Hardware

VR and AR platforms and devices—Ultraleap is all in

Ultraleap has emerged as the offspring of the acquisition of Leap Motion by Ultrahaptics in the Spring of 2019. The merger joined two companies with different approaches to enable spatial interaction for digital devices. Ultrahaptics had the Stratos platform using ultrasound to provide tactile feedback and with the acquisition of Leap Motion, it added hand tracking using optical sensors and … Read more

Varjo changes the game

The Finnish headset company Varjo is building no-compromise VR. In 2019, the company started making a strong case for its high-resolution products including its VR-2 headsets and its new mixed reality headset, the XR-1, being sold to developers. The company has been iterating on the same design built around human-eye resolution, integrated eye tracking, and support for industrial applications. The … Read more

Famous graphics chips: Nintendo 64

Silicon Graphics had been a leader and highly respected workstation developer that rose to fame and fortune based on its introduction of a VLSI geometry processor in 1981. In the ensuing years, it developed leading graphics technologies at the high end. A high-end super high-performance workstation could cost over $100,000. Therefore, the idea of adapting such state of the art … Read more

Intel’s stacked chip is sexy

Image credit:  phee hawberries   Intel’s newest chip family, code-named Lakefield, is built with Intel’s Foveros technology. They are built in a totally new way, says Intel; not with the various IPs spread out flat in two dimensions, but with them stacked in three dimensions. Think of a chip designed as a layer cake (a 1-mm-thick layer cake) versus a … Read more

The evolution of cloud infrastructure

I had a conversation with Jacob Smith, the CMO of Packet. Packet is a company that manages the raw infrastructure in data centers and has various products that automate data center tasks. They are being acquired by Equinix, of dot com infamy, who has quietly returned to a very large presence in US data infrastructure. The fun part of it … Read more

Khronos extends and releases Vulkan 1.2 for GPU acceleration

Mount Vulkaan – Wikipedia   The sun never sets on Khronos, and Vulkan never sleeps. Khronos’s Vulkan is also no Rip Van Winkel and since the release of Vulkan 1.1 at Siggraph 2016, over 23 extensions to an already robust API have been suggested to the committee. Those extensions have been accepted bringing significant developer-requested access to new hardware functionality, … Read more

AMD charging into the fast lane with new CPUs

In this week’s stories, you can find Boxx Technologies bragging about using AMD’s Threadripper in Boxx’s new Apex workstation. And as happy as that makes AMD, it’s almost deliriously giddy about its 15 W, 2.1 to 4.2 GHz Ryzen 4000 mobile processors that can run some serious games. And, the company has design wins to brag about too. Consumers will … Read more

Intel announces discrete GPU DG1 at CES

Intel seldom disappoints at CES, and this year they clearly had more to tell than the time allotted to do it. From autonomous cars, supercomputers to micro IoT thingies. Vice President Gregory Bryant showed the tiny but powerful 10 nm, Tiger Lake processor based on the Willow Cove architecture and said it is in full production. Gregory Bryant holding a … Read more

Famous graphics chips: HP’s Artist Graphics

  In 1993, facing heavy competition from Sun, HP set the design goal for its new 32-bit HP 9000/712 workstation to reach performance levels of 1992-era workstations and servers at a fraction of their fabrication costs. Their target was the earlier generation HP 9000/735. To accomplish that HP employed VLSI technologies for the processor components, which were state of the … Read more

Intel really respects AMD technology

 Image by mgallon from Pixabay   When Intel was struggling with Itanium, it shifted to the x86 64-bit approach AMD developed. When Intl realized parallel buses weren’t going to scale much further, it copied AMD’s hyperlink. And when Intel wanted a compact high-performance GPU, it went to AMD for a dGPU to put into its Kaby Lake-G multichip processor. When … Read more