Eleven years ago, the Larrabee project was started in 2007. In 2010, the company killed the project. Then in 2011, Intel introduced the Xeon Phi, an accelerator card based on the 22-nm “Knights Corner” chip. A vestige of Intel’s ill-fated Larrabee project, Knights Corner was the first realization of Intel’s Many Integrated Cores (MIC) architecture. MIC was a cache-coherent multiprocessor … Read more
Elon Musk teases Easter eggs in Tesla update
Intel reported its calendar Q2 2018, revenues were up 15% year-over-year driven, says the company, by strength across the business and customer demand for performance-leading Intel platforms. ”After five decades in tech, Intel is poised to deliver our third record year in a row. We are uniquely positioned to capitalize on the need to process, store and move data, which … Read more
AMD reported a record quarter for calendar Q2 2018, revenues and operating income were up as well as its graphics and compute groups revenue and profits. ”We had an outstanding second quarter with strong revenue growth, margin expansion and our highest quarterly net income in seven years.” – Lisa Su Every metric was up including the company’s gross margin which … Read more
In late June this year, Qualcomm reported a record quarter, with overall revenue of $5.6 billion, Net income of $1.2 billion, and shipments of 220 million devices. While some of Qualcomm’s competitors in the semiconductor sector are growing at a faster rate than the reported 4 percent growth from the prior year, Qualcomm remains committed to inventing the future, developing … Read more
Making forecasts is always complicated and never a sure thing; and, to get a forecast close to reality, it’s necessary to constantly tweak factors and adjust assumptions. US President Trump has precipitated quite a bit of tweaking and adjusting. As a result, we expect to see the Trump trade-war with China drive up costs and therefore the price-elasticity curve of … Read more
Amber Lake-Y processors employ Intel's UHD Graphics 615 (GT2) integrated graphics processing unit (iGPU). The iGPU features 24 Execution Units (EUs) running at a base clock of 300 MHz with a turbo clock up to 1000 MHz depending on the model. That’s a pretty decent GPU, and even though its constrained with UMA (uniform memory access) the M in UMA … Read more
Intel and Samsung are gearing up to introduce new GPUs to the market. GPU design has been stable for over 10 years, but change is coming. In the meantime, the GPU market is showing itself to be large, resilient, and very elastic.
The last major architectural improvement to the basic GPU design happened when the major GPU suppliers went to unified shaders with the introduction of Direct3D 10, Shader Model 4.0, in 2008. That was ten years ago. The unified shading architecture was introduced with the Nvidia GeForce 8 series, ATI Radeon HD 2000, S3 Chrome 400, Intel GMA X3000 series, Xbox … Read more
Graphics industry veteran Chien-Ping Lu joins Samsung’s semiconductor team to develop a new in-house GPU for mobile.
Who has gone to Disneyland (or world) in any country and not left banging themselves on the side of their head trying to shake out, “It’s a small small world we live in… “ See, I just did it to you. Sorry. Walt Disney “meets” some residents of the “It's a Small World” attraction at Disneyland On July 17, … Read more
This is the first in a series of short articles about graphics chips, controllers, and processors that changed the course of the computer graphics (CG) industry. In buzzword talk, they were disruptive devices, and in addition to changing how things were done, the application of those chips made a lot of companies successful. Ironically, all of them are gone now. … Read more
