AMD fills out its entry class Radeon Pro GPUs with Polaris While anticipated release of the upcoming Vega GPU is hogging the limelight, AMD has completed the transition of its Radeon Pro workstation GPU line-up to the current Polaris 4th generation GCN architecture, also known as Polaris. The company had already filled out the Radeon Pro mid-range with Polaris earlier … Read more
Qualcomm selected by DARPA’s HIVE Project to accelerate the future of deep learning DARPA—The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit (HIVE) project has the objective of creating a graph analytics processor that achieves 1000x improvement in processing efficiency. If successful, it will enable relationships between events to be discovered as they unfold in the field rather than … Read more
Is this exciting news? AMD has announced that its free ray-tracing engine, ProRender, will run within Blender, as well as Maya, 3ds Max, and SolidWorks. AMD says ProRender uses a physically-based workflow that allows multiple materials to be expressed in a single, lighting-independent shader, making it easy to color objects and have them usable in any sensible environment. The key features … Read more
Can you really do that? Gaming is a major social and technological phenomenon, engaged in by a third to a half of humanity. Unfortunately, the associated energy use has been understudied, and passed over in most energy policy and planning initiatives. Seeking to correct an important oversight in the relationship between energy use and computers, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory … Read more
GPU-compute where no person has gone before AMD has released the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition 16GB workstation add-in board series, in two versions, liquid or air-cooled models. First announced back in mid- May, and bumped to the back of the stage by the Ryzen announcements, Vega is now finally emerging, and available for sale—but you better check your bank account— … Read more
Do you see what I see . . . VR isn’t just for games and 360-videos of vacation spots, as evidenced by developers who are starting to deploy systems that are major art exhibits. And such exhibits are a prime example of what VR can do. In today’s museum industry, a show idea/theme is developed, curated, and then if popular, … Read more
NASA’s hybrid reality astronaut training system uses 3D scanners NASA established Hybrid Reality Lab in late 2015 based on Unreal Engine 4 and incorporating consumergrade VR, physical mockups and models, wearable technologies, and roomscale technology to create training environments. One of the applications of the lab is a detailed mixed reality (MR) replica of the International Space Station (ISS) for … Read more
Chaos Group, one of the most powerful contenders in the ray tracing sweepstakes is offering its SDK for developers who wish to add rendering to their applications. The V-Ray Application SDK includes a high-level API, which enables developers to integrate V-Ray’s rendering into any application. Iavor Trifonov, the VP of Cloud and Integrations says the advantage to using the V-Ray … Read more
Meta is a big kauna in the San Jose AWE community, they have a big impact at the show. This year, Meta CEO Meron Gribetz's keynote revealed the company's Meta Workspace, an AR operating system. Meta has gone with an office metaphor with shelves to store conten, “monitors” for displaying 2D content, and Airgrab that lets people grab and manipulate … Read more
Intel warns expansionists to stay out of the garden It’s one thing to expand the PC market, and something else again to expand the Windows market. PC to Intel means x86. An x86 can run Windows, Linux, iOS, and a dozen other OSs. Windows can run on X86 and no other CPU—today. Intel likes it that way, Microsoft doesn’t. So, … Read more
Expanded product range, going public EVGA started in 1999, with three people in southern California, building cooling devices. Later the company expanded from an add-on to an AIB builder in 2001 using Nvidia chips, and quickly became one of Nvidia’s most trusted AIB partners. More than just a reference design board builder, EVGA invested in R&D for power distribution, cooling, … Read more
Bigger, better, faster Intel introduced the three-chip Visual Compute Accelerator (VCA) quietly in Q4’15. It was equipped with a 3.5 GHz Xeon E3-1200 v4 series processor with 6 MB cache and Iris Pro Graphics, plus two 3.2 Ghz Xeon E5- 2600 v3 series processors with 30 MB cache. The processors were packaged in a slick looking PCIe AIB, and the … Read more
