Hardware

Dell’s 13-in 2-in-1, the Latitude 7390

Dell sold its first laptop in 1989, and it still looks good today.  Dell's first laptop, the 316LT, 1989   For the past 30 years, Dell has made lots of laptops, notebooks, and tablets, so it’s learned a few things. Its also learned about user’s wants and needs. And, the company has stayed at the leading edge of technology. All … Read more

Super is, as super does — Fujitsu post-K goes for exascale

Fujitsu Limited and the RIKEN center for computational science, announced the joint development of post-K, a supercomputer that the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has set forth as a successor to the K computer, is moving forward. The goal is to be in full operation around 2021.  Fujitsu Post-K ARM Supercomputer, Exascale by 2021   Fujitsu … Read more

HPE Astra will deliver 2.3 petaFLOPS

Based on HPE's Apollo 70 the Astra supercomputer will be comprised of 2,592 dual-socket nodes, containing 145,000 cores—the largest such system the company has delivered. Each node will have two 28-core Cavium ThunderX2 processors running at 2.0 GHz. The nodes will draw 1.2 MW of power. The Astra supercomputer is the first deployment of the of the Department of Energy’s … Read more

Jensen Huang gives away 276 TFLOPS

If you were lucky enough to get to go to the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Salt Lake City, and if you were one of the twenty lucky enough once there to get tapped by Nvidia’s gregarious CEO Jensen Huang, then you went home with a 32 GB Titan V supercomputer AIB. Jensen Huang demonstrating his largesse in … Read more

Core Wars: AMD and Intel update an old battle

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

Mali-V76 VPU from Arm.

Arm’s recent Premium Launch gave us an insight into upcoming products aimed at the higher end of the mobile and consumer device markets. In there with the new Cortex-A76 CPU and the Mali-G76 GPU (subscribers see related story) was the Mali-V76 VPU, a new video codec IP core that delivers 8K UHD encode and decode.  Integration of Arm’s IP engines … Read more

Money Can’t Buy You Love

In computer graphics, too much is not enough. I first said that in 1980 I think, and its been true ever since. That’s why I’m such a pixel pig, sitting here writing this with 50 megapixels spread across three 31-inch monitors in front of me (4K-8K-4K), and I’d take more if I could get it (and an AIB to drive … Read more

Arm Expands Bifrost to New Mali-G76

Arm has been steadily improving the Mali GPU since they acquired it from Falanx twelve years ago. The little GPU has found its way into TVs, phones and tablets, automobiles, and various consumer and industrial devices. The little GPU that could, and did, has gone through several architectural evolutions, the latest being the Bifrost and implemented in the Mali-G71 last … Read more

Nvidia Slows the Pace, while AMD Promises More

AMD and Nvidia, despite how they poster and position themselves, have limited resources; and since there are only 25 hours in a day, they have to pick their priorities carefully. And even though there was a lot of fanfare when Koduri rejoined AMD in 2013, the Vega product line was less than stellar, although it did have a surprising advantage … Read more

An AIB in a blink of the eye

From the beginning of second quarter of 2017 to the end of the first quarter of 2018, almost sixty-four million AIBs were shipped—63, 887,712 to be exact.  In one year, there are 31,536,000 seconds in an average year (not factoring in leap year offsets). More AIBs per year than seconds, over twice as many in fact. That’s almost as many … Read more