Alex Herrera

Moore’s Law decline: the short and the long, the incremental and the revolutionary

In the literal sense, Moore’s Law—long a definition and quantification of the down-scaling of the silicon-integrated transistor area and cost—has slowed or ended, depending on how strictly one interprets the definition. But, Moore’s Law is not the point, it's a metric. Technology R&D will continue to find new ways to advance the performance and price-performance of processors and that is the point.  The semantic details … Read more

A mini platform from Intel: the NUC

From a strategic standpoint, Intel is intentionally not in the business of making money from selling systems. And for good reason, as doing so — at least on any kind of consistent basis —would alienate its OEM customers, whose existence does depend on making money from selling systems. However, to help seed demand, especially for novel products, Intel will create … Read more

Intel’s new 14-nm Xeon W 2200 processors

  Intel once envisioned a 2018 where 10-nm processors were shipping out of its fabs, followed by a subsequent introduction of a major new core microarchitecture. However, the company’s well-chronicled delays with 10-nm meant another “optimization” generation extending Skylake one more time on 14++ was in order to fill the gap. For the Core brand processors serving high-performance PC and Entry … Read more

Doubling down on ray tracing at GTC 2019

And the fact they are so symbiotic could have a lasting and dramatic impact on 3D visual processing.  Right at the outset of this year’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went out of his way to give graphics a hefty dose of respect, acknowledging that 3D visual processing remains the company’s bread and butter business. Now from … Read more

Keeping up a Moore’s Law pace … with or without Moore’s Law

As a sign of its renewed focus on constructing and articulating a coherent strategy for the future, Intel recently held an industry analyst summit, the first in four years. The confluence of the slowing of Moore’s Law transistor scaling, a rapidly transitioning computing paradigm from distributed, local clients to data-rich clouds, and energized competition from competing providers of high-performance silicon … Read more

The workstation market in Q3’18: Economic conditions and demand drive the market to record levels

Vendors are justifiably more confident to hang their hats on the workstation market than most other PC-related markets. And for good reason, the workstation does not suffer (at least not to a substantial degree) from the forces that have been dragging on the mainstream PC market as of late, namely lagging replacement cycles due to reaching “good enough” computing levels, … Read more

The Tale of Turing

Nvidia’s long expected successor to Pascal in gaming and professional graphics markets is here. At Siggraph in August, Nvidia pulled the covers off of Turing, which one could argue is both a successor to not one but both of its preceding generations, Pascal and Volta. In the process, Nvidia confirmed several of the more expected advancements in its next flagship … Read more