Cray Computer was founded in 1972 in Minneapolis by Seymour Cray (1925–1996). The company shipped its first Cray supercomputer, the Cray-1 to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 and it cost $8.8 million. It boasted a world-record speed of 160 MFLOPS and an 8 MB of main memory. Seymore Cray standing next to his supercomputer. (Source: Cray Research) The … Read more
Hands-free voice commands, 4K HD adjustable, rotating camera, no wires or earbuds surround sounds, with bone-conduction (AVIwear) $350 (4K), $250 (1k), $150 audio only JP’s rules for AR: Don’t be ugly or obnoxious Don’t be expensive or heavy Don’t be proprietary For AR to realize its potential, to become a consumer product and be as critical and ubiquitous as … Read more
Computex is shaping up to be another big year. Our friends at AMD, Intel, and Nvidia have been bugging us with hints and promises and demands because they’re lining up their big announcements and they want to make sure we recognize Computex week as a worldwide celebration of compute power. AMD is expected to show the 2nd Gen of Ryzen but … Read more
The founding theme of the FMX conference in Stuttgart is special effects, but as the conference has evolved, driven by the energy of the students who attend, and the creativity of industry professionals and developers, it has expanded to recognize the contribution from all forms of art and the role of technology innovation. Looked at one way, the art of … 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
Intel reported its calendar Q1 2019, revenues were flat year-over-year and achieved 4% growth in the PC-centric business while data-centric revenue declined 5%. “We shipped a strong mix of high-performance products and continued spending discipline while ramping 10 nm and managing a challenging NAND pricing environment. Looking ahead, we're taking a more cautious view of the year, although we expect … Read more
AMD reported its quarter results for calendar Q1 2019, revenues and operating income were down year-over-year as well as its graphics and compute groups revenue and profits. “We delivered solid first quarter results with significant gross margin expansion as Ryzen and EPYC processor and datacenter GPU revenue more than doubled year-over-year,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. “We … Read more
It’s been a big year for Maxon. The company won its first Academy Award, and in the last 12 months it has gotten a new CEO, David McGavran, and it celebrated this year’s NAB by acquiring Redshift Rendering Technologies. Maxon gathered crowds at NAB on the back of their Academy Award for Motion Graphics and their newly announced acquisition of … Read more
At FMX, Intel’s Sr. Principal Engineer, Sr. Director, Advanced Rendering and Visualization, presented updates on Intel’s Rendering Framework which includes the open source tools and libraries of Embree and OSPRay, Open SWR, and the Open Image Denoise tools. Jeffers notes that the AI/ML based Open Image Denoise, is available for integration into any program, but that it is also integrated … Read more
Change is a constant for the NAB show, and its international counterpart IBC, because broadcast is an industry ruled by committees, standards, laws, regulations, and humans. Broadcast is based on semi-miraculous technologies: radio waves, television transmission, digital transmission, and now the Internet. It’s an industry whose practitioners engage in cut-throat competition enabled by cooperative alliances. Much ado about cables in … Read more
When Lisa Su took over the presidency of AMD in October 2014, the company was at an all-time low, and its share price was $2.80. At that same time, Intel’s share price was $32.80, and Nvidia was at $19.21, things didn’t look for AMD or Su, and several people asked, why would anyone want to run AMD? Two years later … Read more
