Software

Oculus Connect 4 Conference

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who believe in VR and those who say it’ll never happen. And, okay, there are those wusses who say, VR is going to be great but now right now. The people at Oculus Connect are believers. After all, it’s a developer conference, they have skin in the game. This year … Read more

Adobe races to the future

Magic over machines: more Harry Potter than the Terminator The overweening theme at this year’s Max is extending creative tools every everyone and brand new apps unveiled this year is enabling the creativity that resides in everyone. In addition, the new apps seem to be built on a continuum that reaches from absolute beginners to professionals and occasional users to … Read more

Photorealism for the masses gets closer

With increased performance and clever algorithms Ray tracing has been one of the white whales of computer graphics. Since its introduction in the early 1980s, ray tracing has promised to bring photorealistic rendering on a broadscale, and it’s always been twoyears in the future. In those years, we have nonetheless seen it get faster, while screen resolutions have also increased. … Read more

EVGA goes crazy fast— or maybe just crazy

Proving being cool is the key The folks at EVGA were bored one afternoon, and so Jacob Freeman said, “Hey, I know what we can do with that liquid Nitrogen left over from the beer party—let freeze some 1080Tis.  Freeman’s excited voice woke Joe Darwin from his caffeine deprived coma and he said, “Sure, call Vince and see his burns … Read more

Fujitsu updates its premium Celsius workstations

Featuring new Xeons and an overhauled design Along with rivals HP, Dell and Lenovo, the number four vendor of workstations worldwide has an­nounced two new Celsius work­stations built around Intel’s latest Xeon Scalable and Xeon W processors. Ship­ping this quarter will be the premium 2S Celsius R970 and 1S Celsius M770. Prior to the tail end of 2017, Fujitsu’s premium … Read more

Imagination introduces its own VPU

New NNA steps up to compete in ML Citing the burgeoning intelligent vision market, Imagination Technologies announced on September 21st that it has joined the ever-growing list of companies with hardware acceleration for deep learning. Up to now, they have relied on their PowerVR GPUs running in GPU compute mode to provide an ad hoc solution for inferencing but with … Read more

The Z VR Backpack: oddball or opportunity?

In the workstation industry, as in most, the high-volume mainstream providers tend to stick with tried-and-true formulas in product development. The niche and boutique products tend to be left to second tier OEMs, VARs and Sis, eager to fill in the gaps left by the low-cost top-tier suppliers. But there are exceptions to that rule, and HP is often the … Read more

Siemens PLM focuses on additive manufacturing

Now that the technology industry has survived the great 3D printing hype cycle, the real changes coming from additive manufacturing are coming into focus. The major CAD manufacturers are all en-thusiastic about the potential and most have made changes to their software to accommodate 3D printing, but Siemens PLM has signaled its intention to make AM a major business in … Read more

Khronos opens up its membership with new pricing

Associate membership expanded for smaller companies and a new membership tier created for nonprofit organizations If you’ve been planning to join the Khronos Group and you just haven’t had time, the open consortium for technology standards wants to make it easier for you. They have introduced new tiers of membership to enable smaller companies and individuals to participate in the … Read more

Adobe reinvents OCR

Really? Adobe’s Sensei teaches old dogs a trick or two It can be hard to get worked up about an innovation in PDF, even though the technology has become ubiquitous and we all depend upon it. On the other hand, it is ubiquitous and we do all depend on it, and it’s up to Adobe to keep it that way. … Read more

MSI unveils its 17-inch gaming notebook

Joins the ranks of the monster octal Micro-Star International (MSI) has re-introduced its GT75VR gaming notebook that it showed at Computex. It features a 17-inch display, Intel's top-end CPU and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080 or 1070 GPU, and claims its display features have a response time of 3 ms and a refresh rate of 120 Hz, while the device's 10GbE … Read more