindle.…

Is this a test?

Posted by Jon Peddie on February 28th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: Content Creation
Tags:

I once had a cat named Alice. She was great company when I was working late at night, or very early in the morning. I would talk to her and she would look at me attentively, and sometimes answer with a little meow. During WWII Alan Turing developed the Turing test, which was a challenge and the basis for AI that asked the observer to see if he or she could determine if the correspondent (on a remote computer) was a machine or a human. That was the foundation for the A.L.I.C.E foundation, and those AI developers developed Alice the bot.…

SLI on Skulltrail – how?

Posted by Jon Peddie on February 15th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Games
Tags:

That’s what I wanted to know – how’d you get SLI to work on the 5444 chipset. I asked the folks at Intel. I got shrugged shoulders and apologetic smiles. Not being coy, the people I was talking to just didn’t know, but did, in true (and almost always reliable) Intel fashion, promise to ask around and find out. I figured it was magic,  a little trickery maybe, but if it was, it wasn’t easy. It’s well known Intel doesn’t have an SLI license, but the Nvidia SLI control panel on the computer was operational in the Display Settings dialog box,…

What’s Apple’s next trick? Jon thinks it’s gamey

Posted by Jon Peddie on February 7th 2008 | Permalink
Categories: Games
Tags:

Apple, which used to be known as Apple Computer, is today possibly one of the greatest consumer electronics companies in the universe. It’s interesting and admirable how the Mac transitioned from the computer of choice for artists and photographers to a consumers delight, and didn’t lose any of its artist photographer fans — in fact if anything, they are stronger and more convinced (vindicated?) than ever. Apple has created customer loyalty as great as Sony used to enjoy. It used to be Sony that was the one to bring out the marvelous new consumer products, and they charged more because they…

Ink — I love ink

Posted by Jon Peddie on January 23rd 2008 | Permalink
Categories: Engineering and Development
Tags:

Electronic ink or electronic paper (e-paper)  was developed in the 1970s by Nick Sheridon at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and it was called Gyricon. Its technical name is electrophoretic display meaning a display that forms visible images by rearranging charged pigment particles (i.e., powder like substances) using an applied electric field. In the early 2000s the technology began to gain some traction and looked like it could be mass produced, albeit in small sizes. One of its first commercial applications was for the second display on mobile phones, and in 2001 E Ink and Philips Components announced plans to jointly…