Jon Peddie Blogs

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: gpu nvidia amd ati 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…

Calculating the Total Cost of Ownership

Posted by Ted Pollak on November 30th 2010 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, General Interest
Tags: gpu tco energy efficiency graphics processors total cost of ownership

The other day Jon was (halfway) joking that modern enthusiast GPU’s should be measured in horsepower, as they now consume about 1/3rd HP on the high end. This got me to thinking of a computer system expense evaluation tool I started working on a few years ago named RealCost. This tool could be used for just about anything electronic and is intended to estimate the total cost of ownership of a device based on its initial expense and the power it consumes. Consumer adjustable variables include average hours use per day, load weighting, planned life, and local energy expense. It is…

Qualcomm’s powerful new HPU the S4

Posted by Jon Peddie on October 7th 2011 | Permalink
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…