Jon Peddie Blogs

Quadrillions and Quadrillions of Cycles

Posted by Jon Peddie on July 24th 2010 | Permalink
Categories Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: rendering, processors, cloud computing,

The number of processors, both x86 and GPU, available for rendering has been increasing exponentially. Rendering is one of the applications that can soak up all the cycles that are available to it, which is an example of Peddie’s first law – In computer graphics, too much is not enough. We looked at the installed base of x86 and GPU processors, applied a factor for the average number of cores and developed the following chart. Cores alone don’t tell the whole story, the real measure is how millions of operations per second can the processor execute. A general figure of merit…

Nintendo goes with DMP for S3D graphics engine

Posted by Jon Peddie on June 20th 2010 | Permalink
Categories Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: nintendo, 3ds, 3d, gaming, stereographic, autostereoscopic

Today, DMP announced in Japan that Nintendo has adopted DMP OpenGL ES 1.1 compliant PICA200 for the 3DS. The new Nintendo 3DS is an amazing little device. The DS has already been a beloved machine attracting over 100 million users since 2004. Not many products (that I can think of, at least) can match that volume of enthusiasm or the customer base. And it’s self perpetuating because the installed base attracts developers which create new games which attracts new consumers – it is a perfect ecosystem. Nintendo has experimented with S3D for years, starting with the Nintendo Virtual Boy monochrome system, and…

Intel Will Never Buy Nvidia

Posted by Jon Peddie on December 9th 2009 | Permalink
Categories Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags:

Someone just sent me an email and asked if I thought Intel might buy Nvidia now that Larrabee is dead. I would have just answered it and then disregarded it if I hadn’t gotten a phone call asking the same dumb question. Intel won’t buy Nvidia for the following reasons: Larrabee isn’t dead - there will be a Larrabee graphics chip, based on x86 architecture. There will be a whole family of Larrabee chips. Wishful thinking won’t make Intel or its ambitions go away. The company has, and continues to make, huge investments in the graphics technology and space. Intel believes…

Larrabee past, present, future

Posted by Jon Peddie on December 6th 2009 | Permalink
Categories Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: intel amd larrabee cpus gpus

“Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we hoped to be at this point in the project,” said Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffe. “As a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product.” (December 4, 2009.) After three years of bombast, Intel shocked the world by canceling Larrabee. Instead of launching the chip in the consumer market, Intel will make it available as a software development platform for both internal and external developers. Those developers can use it to develop software that can run in high-performance computers. The following is an excerpt from an…

Nvidia and Starting the Next Age of Super Computing

Posted by Jon Peddie on October 7th 2009 | Permalink
Categories Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: nvidia opencl directx cuda compute fermi

“I believe that we need something big and new every four years or so.” – Jen Hsun Huang Nvidia has been planning to be in the super computer business for the past three years. The company has had stellar growth since the internet melt down in 2001, and it has come to dominate almost every market it has entered, but Nvidia is now facing limited growth opportunities in its classical markets and new competition. Its main rival for graphics chips ATI has renewed itself with a winning and very challenging price/performance product design and positioning. Nvidia’s integrated chip business is declining…

Different strokes: AMD and Nvidia’s approaches are diverging in more ways than one

Posted by Alex Herrera on October 6th 2009 | Permalink
Categories Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: nvidia gpu ati amd opencl cuda compute directcompute gforce

It’s often hard in this business to draw clear lines separating two vendors’ technologies or products, as often they tend to converge on common solutions, the result of tackling the same problem with the same vision and set of priorities. And while it wouldn’t be right to say the latest generations of GPU technology from Nvidia and AMD are apples and oranges — they aren’t — the two companies are both very consciously differentiating themselves, both with respect to the goals that are shaping their technology decisions and in how they’re packaging up that technology to deploy products. GPU-compute representing different…

With Nehalem, OEMs Xeon — not Core — for entry level, single-socket workstations

Posted by Alex Herrera on April 8th 2009 | Permalink
Categories Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: intel market workstation report xeon

Intel appears to be consciously shifting brand strategy ... and pricing accordingly When it comes to workstation volume, Intel’s Core brand has consistently garnered the lion’s share of unit shipments, with its sibling Xeon brand commanding a relative minority. That long-time status quo is now set to change, however, as Intel’s introduced not only a new Xeon platform, but it appears a new strategy for the brand as well. In launching the first processors of the Nehalem generation to bear the Xeon name, Intel’s looking to extend the brand’s reach down into the entry-level, single-socket segment of the workstation market, pushing…

Intel’ s Core i7 is FAST but getting there isn’t

Posted by Jon Peddie on November 19th 2008 | Permalink
Categories Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags:

I was invited to the Intel Core i7 victory lap party in way, way downtown south of the biotech area that’s exploding in San Francisco known as the dogpatch, is an area filled with old warehouses now used by film and art studios, and a few software development firms. On my way to the Intel i7 rollout I was making a left to the designated parking area – parking being the most unavailable thing in this area of empty lots – go figure, and when I got to the right lane of on-coming traffic (the left two lanes were stopped waiting…

How many FLOPS?

Posted by Jon Peddie on May 24th 2008 | Permalink
Categories Engineering and Development
Tags:

FLoating point Operations Per Second – FLOPS, one of the more obscure acronyms in our lives, and one of the oldest ones. It’s since been modified with a prefix of M (mega), G (giga) and most recently T (tera). A Terra is a million millions, one trillion (1012) a whole lot of anything, whether its cycles (Hertz), Bytes, dollars, or FLOPS. (And note - the ‘S’ in FLOPS is capitalized.) So I was asked recently, how many TFLOPS in all the game consoles? There are two answers to that question. Do you mean in all the ones built, or just the…

Educating the next crop of engineers

Posted by Jon Peddie on April 7th 2008 | Permalink
Categories Engineering and Development
Tags:

As I pondered this ponderous title and the challenge it represents for me to lead the round table at COFES it got me thinking about how we learn. Studies have shown that children learn fast and do so until they become 19 to 20 years old, then their brains become less flexible and learning takes longer, and it’s more difficult. By the time one reaches full adulthood and middle age  you really have to work at it to learn new things; languages are particularly difficult because of the contextual and grammatical differences, they don’t easily fit our well honed models and…