MTTL Lenovo and Qualcomm team up
New always-connected long-life notebook
ARM introduces a display processor and enhances its Mali GPU
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
Old companies performing like new companies — how curious
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
Old companies performing like new companies — how curious
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
Your next Audi will be entertaining
“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
Arm shows its hand in automotive
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
The GPUs of 2019
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
Arm TechCon and the 5th wave
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
First look at the Arm Machine Learning Processor
Arm chose this year’s IEEE Hot Chips Symposium to show off their first-generation Machine Learning Processor claiming a design that delivers ‘massive’ efficiency improvements over GPU, CPU, or DSP implementations as well as the ability to scale from IoT to server applications. Being an English design, it probably serves tea in a porcelain cup, as well. Leaving aside the issue … Read more
And now there are 11
Intel and Samsung are gearing up to introduce new GPUs to the market. GPU design has been stable for over 10 years, but change is coming. In the meantime, the GPU market is showing itself to be large, resilient, and very elastic.
And now there are 11
The last major architectural improvement to the basic GPU design happened when the major GPU suppliers went to unified shaders with the introduction of Direct3D 10, Shader Model 4.0, in 2008. That was ten years ago. The unified shading architecture was introduced with the Nvidia GeForce 8 series, ATI Radeon HD 2000, S3 Chrome 400, Intel GMA X3000 series, Xbox … Read more
HPE Astra will deliver 2.3 petaFLOPS
Based on HPE's Apollo 70 the Astra supercomputer will be comprised of 2,592 dual-socket nodes, containing 145,000 cores—the largest such system the company has delivered. Each node will have two 28-core Cavium ThunderX2 processors running at 2.0 GHz. The nodes will draw 1.2 MW of power. The Astra supercomputer is the first deployment of the of the Department of Energy’s … Read more