Last summer, Scientists from EPFL’s Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) in Switzerland announced they had developed a method to control exciton flows at room temperature. That in and of itself was a pretty big deal. In the latest development, they have discovered new properties of these quasiparticles that can lead to more energy-efficient electronic devices and have found … Read more
Further evidence that AMD is at the top of its game came with the company’s keynote at CES this year. The company took a keynote spot for the first time while Intel let the opportunity pass. CES CEO Gary Shapiro, who seems to be ageless, introduced Lisa Su, and couldn’t have done a better job if he had worked for … Read more
As a sign of its renewed focus on constructing and articulating a coherent strategy for the future, Intel recently held an industry analyst summit, the first in four years. The confluence of the slowing of Moore’s Law transistor scaling, a rapidly transitioning computing paradigm from distributed, local clients to data-rich clouds, and energized competition from competing providers of high-performance silicon … Read more
This is the latest installment of a series of short articles about graphics chips, controllers and processors, that changed the course of the computer graphics (CG) industry — The TI TMS34010 and VRAM introduced in 1986 by Texas Instruments. In 1984 Texas Instruments introduced TI’s VRAM, the TMS4161. he TMS34010 and VRAMs are related but not in the way one … Read more
For all you people planning to give semiconductors as presents, AMD’s latest APUs arrived just in time for the holiday. AMD says its new Athlon 220GE and 240GE processors with 4 processing threads and Radeon Vega Graphics represent the most advanced entry-level processors AMD has ever created. The new processors enable 720p esports gaming out-of-the-box and with the Zen processor … Read more
2019 will see the introduction of three new GPUs, the first change in the GPU landscape in over 18 years. Nvidia lead the change with their Turing architecture introduced in late 2018. We’ve written about it extensively, but its noteworthy aspects relative to graphics are its hardware ray tracing engine, and the use of AI to do anti-aliasing. Samsung lifted … Read more
We, along with just about anyone with a keyboard and internet access, reported on Intel’s comments at its Architecture day about its forthcoming GPU. In the rush to scoop something, anything, interesting or possibly even meaningful about Intel’s promised GPU, the news and pundits have decided Intel has branded it as the Xe chip. It hasn’t. What Intel actually said … Read more
Ageia was founded in 2002 by five guys in Silicon Valley. The fabless semi company developed a real-time physics-processing engine (PPU) they called PhysX. Nvidia acquired the company in 2007 and made the software part of its toolkit. Recently the GPU maker said its PhysX SDK 4.0 physics engine will be available on December 20, 2018, under the open source … Read more
Former PR manager at AMD and now head of engineering at Intel, the invincible Chris Hook called together his team of 500 engineers in Folsom, CA, who are building Intel’s dGPU and asked them what was being done right and what needed improvement. They told him, and he says (representing management), “we’re listening.” Hook’s real job, however, is Discrete Graphics … Read more
AMD’s Adrenalin 2019 Edition has delivered some of the biggest and most unique features we’ve seen so far from the company. The heart of the new software package is a tuned driver that the company claims gives up to a 15% average performance gain since the launch of Adrenalin Edition software in November 2018. The Game Advisor, AMD’s game tuning … Read more
At Intel’s recent Architecture Day, Raja Koduri, Intel’s senior vice president of Core and Visual Computing, outlined a strategic shift for the company’s design and engineering model. This shift, said Koduri, will combine a series of foundational building blocks that leverage a portfolio of technologies and intellectual property (IP) within the company. “We are generating data faster than we can … Read more
Now that Intel is reentering the discrete graphics chip market, we thought you might like to know about some of their previous offerings. Everyone knows about Larrabee, and a few remember the i740, but Intel did a chip before that, in 1986. Intel saw the rise in discrete graphics controllers such as NEC’s µPD7220 (and even licensed it), Hitachi’s HD63484, … Read more
