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
In June 2017, Konica Minolta and Konica Minolta Planetarium Co. announced they would launch VirtuaLink, a location-based multiplayer virtual reality entertainment service. The service allows up to 50 visitors to share a 360-degree virtual space and enjoy an exciting experience together, with the accompaniment of live narration. The VirtuaLink service is offered at Konica Minolta VirtuaLink (Tokyo), KMP’s directly managed … Read more
As you know, X-ray, MRI, and CAT scans are reproduced in monochrome, between 12 and 16 bits/pixel, which corresponds to 4,096–65,536 shades of gray. But what if, instead of a black and white X-ray picture, you and/or a doctor could have images that identified the tissues being scanned? Such a color X-ray imaging technique could presumably produce clearer and more … Read more
EVGA celebrated its nineteenth anniversary this week,and held a scavenger hunt on its web page by placing 10 hidden badges on their website. The company is offering a huge list of prizes including gaming PCs, Processors, a Monitor, sound bar, SSDs, memory, VR headset, keyboards, gear, and EVGA bucks. The company also introduced an Anniversary Retro Wave Gaming event on the … Read more
Anyone who follows the mainstream technical press will have noticed the recent wave of stories and editorials about the decline in interest and sales of VR hardware. This is not surprising to me, and in a “told-ya-so” way, I’ll tell you it has been my forecast for a couple of years. I believe interactive-VR (IVR) will return to its original … Read more
