At IBC, digitalization is a done deal and 4K becoming the norm; 8K is coming in with new screens, cameras, transmission systems, CODECS, and lenses all built to satisfy increasing demand. UHD is at home in living rooms around the world and the discussion now is around HDR. All of that adds of the heavy workloads for workstations and servers, … Read more
Hector Ruiz, AMD’s second CEO after the legendary Jerry Sanders (who said, “Only real men have fabs”) sold off the company’s fab 11 years ago and introduced the concept of “asset light.” The former Dresden fab became GlobalFoundries with financial backing from the Mubadala Investment Company in the The United Arab Emirates. Mubadala invested more in GF, bought Singapore-based Chartered … Read more
JPR SIGGRAPH Luncheon, Vancouver 2018, Pan Pacific Hotel
Threadripper has played a significant role in helping AMD redefine itself in the CPU market. The original Threadripper spawned from the first round of Zen generation parts in 2017, pushed the core count up to 16―more cores than the gaming or professional computing segments had seen to date. Threadripper pushed the core count up so dramatically, it forced Intel to … Read more
Workstation users buy workstations and/or workstation accessories and peripherals for two main reasons: reliability and performance. Price is usually a low consideration because the relative cost of the hardware to the labor cost of the user and the application costs is quite small, especially over time. But reliability is critical, for all the above reasons. At Siggraph 2018 in Vancouver, … Read more
As other countries step up semiconductor development efforts in order to build homegrown industries, and Moore’s Law shows its age, the United States and its allies risk losing their dominance in the industry. At the top of the list of concerns is China’s well-funded Made In China initiative targeting worldwide AI leadership. In 2017, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency … Read more
As we try to mitigate our excitement in the run up to Siggraph, which can only be compared to the weeks before Christmas, subtle hints and leaks are dribbling out of some of the exhibitors and paper presenters as they employ guerilla marketing techniques to vie for big(er) headlines when the actual event happens. Announcements from Pixar, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, … Read more
AMD reported a record quarter for calendar Q2 2018, revenues and operating income were up as well as its graphics and compute groups revenue and profits. ”We had an outstanding second quarter with strong revenue growth, margin expansion and our highest quarterly net income in seven years.” – Lisa Su Every metric was up including the company’s gross margin which … Read more
HP has been expanding its workstation line using both professional 8th generation E2100 Xeon CPUs and 8th generation Core processors, equipped with either AMD Radeon Pro AIBs, Nvidia Quadro AIBs, or Intel HD graphics for the budget-minded. HP has established the platform for factor, and then broadened each one with a wide range of option in processor type, GPUs, and … Read more
Used for far more than graphics now
Array Technology Inc. was founded in 1985 by K.Y. Ho, and the Lau brothers, Lee, Francis, and Benny, in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. The company subsequently moved to Markham, just north of Toronto, in 1993. The company built sub-assemblies for the still new PC industry and introduced one of the industry’s first graphics boards. By 1987, ATI had grown into an … Read more
In the beginning, back in when the fabulous 286 was introduced in 1982, several companies sought to clone it, AMD being the most successful. That started the MHz wars, and we users and the happy replicants of the war, the ISVs, enjoyed the bi-annual clock increases and subsequent performance boosts. Ah, those were the days when we have a simple … Read more
