This is the latest installment of a series of short articles about graphics chips, controllers, and processors, that changed the course of the computer graphics (CG) industry. 3Dfx was founded in 1994 in San Jose, California by former employees of Silicon Graphics (SGI) with backing from Gordie Campbell's TechFarm. In 1995, the company raised $5.5 million dollars from venture capitalists. … Read more
Nvidia reported revenue from some platforms—Gaming and Automotive were up, while Data center, Professional Visualization, and OEM saw a decline quarter-to-quarter. The company’s GPU business revenue was $2.02 billion, down 27% from a year earlier and up 2% sequentially. “NVIDIA is back on an upward trajectory,” said Jensen Huang, founder, and CEO of Nvidia. “We’ve returned to growth in … Read more
As can be expected, the latest battles in the U.S. trade wars have resulted in additional tariffs against exports from China and the prospect of more to come. The high-tech industry will encounter tariffs in a variety of ways and the move has resulted in uncertainty. Add-in boards (AIBs) will mostly not be affected except for the low-end products. … Read more
9th gen things and more
Nobody said gamers would stop gaming. The detail is simply, like audiophiles used to have much higher end equipment than what anyone else could afford, or a high-end cell phone was different than a low end, technology being a great equalizer has made consoles, “good enough.” In the bad old days of the 80's when computer memory was still measured … Read more
By the early 1990s, the PC industry was still expanding and offering plenty of opportunity for all. IBM had lost its position of leadership and for a few years the market existed on commercial off the shelf (COTS) graphics chips from TI, and a bunch of XGA and VGA clone builders. In 1994, Number Nine, a small company in Boston, … Read more
What good is a new PC with a new CPU if it doesn’t also have a new GPU? Right. So when Intel let its bestest friends in the OEM community know that they would soon be building new PCs, those OEMs also heard from Nvidia—probably just a coincidence, but lucky timing, right? So to coincide with the new new 9th … Read more
IBM introduced the eXtended Graphics Array XGA graphics chip and add-in board (AIB) in late October 1990, and it was the last graphics chip and AIB IBM would produce after having set all the standards for the industry it created. Developed for the PS2 along with the VGA, the XGA was referred to as a Type 2 video subsystem (the … Read more
You never paid for it— shut up
Jensen Huang's press conference presentations are always predictable yet surprising. Predictable because you know he’s going to be wearing one of his 270 black leather jackets (and rumors that he sleeps in them is not completely true—only on airplanes), and predictable because he’s going to be excited about what he has to say. Surprising because you never really know what the … 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
Former PR manager at AMD and now head of engineering at Intel, the invincible Chris Hook called together his team of 500 engineers in Folsom, CA, who are building Intel’s dGPU and asked them what was being done right and what needed improvement. They told him, and he says (representing management), “we’re listening.” Hook’s real job, however, is Discrete Graphics … Read more
