The Krell supercomputer (1956) There’s 500 of them! Five hundred. Do I really give a hoot? If I told you, there are five hundred top baseball players, think you’ve given a… after I named number five or six? Hell, I’d bail out after number three. I mean really, what’s a supercomputer ever done for me? But because we’re an … Read more
Is it just bragging rights, or nuclear weapons research?
This is the first time in history that the same supercomputer has become No.1 on Top500, HPCG, and Graph500 simultaneously.
A group of enthusiasts is proposing a new set of graphics instructions designed for 3D graphics and media processing. These new instructions are built on the RISC-V base vector instruction set. They will add support for new data types that are graphics specific as layered extensions in the spirit of the core RISC-V ISA. Vectors, transcendental math, pixel, and textures … Read more
New always-connected long-life notebook
ARM has done a lot of clever things over the past 29 years of its existence and buying Falanx in 2006 and continuing to invest in it for the past 13 years is one of them. (Selling to Softbank in 2016 wasn’t a bad move either for its investors.) New Mali-G77 GPU, ML Processor. Recently the company announced its latest … Read more
After reading and reporting on the financial results of AMD and Intel, and reading Nvidia’s cautionary letter to its shareholders, I have been struck by the resiliency and dynamism of these companies. AMD and Intel are in their fifties, and Nvidia is 25. That may not be as old as say General Electric, Konica, or Bayer but those staid … Read more
After reading and reporting on the financial results of AMD and Intel, and reading Nvidia’s cautionary letter to its shareholders, I have been struck by the resiliency and dynamism of these companies. AMD and Intel are in their fifties, and Nvidia is 25. That may not be as old as say General Electric, Konica, or Bayer but those staid … Read more
“Audi thrives to bring the most exciting, yet the safest automobiles when we vision the drive of tomorrow,” said Alfons Pfaller, head of Architecture & Platform Development E/E at Audi. “Samsung has been a valued technology partner over the past few years and we are extremely pleased to have the Exynos Auto V9 power our next-generation platform that will shape … Read more
As 2018 drew to a close Arm livened up everyone’s holiday mood by making a pair of linked announcements that signaled a determined push to make inroads into the cash-rich automotive market. On the product front, VP of Automotive, Lakshmi Mandyam gave what amounts to a pre-launch announcement of Arm’s new Cortex A65AE (for automotive enhanced) CPU. Previously known by … Read more
2019 will see the introduction of three new GPUs, the first change in the GPU landscape in over 18 years. Nvidia lead the change with their Turing architecture introduced in late 2018. We’ve written about it extensively, but its noteworthy aspects relative to graphics are its hardware ray tracing engine, and the use of AI to do anti-aliasing. Samsung lifted … Read more
Back when I was a young engineer at Inmos (remember them?) I attended a pep talk given by the flamboyant Texan who had the job of running our new wafer fab in Duffryn, South Wales. I don’t recall his name or much of the talk, but I do remember the white suit, the ten-gallon hat, and the ostrich-skin cowboy boots. … Read more
