AT&T used to be into advanced graphics and image processing and many of the leading concepts that survive and underpin today’s products were created there. Electronic Photography and Imaging Center (EPICenter), co-founded by Carl Calabria, was AT&T's first intrapreneurial venture. AT&T EPICenter was an internal spin-off of AT&T created to market new technologies AT&T had developed for color frame buffers … Read more
AI technology—which various companies and the DoD want to use in predictive maintenance, and process automation, is a perfect partner to augmented reality (AR) which enables technicians and maintenance personnel to find, quickly assess and correct any performance issues, without the burden of carrying packs of outdated documents. Most medium-sized to large organizations that have been operating processes for … Read more
Intel has led the market share race on GPUs for almost two decades. That’s because almost every CPU that Intel ships have a built-in integrated GPU. The compromises of being integrated have kept Intel’s and AMD’s integrated GPUs in the “Good enough” class. With Intel’s announcement of it entering the discrete GPU market sometime this year, with its scalable Xe … Read more
When Jim Pappas first spoke to me about USB, which was almost based on Philips I2C, his ambitions for it was a universal peripheral interconnect. That was 23 years ago. Last week, when he introduced CXL, he told me it (CXL) could evolve as USB did. “I never could have imagined it would expand and be used for everything as … Read more
I never met a supercomputer I didn’t like, and boy-oh-boy is there a lot to like about the upcoming Aurora. Intel and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will deliver the first supercomputer with a performance of one exaFLOP in the United States. The system being developed at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, named Aurora, will be used … Read more
Nvidia shook up the CG community last Fall at Siggraph when the company introduced its RTX Turing-based AIBs that are capable of real-time ray tracing (RTRT). Microsoft brought out a special API for it, DXR, and several ISVs committed to it (see article this issue, Ray tracing is a journey ). All of that was and still is, exciting. I … Read more
As most of you know I love ray tracing, even just wrote a book about it (comes out Siggraph time). So, I was thrilled when at last year’s Siggraph Nvidia showed their Turing architecture and promised real-time ray tracing for all. I wasn’t the only one thrilled as enthusiasts and developers bought out all Nvidia had to sell. Then the … Read more
Let’s bring back the biggest and warmest
The initial Compute Express Link (CXL) specification was developed by Intel and is being donated to a new consortium. Nine companies (so far) have signed up to support the new interface. Alibaba, Cisco, Dell/EMC, Facebook, Google, HPE, Huawei, and Microsoft. “Much like our roles with Universal Serial Bus (USB) and PCI Express—and we look forward to working with the CXL … Read more
If you wanted to play Halo, or maybe Gears of War 5, which are non-PC games, you’d need a Microsoft Xbox game console and a TV or a PC monitor. You’d also need some patience and maybe a magic decoder ring because Microsoft has made buying an Xbox about as confusing as they can. How, why? By offering so … Read more
IBM for a long time offered two levels of display capabilities: one for general purpose business users doing word processing, database entry, and Lotus spreadsheets, and one for engineering users—the latter always having higher resolution, more expensive monitors and controllers. The IBM Professional Graphics Controller (PGC) Before the 8514/A, in 1984, IBM introduced a multi-board AIB called the Professional Graphics … Read more
It is said about airplanes that the DC3 and 737 are the most popular planes ever built, and the 737, in particular, the best-selling airplane ever. The same could be said for the ubiquitous VGA, and its big brother the XGA. The VGA which can still be found buried in today’s modern GPUs and CPUs set the foundation for a … Read more
