Jon Peddie Back Pages - It's all about the pixels

I don’t want to look like a dork—and I’ve got work to do

Posted by Webmaster on October 1st 2010 | Discuss
Tags:

I was brainstorming with some friends/clients about what a workstation would look like five years from now, and I said, “You’ll wear it.” You will. My model can be built now, well almost. But that’s about right timing for productizing, miniaturization and evolutionary developments of some of the prime components. Here’s the model. You wear glasses. Lightweight glasses that look like lightly-tinted sun glasses. On those glasses are high-res OLED displays with a focal length about a foot in front of you. The glasses also have tiny CMOS sensors in the corners that can see everything you do, in stereo, for…

Tension at the inflection point

Posted by Jon Peddie on September 16th 2010 | Discuss
Tags:

This week the world was introduced to the next, and possibly most significant, inflection point in the PC industry since dual-core—the embedding of graphics processors with the CPU. There has been an inevitable march of more and more integration of peripheral components to the CPU. So it should be no surprise to anybody that graphics are being integrated into the main processor. However, since its introduction, the graphics processor unit, GPU, grew in greater complexity than the CPU during the past eight years, exceeding the transistor count, and matching or exceeding the die size. Many people thought that due to the…

The problem with crystal balls

Posted by Jon Peddie on September 2nd 2010 | Discuss
Tags:

Twice this past week I was confronted with soothsayers, magicians, and fortune tellers—you know—industry analysts and company guidance managers. One of the problems with having grown up in this industry (but, I’d like to point out, not being grown up thank you) is that you’ve heard and seen it before—a state that feels something like Run Lola Run, Groundhog Day, and déjà-vu. A highly involved, if not evolved, friend called the other day to bemoan the Rodney Dangerfield treatment S3D seems to be getting from the press, and a few commissioned analysts. Seems those hired guns had discovered the consumers don’t…

The data’s there, why not use it?

Posted by Jon Peddie on August 17th 2010 | Discuss
Tags:

Every day we (or at least I) read about an augmented reality (AR) application or installation somewhere in the world. Maybe I’m just sensitive to the topic since it fulfills one of my fantasies about a sci-fi singularity world I can’t wait to enjoy. The idea of location-based information flowing to me based on a preferences algorithmic learning program (like the Pandora digital radio application) powered by gigantic cloud-based processors and delivered to my very smartphone (which knows who I am, and where I am) is so appealing I simply can’t wait. Why should I wait? Do I really have to?…

Leading edge, bleeding edge, or just edgy?

Posted by Jon Peddie on August 6th 2010 | Discuss
Tags:

Siggraph is enigmatic, sphinx like, all knowing, all seeing, and unknowable. Is it a trade show, an academic conference, a big R&D lab, a screening room, a job fair, an artist’s colony, or a gathering of the clan? Yes, Siggraph is. As such, it’s probably a little disappointing to some that it’s not more of whichever aspect they want. It’s literally a shared experience, a happening, chaotic, spontaneous, shocking, surprising, sometimes loud, and annoying. It’s a mix of spiked neon hair, grey hair, no hair, and long shiny hair, but regardless of the costume and artifacts, no one who attends Siggraph…

The art of testing and other esoteric sidelines

Posted by Jon Peddie on July 22nd 2010 | Discuss
Tags: graphics 3d directx opengl benchmarking testing benchmarks

We test a lot of things here at JPR and at JPA before that. We’ve been testing stuff officially and unofficially for 30 some years—you’d think we’d know what we’re doing. Hell, we thought we knew what we were doing. This last batch of graphics AIBs really threw us. We couldn’t get things to work. Benchmarks wouldn’t bench. Command lines needed to set parameters wouldn’t work. Resolutions would stay stuck, and over-clocking tools defied us to make them behave—and all the while the clock is ticking …. No one wants to read about a test done on a product that was…

Been seeing double for a very long time

Posted by Jon Peddie on July 8th 2010 | Discuss
Tags:

The idea of using a computer for stereovision representation of molecules dates back to Project MAC at MIT in 1966. And in the early 1980s the concept became known “molecular graphics” and the Molecular Graphics Society (MGS) in the UK formalized the notion and science of computer-based molecular modeling. Initially much of the technology concentrated either on high-performance 3D graphics, including interactive rotation or 3D rendering of atoms as spheres (sometimes with radiosity). The first stereovision machine I saw was an Evans & Sutherland (E&S) workstation in the early eighties. It had a vector (“stroke”) display. The stereo device or selection…

It’s the noun stupid - Video Game Consoles

Posted by Jon Peddie on June 23rd 2010 | Discuss
Tags:

I couldn’t understand after all these years why the press keeps referring to, and getting excited about “video games,” and yet never mentioned the PC. The first console dates back to the “Brown Box,” Ralph Baer developed at Sanders in 1962 (although Baer says he thought of it in 1952.) Sanders licensed it to Magnavox in 1969, and Magnavox then released it in 1972 as the Odyssey. However, the first computer game, “Spacewar,” was developed on a PDP-1 in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen at MIT. Actually, using a computer to play a “game” dates back to…

Those ungrateful consumers

Posted by Jon Peddie on June 11th 2010 | Discuss
Tags:

Look at all we’ve done for them and have they once said thanks? No, all they want to do is talk about the good old days. The good old what? You mean when we had Windows 95, and a laptop had VGA resolution in a nine-inch screen, weighed ten pounds and ran on a battery for almost three hours? Yeah, that was great wasn’t it? Today we hardly even mention the battery life of a laptop. Kathleen Maher has a Vaio that refuses to quit, in fact she runs out of energy before it does. She also has an iPad and…

The Tyranny of Terminology

Posted by Jon Peddie on May 28th 2010 | Discuss
Tags:

One of the running jokes about the difference between the English, French and German languages are how rich and efficient English is and how complicated and wordy French and German can be. We struggle with terminology here all the time, trying to come up with meaningful, efficient, and entertaining nomenclature to describe the incredibly complex thingies we deal with every day. We are currently struggling with two developmental products that as of yet have not been totally defined or turned into a comfortable acronym. Our attempts this week concerned the new class of processors, which have graphics embedded in them, and…