Samsung's 2018 QLED TVs blend into the background when idle Since the TV is often the focal point of the living room, when it's off that blank black rectangle wastes a lot of space. To put it to better use, Samsung has introduced what it calls Ambient Mode, a low-power setting that lets the idle screen display news, weather, or … Read more
No longer a cheap discount disguise I’ve heard and used the term, MSPR (Manufacturer’s suggested retail price) for at least three decades that I can recall. In the past it has meant a discount was being offered, as in, we’re giving it to you at the manufacturers price. And as with all such promises, smelled a little off. Cryptocurrency-mining’s use … Read more
Introduces 700 platform, a subset of 800 platform for IoT automotive and embedded Qualcomm’s new 700 series is targeted at OEMs and the company claims it offers premium features, such as on-device artificial intelligence, in high-tier smartphones and can meet the ever-increasing demands of China’s smartphone ecosystem for more premium devices. The new Qualcomm Snapdragon 700 Mobile Platform Series offers … Read more
The CNN accelerator field continues to get more crowded. ST Micro quietly previewed their Orlando high-efficiency inferencing accelerator at CES and have now gone public with an announcement at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. Built on ST’s proprietary 28nm FD-SOI process, the chip is still described as a prototype but it is supported with a full set of production … Read more
Too little too late, or the foreshadowing of history? Arm took advantage of the post-CES news lull to announce, “Project Trillium,” a suite of software tools for neural network inferencing at the edge, along with new hardware IP for deep neural network (DNN) acceleration that is scheduled to be available for licensing in late 2018. The key software element of … Read more
The brutality of numbers: You need to make $5,000 a year to make it crypto-mining worthwhile. We have been investigating the impact on the AIB market by cryptocurrency monitoring for a while and we’ve written about it often. The following is an excerpt from an updated and curated monograph collection of our writings to give a perspective to the phenomenon … Read more
Company expands its footprint AMD has introduced two new product families—the AMD EPYC Embedded 3000 processor and AMD Ryzen Embedded V1000 processor. AMD EPYC Embedded 3000 brings the power of “Zen” to a variety of new markets including networking, storage and edge computing devices, while AMD Ryzen Embedded V1000 targets medical imaging, industrial systems, digital gaming and thin clients, according … Read more
Fine-grained voltage and frequency controls As always, Intel presented papers at the world famous and prestigious IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference — ISSCC. One Intel paper was particularly interesting to us. It was titled, An Energy-Efficient Graphics Processor Featuring Fine-Grain DVFS with Integrated Voltage Regulators, Execution-Unit Turbo, and Retentive Sleep in 14nm Tri-Gate CMOS Bet you can’t say that … Read more
Dollars per nit Three new 4K projectors were recently announced, Acer’s $4k, 4K 3K lumen VL7860, N-tech’s $0.47k, 4k, 1.5k lumen, and BenQ’s $1.5k, 4k, 2.2k lumen HT2550 projector. Acer’s and BenQ’s are also HDR compatible, Acer is supporting a wide color gamut of 110 percent of the Rec. 709 color space and is Rec. 2020 compatible, and BenQ offering … Read more
The better to see you with my dear. My grandmother told me, never stick anything smaller than your elbow in you eyes or ear. But grandma didn’t know about lasers, VR, and AR (she would have liked them). By now almost anyone reading this knows about the screen-door effect one gets when a display is placed close to your eye—you … Read more
TSMC first chipmaker to move to 5 nanometer process Legendary Morris Chang says TSMC will be the first with 5nm volume production. Chang is one of those guys says what he means and means what he says, so we have no doubt, TSMC will have 5nm. Morris Chang (張忠謀) photo Focus Taiwan The chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. … Read more
Nanometer processors used for petawhopper computers to keep your lights on Last week, Italian energy company Eni’s took the lead in supercomputers with the launch of its latest petawhopper, the HPC4. At 18.6 petaflops (peak) the new cluster becomes the world’s most powerful commercial system and quadruples the company’s computing capacity to an aggregate peak performance of 22.4 petaflops. According … Read more
