Alex Herrera

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

AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Threadripper: highest core count in single socket workstation

Threadripper has played a significant role in helping AMD redefine itself in the CPU market. The original Threadripper spawned from the first round of Zen generation parts in 2017, pushed the core count up to 16―more cores than the gaming or professional computing segments had seen to date. Threadripper pushed the core count up so dramatically, it forced Intel to … Read more

Intel launches Coffee Lake Xeon E (rebrand) for Entry 1S workstations

It’s been roughly two decades since workstation OEMs were building new models on their own schedules. Back in the 90’s, vertically integrated industry pioneers like SGI, HP, Sun, IBM, and DEC produced everything, from the chassis and operating systems to the CPU and GPU chips inside. They introduced new workstations whenever they were able to deliver all the key components … Read more