AMD and Nvidia, despite how they poster and position themselves, have limited resources; and since there are only 25 hours in a day, they have to pick their priorities carefully. And even though there was a lot of fanfare when Koduri rejoined AMD in 2013, the Vega product line was less than stellar, although it did have a surprising advantage … Read more
From the beginning of second quarter of 2017 to the end of the first quarter of 2018, almost sixty-four million AIBs were shipped—63, 887,712 to be exact. In one year, there are 31,536,000 seconds in an average year (not factoring in leap year offsets). More AIBs per year than seconds, over twice as many in fact. That’s almost as many … Read more
This week Matrox, the eclectic pioneering Canadian graphics company who developed a 3D graphics controller in 1998 they called the G200, is celebrating its 20th anniversary. At the time it was a killer new part, coming on the heels of the programmable TI TMS34010 (which was not called a GPU at the time) and just ahead of the introduction of … Read more
The following is a collage of stories about AIBs that occurred in Q1’18. Not meant to be an exhaustive listing of every mention of an AIB, or product announcement, it will give you some view of the general activities and areas of interest. MSPR finally means something, part 2 No longer a cheap discount disguise We’ve heard and used … Read more
Q1’18 GPU and PC shipments broke a lot of records. Q1 is traditionally a down quarter for PCs (see Figure 1). Q1’18 was down 14.1%, not a record, it went down 16.2% in Q1’16, but a big drop nonetheless. Figure 1: PC shipments and quarter-to-quarter change As the chart indicates, the PC market has been exhibiting a steady seasonal … Read more
Q1, 2018 goes down as a record-breaking quarter for add-in boards
$3.2 billion in sales, $1.24 billion profit, up 11% from last quarter Nvidia reported another record of revenue for the first quarter ended May 1, 2018, of $3.21 billion, up 66% from $1.9 billion a year earlier, and up 10% from $2.9 billion in the previous quarter, with growth across most of its platforms. Revenues were up in all segments. … Read more
We’ve been racing to keep pace with Moore’s Law for decades. GPUs have become our daily workhorse for visualization and aspects of compute. We’re close to adding FPGAs and quantum computing to that mix. This is the era of processors. Hardware is important again. The story of the last twenty years has been that everything is software; as long as … Read more
MegaMol from the Visualization Research Center of the University of Stuttgart The Visualisation Research Centre (VISUS) is a central institution of the University of Stuttgart. About 30 scientists research in different areas of scientific visualization, visual analytics, visual computing and computer graphics, as well as interdisciplinary, applied research. VISUS owns a large-area projection screen that is able to display about … Read more
The idea of using external graphics as a means of beefing up a laptop or desktop computer is not new, but it has been revitalized by the availability of Thunderbolt on modern machines. In 2008 ATI developed an external graphics box that connected to a laptop via what ATI called eXternal Graphics Port (XGP). Fujitsu and MSI built lap tops … Read more
The evolution of future processors Is it a revolution — or just evolution? The GPU with its hyper-dense compute capacity and relatively low cost, is an amazingly powerful workload accelerator for certain classes of problems — those that lend themselves to massive parallel processing and multi-threaded workloads. When programmable vertex shaders were first introduced in 2002 (by 3Dlabs), and the … Read more
Nvidia's big, bad Xavier is the first of a breed of processors that will power the modern world At GTC 2016, Nvidia previewed “Xavier,” an SoC that integrates a 512-core Volta GPU and an 8-core ARM CPU. Skipping the amusing retort given by most companies when questioned about leaks—we don’t pre-announce products—probably because press, analysts, and fans have been hearing … Read more
