Blog

Jon Ponders Apple

Am I having Déjà vu again? Apple began in 1976 with the 6502 processor and, in 1984, moved to the 68000 with the introduction of the Mac. The company introduced the new computer with an ...

It’s been seven years—have computers taken over?

In 1999, the Internet bubble began. Most people knew it was a bubble, laughed at the silliness of most of the deals, but a greed factor and feeding frenzy, fear of missing the boat and ...

3D to be, or not to be

The industry, or perhaps I should say the industries, are hurling themselves toward the newfound wonder of stereovision, which is being called 3D (not even 3D vision). 3D in the movies, 3D in games, and ...

Cores, accelerators, and processors—oh my

It’s a quality issue… We now have four offerings for the consumer space of multi-core chips, which are euphemistically called processors. That is just a taste of how confusing this is all going to be, ...

So many pixels… so little time

Having been dazzled by four days of dancing delightful pixels in LA at Siggraph, I then took a shower and went to San Francisco to continue the consumption of pixels and information at IDF. Another ...

Look at me, dammit

You’ve all heard me say, “The more you can see, the more you can do.” It’s Peddie’s Second Law. I have four screens on my desk; I think you’ve all seen the pictures. There’s one ...

Thank the loom

The mechanical loom developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard between 1801 and 1805, which used holes punched in pasteboard, was the beginning of the digital age. Were it not for that machine, we’d still be calculating ...

Predicting the future is tricky business, pick your data, premises, and emotions carefully.

Nvidia should take a month off Boy, for as long as I’ve known the company, which is actually before it was a company, I have never seen such a torrent of bad news and bad ...

We need a new metric—P3

With the introduction of ATI’s and Nvidia’s new AIBs, and the lack of a really killer app, other than perhaps Crysis and/or FSX, we really can’t see much difference in the products anymore. I was ...

Make it real—wait a minute…

While driving back from the AMD RV770 press meeting (NDA’d till the 25th) Robert and I discussed the issue of CG. With GPU power accelerating exponentially, while maintaining the same price points (thank you Dr. ...

The PC is more confusing than ever

Have we created a new tower of Babel? For a while there was peace in the valley. The PC market had gone through its consolidation, we got over the internet bubble, the platform was stable, ...

What’s the most important thing in CG?

Resistance is futile—you should believe That might beg the question, “what exactly is CG,” but I’m going to sidestep that discussion because it might distract from my main point, which is that the most important ...