TSMC first chipmaker to move to 5 nanometer process Legendary Morris Chang says TSMC will be the first with 5nm volume production. Chang is one of those guys says what he means and means what he says, so we have no doubt, TSMC will have 5nm. Morris Chang (張忠謀) photo Focus Taiwan The chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. … Read more
Those shovels are getting expensive. Supply and demand. AIB prices have been drifting down, subject to seasonality and product introduction dates, up till about Q4’16, as the following chart shows.’ Figure 1: ASPs of AIBs past five years Looking into the segments you can its been the high-end and midrange that have enjoyed the uplift from crypto mining. Figure … Read more
Ask Oculus, they’ve invented one Oculus has announced what they call groundbreaking technology, Focal Surface Display. The new technology is designed to improve the vergence-accommodation conflict that impacts today’s VR headsets. Oculus has built a first binocular multifocal testbed with integrated eye tracking and accommodation measurement, which will make wearing headsets more comfortable for longer viewing. To back up a … Read more
$17.1 billion in sales, $690 million loss, sales and profits up from last quarter. Intel reported its calendar Q4 2017, revenues were up, but profits down due to a huge tax expense. All of its business centers except McAfee were up. “2017 was a record year for Intel with record fourth-quarter results driven by strong growth of our data-centric businesses,” … Read more
$1.5 billion in sales, $71 million GAAP profit for the quarter, sales and profit down from last quarter. AMD reported its calendar Q4 2017; revenues and operating income were up as well as its graphics and compute groups revenue and profits. “2017 marked a key inflection point for AMD as we re-shaped our product portfolio, delivered 25% annual revenue growth, … Read more
Nanometer processors used for petawhopper computers to keep your lights on Last week, Italian energy company Eni’s took the lead in supercomputers with the launch of its latest petawhopper, the HPC4. At 18.6 petaflops (peak) the new cluster becomes the world’s most powerful commercial system and quadruples the company’s computing capacity to an aggregate peak performance of 22.4 petaflops. According … Read more
Legend has it the people making the most money during the California Gold Rush were the people selling equipment to the miners. The same holds true today for the companies selling the tools for crypto-currency. Certainly it’s a safer business.
How many are there? 21 quadrillion pixels An old friend asked me, Hey Jon, how many pixels do you think there are in the world? TV’s, PC’s, smart phones, tablets. It’s going to be a lot! But how many? Twenty-one quadrillion, six hundred and thirty-four trillion pixels in use today: 21,634,876,802,016,700.00 To start the analysis, I started with what was … Read more
AMD brings in some industry heavyweights AMD has announced the addition of two computer industry veterans to its Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) and to its executive team: Mike Reyfield from Micron Technology and David Wang from Synaptics. AMD will support Wang and Reyfield with dedicated engineering and business teams within RTG. AMD’s C-suite t’s a new arrangement in that the … Read more
Furian-based four-cluster PowerVR 8XT GT8540 GPU can simultaneously drive six 4K screens Imagination Technologies announced its new, high performance PowerVR Series8XT GPU core, which supports multiple, ultra-high resolution displays for cluster, Head-Up Display (HUD) and infotainment, is being adopted by automotive manufactures from 2018 onwards. The company says that among things, that is due to an 80% fill-rate density improvement … Read more
Electronic skin will tell where your hands are If you’ve ever tried gesture recognition systems in VR, you know the resolution of the cameras are not really high enough to detect subtle movements. Also, the latency is distracting because you pay more attention to the mechanism than you do the results. And lastly you can’t do simple things like fold … Read more
VR & AR with realistic images coming soon People have described ray tracing as the holy grail of computer imaging. RT generates (if done properly) a physically accurate representation of an imagined or reconstructed scene. The number of variables are bewildering, from location and number of light sources combined with the style of each individual light (point source, diffused, flickering … Read more
