Streaming gaming is getting a lot of attention, especially with Google’s recent announcement as a provider. All the major gaming companies such as Microsoft, EA, Nvidia, and others are either offering such a service capability or soon will—they’ll have no choice if they want to stay competitive. Media delivery for gaming has evolved from cartridges to tape, to CDs, to … Read more
Intel used an announcement about its new Cascade Lake-based Xeon 9200 Platinum to show off all the stuff they are bringing to the data center, which introduces many multiple SKUs and a range of supporting products with the intent of giving customers the ability to build custom server applications covering HPC, AI, edge, memory, and super-sized particle chasing servers. Intel … Read more
IBM introduced the eXtended Graphics Array XGA graphics chip and add-in board (AIB) in late October 1990, and it was the last graphics chip and AIB IBM would produce after having set all the standards for the industry it created. Developed for the PS2 along with the VGA, the XGA was referred to as a Type 2 video subsystem (the … Read more
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personnel to find, quickly assess and correct any performance issues, without the burden of carrying packs of outdated documents.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
