Nvidia chose Siggraph as the backdrop for its big reveal of the new Turing GPU because the company believes this new processor has the power to transform graphics on several fronts important to the Siggraph community. Number one on the list is hardware accelerated ray tracing, at least in terms of messaging for Siggraph, but the company has also beefed … Read more
That’s the view of a significant number of players in the ML game, anyway. Even discounting the fact that this opinion is largely heard from companies with FPGAs to sell, it has gained enough traction that it has to be taken seriously; Microsoft has based its entire Azure business strategy on FPGA-accelerated servers and Americo-Chinese company DeePhi, recently acquired by … 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
Eleven years ago, the Larrabee project was started in 2007. In 2010, the company killed the project. Then in 2011, Intel introduced the Xeon Phi, an accelerator card based on the 22-nm “Knights Corner” chip. A vestige of Intel’s ill-fated Larrabee project, Knights Corner was the first realization of Intel’s Many Integrated Cores (MIC) architecture. MIC was a cache-coherent multiprocessor … Read more
Amber Lake-Y processors employ Intel's UHD Graphics 615 (GT2) integrated graphics processing unit (iGPU). The iGPU features 24 Execution Units (EUs) running at a base clock of 300 MHz with a turbo clock up to 1000 MHz depending on the model. That’s a pretty decent GPU, and even though its constrained with UMA (uniform memory access) the M in UMA … Read more
The last major architectural improvement to the basic GPU design happened when the major GPU suppliers went to unified shaders with the introduction of Direct3D 10, Shader Model 4.0, in 2008. That was ten years ago. The unified shading architecture was introduced with the Nvidia GeForce 8 series, ATI Radeon HD 2000, S3 Chrome 400, Intel GMA X3000 series, Xbox … Read more
This is the first in a series of short articles about graphics chips, controllers, and processors that changed the course of the computer graphics (CG) industry. In buzzword talk, they were disruptive devices, and in addition to changing how things were done, the application of those chips made a lot of companies successful. Ironically, all of them are gone now. … Read more
Samsung is the first to announce the availability of JEDEC GDDR6 CMOS 8 Gb through 16 Gb x16 dual channel SGRAM (Synchronous Graphics Random Access Memory) memory devices for use in advanced graphics processing for gaming devices and graphics cards as well as automotive, network and artificial intelligence systems. “Beginning with this early production of the industry’s first 16Gb GDDR6,” … Read more
A few days ago, Baidu joined the ranks of vertically integrated companies to produce Kunlun, their own machine learning accelerator. Announcing two versions of the Kunlun processor, while giving few details outside of their 260 TeraOPS raw performance and 100w power dissipation, Baidu signaled its intention to own all the machine learning components of its datacenters as well as expanding … Read more
With the advent of AI, image recognition, and neural networks, there has been the emergence of a new category of processor, or functionality broadly known as a visual processing unit, or VPU. The name belies the real importance of the function and so we prefer to refer to it in the awkward term of VPU and neural network accelerator, which … Read more
If one looks at the distribution of AIBs, AMD has about 35% market share based on Q1’18 shipments. Not all those AIBs were used for gaming, but most of them were. Q1’18 market share desktop discrete AIBs However, if one looks at the volunteered data of Steam users, AMD has about 15% market share (and Intel 11%). Steam conducts … Read more
Qualcomm announced this week three new additions to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 and 400 tiers: the Snapdragon 632, 439, and 429 mobile platforms. These platforms, says the company, are engineered to bring higher performance, better battery life, more efficient designs, impressive graphics and AI capabilities into the highest selling Snapdragon tiers. Snapdragon 632: Based on their market research and customer … Read more
