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
A noted Apple watcher, Ming-Chi Kuo recently posted (and was echoed) that he thought Apple would among other things be introducing a 31.6-inch 6K monitor. A few of my display-expert friends and I speculated on what that might look like. For example, what would be the aspect ratio and hence the resolution parameters? If offered in a conventional 31.5-inch monitor … Read more
Epic was the first company to demonstrate ray tracing using Microsoft’s new DRX API and Nvidia’s RTX technology at SIGGRAPH. They did that at GDC 2018 with a home-made movie using some of George Lucas’ stormtroopers who had the day off and nothing else to do. Actually, the experiment was created in collaboration with ILMxLAB. Careful you don’t slip on … Read more
I first learned about ray tracing from Turner Whitted in 1980 and have been fascinated by and about it ever since. About eight years later I was working with a company called Meiko which was developing systems based on the Inmos Transputer. The transputer was an innovative and advanced 32-bit floating-point processor with four high-speed serial nodes, and it could … Read more
I first learned about ray tracing from Turner Whitted in 1980 and have been fascinated by and about it ever since. About eight years later I was working with a company called Meiko which was developing systems based on the Inmos Transputer. The transputer was an innovative and advanced 32-bit floating-point processor with four high-speed serial nodes, and it could … Read more
Nvidia reported revenue from most platforms—Gaming, Datacenter, Professional Visualization, and Automotive saw a decline. The company’s GPU business revenue was $1.98 billion, down 19.5% from a year earlier and down 28.6% sequentially. Revenue was down 24% year over year and down 31% sequentially, driven primarily by a decline in Gaming. Full-year revenue was up 21%, reflecting growth in each of … Read more
I remember back when PCIe 2.0 was released and Jim Pappas, the daddy of USB from Intel, was the champion of it. PCIe 2.0 doubled the bandwidth of 1.0, and offered better flexibility while maintaining compatibility with PCIe 1.1. It seemed like magic then providing a 5 GT/s transfer rate with a throughput up to 8 GB/s with 16-lanes—PFM. At … Read more
Several companies offer a ray tracing plug-in for SketchUp, but Trimble calls this one the “premier renderer for SketchUp.” After more than four years of R&D, V-Ray Next accelerates the SketchUp workflow, and according to Chaos Group, the SketchUp plug-in offers massive speed and intelligence enabling designers to produce better renders faster. Chaos says V-Ray Scene Intelligence can now automatically … Read more
What’s best understood about ray tracing is that the technology produces physically accurate images, photorealistic depending upon the desires of the artist and producer. For example, BMW wants a perfectly accurate image that is photorealistic. However, Pixar wants a physically accurate image (for reflections, shadows, etc.) and they do not want it to be photorealistic, but stylistic. The Dark Knight … Read more
