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
MediaTek used to be a loyal customer of Imagination Technologies, especially when it tried to enter the high-end smartphone market. But ARM’s arm-twisting and free GPU was competition no company could stand up to all things being equal. And in the mid and low-end not so smartphone market, Imagination didn’t stand a chance against ARM, and MediaTek had a business … Read more
AMD’s Adrenalin 2019 Edition has delivered some of the biggest and most unique features we’ve seen so far from the company. The heart of the new software package is a tuned driver that the company claims gives up to a 15% average performance gain since the launch of Adrenalin Edition software in November 2018. The Game Advisor, AMD’s game tuning … Read more
Designed for a variety of GPU computation applications Nvidia has launched its Titan RTX targeting AI training, real-time ray-traced graphics, and virtual reality markets with it. The company calls out the following features of the new AIB. 576 multi-precision Turing Tensor Cores, providing up to 130 teraflops 72 Turing RT Cores, delivering up to 11 GigaRays per second of real-time … 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
The PC GPU market decreased year-to-year by 2.2%, sequentially GPU shipments increased 10.6%
This is the third in a series of short articles about graphics chips, controllers, and processors, that changed the course of the computer graphics (CG) industry. When IBM introduced the Intel 8080-based Personal Computer (PC) in 1981, it was equipped with an add-in board (AIB) called the Color Graphics Adaptor (CGA). The CGA AIB had 16 kilobytes of video memory … Read more
Whether it be hardware or software, it's no longer enough to build bigger, faster, more efficient products. They gotta be smarter. That's what we're seeing this Fall. Every meeting we've attended that introduced new semiconductor technology has dutifully listed hardware features: cores, process, busses, and transistors but has also stressed software enhancements. Software introductions list features, lots of features including AI, … Read more
Nvidia’s long expected successor to Pascal in gaming and professional graphics markets is here. At Siggraph in August, Nvidia pulled the covers off of Turing, which one could argue is both a successor to not one but both of its preceding generations, Pascal and Volta. In the process, Nvidia confirmed several of the more expected advancements in its next flagship … Read more
In 1992, Pixel, a subsidiary of Circus Logic, introduced two new digital video chips, the CL-PX2070 and CL-PX2080. Those chips were the most sophisticated and complex chips for multimedia and video applications we had seen and were designed to process and display multiple streams of full motion video at the same time. The PX2070 had four major functional units: the … Read more
Oculus needs to avoid making a BIG mistake with the PC market
Having watched the Oculus Connect 5 keynote and seeing the follow-up coverage, I think Facebook definitely has some amazing innovations coming around the bend – well earned and hopefully well-publicized innovations. The hardware looks seamless and easy to adopt, there appears to be enough horsepower for half-decent VR experiences, and it does away with the confusion of mixing smartphones and … Read more
