Jon Peddie

AMD launches two Athlon CPUs with Vega graphics

For all you people planning to give semiconductors as presents, AMD’s latest APUs arrived just in time for the holiday. AMD says its new Athlon 220GE and 240GE processors with 4 processing threads and Radeon Vega Graphics represent the most advanced entry-level processors AMD has ever created. The new processors enable 720p esports gaming out-of-the-box and with the Zen processor … Read more

The GPUs of 2019

2019 will see the introduction of three new GPUs, the first change in the GPU landscape in over 18 years. Nvidia lead the change with their Turing architecture introduced in late 2018. We’ve written about it extensively, but its noteworthy aspects relative to graphics are its hardware ray tracing engine, and the use of AI to do anti-aliasing. Samsung lifted … Read more

To Xe or not Xe, is that the question?

We, along with just about anyone with a keyboard and internet access, reported on Intel’s comments at its Architecture day about its forthcoming GPU. In the rush to scoop something, anything, interesting or possibly even meaningful about Intel’s promised GPU, the news and pundits have decided Intel has branded it as the Xe chip. It hasn’t. What Intel actually said … Read more

This moment in history—5G goes live

  After years of testing, and trials in various cities around the world, the U.S., the U.K., and other counties are rolling out 5G. AT&T, Verizon, and BT announced at Qualcomm’s Tech Forum currently going on in Hawaii that they have turned on 5G in cities all over the world, including hurricane devastated Panama City where the infrastructure was severely … Read more

Nvidia makes PhysX Open Source

Ageia was founded in 2002 by five guys in Silicon Valley. The fabless semi company developed a real-time physics-processing engine (PPU) they called PhysX. Nvidia acquired the company in 2007 and made the software part of its toolkit. Recently the GPU maker said its PhysX SDK 4.0 physics engine will be available on December 20, 2018, under the open source … Read more

Giant Intel gears up for dGPU battle

Former PR manager at AMD and now head of engineering at Intel, the invincible Chris Hook called together his team of 500 engineers in Folsom, CA, who are building Intel’s dGPU and asked them what was being done right and what needed improvement. They told him, and he says (representing management), “we’re listening.” Hook’s real job, however, is Discrete Graphics … Read more

MediaTek now shipping P90 with PowerVR

MediaTek used to be a loyal customer of Imagination Technologies, especially when it tried to enter the high-end smartphone market. But ARM’s arm-twisting and free GPU was competition no company could stand up to all things being equal. And in the mid and low-end not so smartphone market, Imagination didn’t stand a chance against ARM, and MediaTek had a business … Read more

CyberLink’s PhotoDirector 10 is too much

I just downloaded a trial version of CyberLink’s PhotoDirector 10 on my Dell Latitude 7390 2-in-1 to see if I could do anything with the hoard of 3–5 MB photos I’ve taken with my smartphone during our visit to Egypt. My Samsung Galaxy S7 edge has a 12 megapixel camera with amazing low-light, HDR, and autofocus capabilities that make a … Read more

AMD delivers a software holiday gift—a boatload of software

AMD’s Adrenalin 2019 Edition has delivered some of the biggest and most unique features we’ve seen so far from the company. The heart of the new software package is a tuned driver that the company claims gives up to a 15% average performance gain since the launch of Adrenalin Edition software in November 2018. The Game Advisor, AMD’s game tuning … Read more

Intel’s Koduri lays out the company’s six pillar for the future

At Intel’s recent Architecture Day, Raja Koduri, Intel’s senior vice president of Core and Visual Computing, outlined a strategic shift for the company’s design and engineering model. This shift, said Koduri, will combine a series of foundational building blocks that leverage a portfolio of technologies and intellectual property (IP) within the company.  “We are generating data faster than we can … Read more