Outward AR is an interesting approach Microsoft’s Beamatron was one of the fist AR projection systems in 2012 using a fixed location projector (video here). Valve spinoff, Cast AR, was the first in 2013 to try using a projector as part of an AR headset. Microsoft tried it again in 2014 with their RoomAlive project. The idea was to turn … Read more
Sends a strong message about the company’s future. Imagination Technologies announced this week that Dr. Leo Li will be the company’s Chief Executive Officer. That is very good news for Imagination, its suppliers, shareholders, employees, and friends. Dr. Li is Chairman of the Global Semiconductor Alliance and a well-known and respected figure in the semiconductor industry. He has over 30 … Read more
Easter morning and things were quiet, so for fun I ran a couple of tests. One machine, an Alienware Aurora with 4 GHz i7-6700K with 16 GB DDR3, and an 8 GB Radeon Vega RX 64 (driving three screens, two-4k, and one-8k for a total of 50 Mpixels) with driver 18.3.4. The other machine—an Alienware Area 51 with a 3.3 … Read more
The pendulum swings back — Apple kills Intel’s share price Back in the 1980s and all the way to the mid-1990s the big computer companies at the time were known as the BUNCH – Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell — names that probably aren’t even recognized now. They designed and built everything, as did their main and competitor … Read more
The basic graphics processor unit—GPU is recognized as one of the most significant developments in computer processing, exceeding the DSP in importance, and challenging the ubiquity of the CPU. GPUs can be stand-alone or integrated or embedded. As such, we have assigned lower case prefixes to help distinguish them. The more popular ones are listed here: dGPU — discrete or … Read more
Hang an external AIB box on it. But not just any box, and not just any AIB. Apple recently announced that it is offering support for certain external chassis equipped with certain AMD AIBs. Such chassis are referred to as an eGPU, an external GPU and frequently called a box or even a bread box, so they become a EGPUBB … Read more
From a low-cost Samsung Gear VR HMD to a super high-performance Rift, Oculus has the VR landscape pretty much covered. Hugo Barra, VP of VR at Oculus shows the company’s existing and future product lineup for 2018 Oculus showed off a range of HMDs at GDC and explained how they think they’ve got something for everyone. Low-cost entry-level (some … Read more
Easter morning and things were quiet, so for fun I ran a couple of tests. One machine, an Alienware Aurora with 4 GHz i7-6700K with 16 GB DDR3, and an 8 GB Radeon Vega RX 64 (driving three screens, two-4k, and one-8k for a total of 50 Mpixels) with driver 18.3.4. The other machine—an Alienware Area 51 with a 3.3 … Read more
Open and free with lots of backers The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) formed in September 2015, with the goal of developing a royalty-free, open-source video format as an alternative to fee-based formats such as H.264 and HEVC. At the time, the Alliance’s initial seven Founding Members—Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix set out to advance video codec … Read more
Nvidia demonstrated real-time raytracing at GDC and again at GTC using their DGX station super computer through the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API. That system provides a theoretical compute capability of over 63 TFLOPS for the total system, of which about 62 TFLOPS were used for the ray tracing. So a threshold or benchmark of sorts has been established for what … Read more
It will take a little longer for smartphones Nvidia demonstrated Microsoft’s approach to raytracing for games at GDC and again at GTC using their DGX station super computer through the DXR API. The $50,000 DGX contains four NVLink 4-Way interconnected Nvidia Tesla V100 add-in boards (AIBs). Each AIB has a 5,120-shader Volta GPU running at 1.46 GHz with 16 GB … Read more
Khronos is making that possible. The Khronos Group announced that the Vulkan Working Group's Portability Initiative has been working with Khronos members Valve, LunarG, and The Brenwill Workshop to enable Vulkan applications to be ported to Apple platforms. The Vulkan Portability resource page (https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/portability-initiative) links to a collection of free and open source set of tools, SDKs, and runtime libraries … Read more
