Jon Peddie

HP makes working at home comfortable

According to some back-of-the-envelope calculations and other data, we estimate the average cost for a tech worker’s space and support facilities in an office is about $15,500 a year.¹ If you could have your employees and contractors work at home, and all you had to do was outfit them with a new computer every three or four years for $500 a … Read more

How I got in and out of word processing and only lost $1000

Editor's note: This is a surprise out of the archives … meaning a box in the garage tipped over and these typewritten pages spilled out. Jon wrote this story in 1982 and we thought it was a fun read for computer veterans. It's easy to forget that there was a time when word processors were very expensive and specialized pieces … Read more

Xiaomi Smart Glasses

(Source: Xiaomi) Xiaomi (pronounced show-me) announced their cleverly named Xiaomi Smart Glasses—the latest entry in new smart wearable devices. Xiaomi says their Smart Glasses (XSG) combine imaging systems and sensors into a subtle, ordinary glasses design using MicroLEDs with optical waveguide technology. The XSFs weigh 51 g. By comparison, Ray-Ban Original Wayfarer weighs 45 g, but unlike the conventional Ray-ban, … Read more

FYR bug’s eye AR glasses

Traditional HMDs are bulky, power-hungry, and most of them fill only a small portion of the visual field with limited resolution. Those limitations plague every industry supplier and user in the AR and VR market, from manufacturing, training, and medical to military and entertainment. The issues are not new or unusual problems; it’s simply physics: there’s only so much light … Read more

Facebook reveals smart glasses: Ray-Ban stories

(Source: Facebook)   Facebook worked with Ray-Ban to design sunglasses to take photos, record video, answer phone calls, and play podcasts. You need to be a Facebook subscriber to use those services, but who isn’t a Facebook user? The unstylish-looking Wayfarer sunglasses is the first product from a multiyear collaboration with EssilorLuxottica, the Italian-French vertically integrated multinational corporation based in … Read more

Portrait Displays gets embedded in projectors and chips

Portrait Displays announced a new collaboration with MediaTek that the companies say will enhance smart TV viewing experiences. MediaTek claiming to be the number one television chipset provider says it will, with Portrait Display’s help, provide realistic and authentic visual imagery, taking the scenery straight from the director’s lens into viewers’ living rooms. Displays (TVs, Monitors) that are Portrait Display … Read more

Anari—come together, over me

In November 2019, open standard API developer and harmonizing industry force, Khronos, enthralled developers and users alike with their proposed data visualization initiative to work on a cross-platform analytical rendering API.  Prior to Khronos gathering the SciViz world, developers working in scientific visualization faced a chaotic, waring gaggle of awkward, conflicting, and confusing plug-ins, interfaces, and wannabe APIs. No one … Read more

AMD’s big cache exposed at Hot Chips

AMD changed the rules when it introduced its chiplet packaging approach and demonstrated it could beat Amdahl’s Law and scale-up processors. At Hot Chips 2021, they revealed a bit more about their packaging magic, and their 3D V-Cache uses a novel new hybrid bonding technique. This manufacturing scheme can create up to an impressive 192 MB of L3 cache per … Read more

What the Olympic visitors saw

Image provided by The Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Image created with the cooperation of NTT   For the Olympics, NTT Docomo built and launched (literally and figuratively) a barge with a very large NTT Docomo display, the company has named Kirari! The barge displayed live transmissions of 12k ultra-wide composited images of an entire sailing … Read more

More, faster memory from Samsung

640K should be enough for anybody—said Bill Gates, apparently never.  I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time. I did not say that in 1981 when the PC came out. I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t! (Source: … Read more

Samsung asks, how smart is your memory?

(Source: Samsung)   Samsung used the 2021 Hot Chips conference, thirty-third in the series, to further reveal and promote a novel alteration of how high-speed memory could be built with AI technology. Samsung’s revelations included the successful integration of its processing-in-memory (PIM)-enabled High Bandwidth Memory (HBM-PIM) into a commercialized accelerator system. That, said Samsung, would broaden PIM to include DRAM … Read more