Robert Dow

AMD squeezes its transistors to re-enter high end

AMD has released its latest Vega 20 GPU and Radeon AIB implementation the Radeon VII, a 3840 shader (60 Vega compute units) with 16 GB of HBM2 RAM, for $699. The new AIB uses 300 watts which is 40% more than the RTX 2080 and goes a long way towards explaining why it has three fans compared to RTX’s two. … Read more

AMD Q4 2018 results

AMD reported its quarterly results for calendar Q4 2018, revenues and operating income were up year-over-year as well as its graphics and compute groups revenue and profits.   “We delivered our second straight year of significant revenue growth, market share gains, expanded gross margin and improved profitability based on our high-performance products. Importantly, we more than doubled our EPYC processor shipments … Read more

Benchmarking ray tracing

Ray tracing, as everyone knows, is a simple algorithm that can totally consume a processor. But how much a given processor is consumed is an unanswerable question because it depends upon the scene and of course the processor itself. So, approximations have to be made, and parameters fixed to get a consistent comparison. Then it’s left to the buyer to … Read more

Imagination Technologies’ Power VR 3C Compression

Imagination has introduced a new compression scheme for GPUs that it claims provides visually lossless image compression with a guaranteed reduction in memory footprint. The company is offering its new PVRIC4, which is an image compression technology that it says will enable SoC customers targeting devices such as DTVs, smartphones, and tablets to reduce costs without a discernable loss of … Read more

Nvidia’s new RTX board’s test results

The highly anticipated Turing GPU-based Nvidia RTC 2080-series AIBs were announced in late August at Gamecon 2018 and the top of the lines cards were promised for delivery in late September. They came out the week of the 17th, and everyone who could get their hands on one tested and compared them to the previous generation, the Pascal GPU-based 1080-series. … Read more

AI fight breaks: Nvidia vs. the world

Nvidia, with its claim to be the leading AI training engine in the data center, has painted a big bullseye on their back. Nvidia’s outsize marketing strategy means that everyone who has introduced or shown an AI chip is going to come after Nvidia.  Nvidia has raised the bar with their new Turing-based Tesla T4 AIB, and, strangely, is positioning … Read more

It’s come to this; flying billboards

Today, we’re more likely to measure the progress of humanity by Blade Runner rather than biblical omens, plagues, locusts, etc. Even though we have plenty of that going on as well. By the Blade Runner scale, we’re hurtling towards the abyss.  Japanese communications giant, NTT Docomo showed off a wealth of technology at the International Broadcasters Convention. It always does. … Read more