A cloud of radioactive material settled over Ukraine and Belarus after a critical failure blew apart a Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station reactor in 1986. The resulting death toll had exceeded 4,000. Twenty years later, we got our first view of Stalker at an Nvidia conference where they showed some clips of it. It was amazing than with debris, bits of … Read more
Lisa Su seems to like Computex and Computex evidently likes Lisa Su. This year, AMD was invited to be among the Computex’ keynote presentations, and Lisa Su snagged the all-important kick-off event. In this very interesting year with very interesting leaders. Taiwan is trying to ride out trade wars and maintain its dangerous dance with China, and somehow come out … Read more
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
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
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
If you believed, you’d a lot richer today
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
Turning 30 is a time to reassess, to think about the future and maybe have a little bit too much to drink because you’re disappointed in your life so far. That’s for humans. When software turns 30 the response can be mixed but the celebration is almost always in order. It’s hard to survive for 30 years in the digital … Read more
One, JPR has just released the definitive report on the ray tracing market and its 70 software and three hardware providers: The Global Market for Ray Tracing Software Two, Nvidia will be presenting 21 sessions on ray tracing at their GTC conference in San Jose from the 18th to the 22nd of March, 2019: GPU Technology Conference Ray tracing and the advent … Read more
As a CAD program based on the ODA DWG format and the Graebert Ares CAD engine, CorelCAD come late on to the scene. The Ares engine was introduced in 2005 and today Graebert is a leading provider of a CAD engine for development. The company got a major endorsement when Dassault chose Ares as the base for its Draftsight CAD … Read more
After reading and reporting on the financial results of AMD and Intel, and reading Nvidia’s cautionary letter to its shareholders, I have been struck by the resiliency and dynamism of these companies. AMD and Intel are in their fifties, and Nvidia is 25. That may not be as old as say General Electric, Konica, or Bayer but those staid … Read more
AMD reported its quarterly results for calendar Q4 2018, revenues and operating income were up year-over-year as well as its graphics and compute groups revenue and profits. “We delivered our second straight year of significant revenue growth, market share gains, expanded gross margin and improved profitability based on our high-performance products. Importantly, we more than doubled our EPYC processor shipments … Read more
