Jon Peddie Blogs

2011. What was that about?

Posted by Kathleen Maher on December 28th 2011 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, The Market
Tags: apple ces amazon 2011 future trends logitech walled garden

Doesn’t it seem like 2011 lasted a lot longer than a mere 365 days? This was a year that was up and down and up and down. In the tech world, the year officially starts in Las Vegas as CES. That’s where we go to see the largest TV ever. I have absolutely no idea why this is important, but I think it’s a guy thing. You can’t buy the TVs they won’t be practical for year but sure as Christmas, big TVs come to CES. As one technology starts reaching a practical limit, then comes the next.  And this year,…

Qualcomm’s powerful new HPU the S4

Posted by Jon Peddie on October 7th 2011 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: gpu qualcomm krait simd adreno snapdragon hexagon dsp s4 processor

Initially leveraging a 28nm process from TSMC, Qualcomm has announced its Snapdragon S4 class of processors, of which the first member is the MSM8960 with an Adreno 225 GPU. The new 1.5 GHz processor (S4 will scale up to 2.5GHz) has Qualcomm’s micro-architectural design with four independent, proprietary ARM Cortex A15-class CPU cores, plus a 32-core GPU, plus 128 bit SIMD engine, plus three DSPs, plus a handful of hardwired engines for codecs and other special-purpose functions—basically a five processor+ heterogeneous processor that has an open programming environment, and a fast memory interface and manager. The new CPU core is compatible…

WebOS—the short term, instant developer opportunity

Posted by Mitchell Weinstock on August 25th 2011 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Content Creation
Tags: market mobile hp software tablets apps

With all the discussion swirling around the sell off of the HP Tablet at $99 this week, there is a discussion point that has been overlooked. There is now a brand new business opportunity.Generally it is very hard to get developers to target devices that don’t have a fairly large install base without serious incentives beyond the token free device to work with.Developers now have an instant total available market of 500K units. Normally it would take a company like Motorola Mobility 7-12 months to reach that sell through on a single carrier focused smartphone type device. Since the number of…

HP — breaking up the place

Posted by Jon Peddie on August 23rd 2011 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, The Market
Tags: hp, apotheker, psg, rick belluzzo, dell, hp, workstation,

HP’s Personal System group, PSG, is a $41 billion dollar company. It is, IMHO, a jewel, but I may be a bit biased because I have a lot of old friends there. And, like any large organization, it’s not just one thing. In macro scale it’s a desktop PC company, a notebook PC company, a workstation company, and maybe a mobile devices company. It also makes and sells monitors. In other words its five companies and anyone of them could be further subdivided.Now if HP really wants to get rid of this prize which still boggles my midget mind, would they…

AMD, ARM, and all that jazz — reading between the lines will make you cross-eyed

Posted by Jon Peddie on August 3rd 2011 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: amd, gpu, fusion, x86, fsail, arm,

There have been persistent rumors, opinions, and speculation since AMD’s Fusion Developer’s Summit (AFDS) that because ARM was one of the keynote speakers a grand collusion was in the works—the ARMing of AMD.The concept gets fuel from the abrupt discharge of Dirk Meyer, the company’s former president for allegedly not having a mobile strategy.AMD’s announcement of a Fusion System Architecture—Intermediate Layer, into an open platform was one of the main messages AMD wanted to get out at AFDS. They are calling it FSAIL. AMD has said they will publish the Fusion System Architecture (FSA) virtual Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) (FSAIL), FSA…

Tablets — the canary in the PC tunnel?

Posted by Jon Peddie on July 11th 2011 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, The Market
Tags: apple tablets economy

The second quarter by all accounts so far has not been a blockbuster, in fact in some places it’s been a career buster. The DJIA wobbled, not many new jobs were created, and the politics in the US got even more rancorous if such a thing is possible. In the PC industry the major bright spot had been tablets. Called computer tablets, media tablets, tablet PCs, or just tablets; reinvented by Apple and followed by a dozen or more imitators, tablets excited the industry — the latest great thing. No one needs a tablet. It doesn’t do anything that can’t be…

WebGL Security - Kill it before it grows?

Posted by Jon Peddie on June 29th 2011 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Content Creation, Mobile
Tags: 3d khronos opengl microsoft security webgl shaders browsers context

When Khronos launched the WebGL specifications with strong backing from Mozilla, Google, Apple and Opera we thought at least peace had come to the 3D web valley. We should have known better; seems that there are competing vested interests in proprietary software and plug-ins that will put a few bumps in the road in WebGL’s journey to pervasiveness. Last week we were told by Microsoft, the developers of Silverlight, that WebGL is a giant piss-hole into which any yahoo can pour viruses, spoofs, and even DoS attacks - ack! The sky is falling run run run. In a post by James…

The real 3D - Looking at all sides of 3D reveals a future far beyond pixels

Posted by Kathleen Maher on June 3rd 2011 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Content Creation
Tags:

3D is an illusion. Right, got that. Ever since I’ve been working around the computer industry I’ve had people tell me 3D is an illusion. Like, I didn’t know that. The computer screen is a 2D surface, and when we look at objects and turn them, or run into a 3D maze with our big ol’ gun, it’s still a 2D screen. The 3D we think we see is just the illusion of depth. Yeah, yeah, yeah, got it. And, then at the Dimension3 conference in Paris, again, a speaker bemoaned the fact that stereoscopic 3D is just an illusion to…

Getting vertical – what Nvidia’s acquisition of Icera means

Posted by Jon Peddie on May 9th 2011 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: nvidia, gpu, icrea, 3g modem, 4g modem, tsmc, tegra

Nvidia announced the acquisition of UK-based maker of baseband chips for 3G and 4G handsets, Icrea for $367 million in cash. This is a really big deal – not for the purchase price but for the impact it’s going to have on the industry. Now the playing field in mobile devices is shaping up to a big three (or four) players, a normal consolidation in a broadly fragmented market. With Nvidia’s acquisition of Icera, Nvidia now has a total processor stack like Qualcomm, and Intel. Qualcomm and Nvidia are going to be head-to-head competitors. Icrea products already compete directly and quite…

Game Technology for Disaster Preparedness and Response

Posted by Ted Pollak on March 17th 2011 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Content Creation
Tags:

By Ted Pollak (contributions by Jon Peddie) Japan’s terrible situation with its nuclear power plant is heartbreaking. Especially sad are reports that some workers are exposing themselves to potentially harmful radiation levels. The bravery of these people is overwhelming. This got me to thinking about how game technology could maybe help in situations like this and also train and educate people about risk analysis. I will disclose right off the bat that I am not an expert in this kind of thing but believe that there must be some way to modernize how we deal with such a terribly dangerous energy source. International…