Hardware

New Report: Crypto-Currency Impact on AIBs

Supplement to Q3’17 Market Watch Jon Peddie Research estimates that Crypto-currency mining accounts for $1.05 billion dollars in AIB revenue since Q1’15, and accounts for sales of 4.6 million AIBs.   Ethereum and Bitcoin, are among the best known crypto currencies but many more have appeared in the market. Some have already come and gone. Bitcoin arrived in 2009 and set … Read more

Seeing more, seeing better Ben Q 3200U

Seeing more isn’t just about spatial resolution The concept of being able to do more if you can see more by employing higher resolution, larger, and multiple monitors is now well understood and appreciated. A case in point is the recent 50 megapixel set up described in my review of 8K monitors. However, we are now in the realm of … Read more

VESA DisplayID 2.0 Optimizes Plug-and-Play for Displays

Updated for 4K, HDR, AR/VR and other advanced features The Video Electronics Standards Association, affectionally known simply as VESA announced a major update to its Display Identification Data (DisplayID) standard. The organization says this new version (2.0) of its display standard simplifies connecting and configuring modern display products, including PC monitors, consumer TVs and embedded displays (e.g., display panels within … Read more

Intel builds heterogenous chip

A new CPU–GPU multichip for high-end notebooks and small form-factor desktop. As much as it pains me to give Kyle Bennet credit for anything other than being the fastest driver in Texas, it turns out he may also be the fastest news reporter too. Way back in July 2016 when Nvidia was telling us how great their new Pascal GTX thingies … Read more

Another win for Qualcomm

As older companies evolve, NIH gets tossed aside. Unable to sustain the massive R&D costs of being a front-line semiconductor and system supplier, Via Technologies has given up on their S3 and Via graphics and their low-power x86 processors in favor of an OTS high volume, and very powerful SoC from Qualcomm. Hoping to participate in the automotive subsystems market … Read more

Graphcore Intelligence Processing Unit

A new yew—IPU Graphcore continues to dribble out information about its hopefully soon-to-be-released ‘Intelligence Processing Unit’. Earlier this year we got past the It’s-going-to-be-awesome stage, and we’ve since learned it has enough memory to hold an entire neural network, including the network’s weights, on chip for at least the duration of an inference. They carefully avoid telling us how large … Read more

Nvidia unveils new projects at the GPU Technology Conference

The Holodeck gives CAD professionals a new VR workspace while TensorRT 3 and Pegasus aims to help accelerate practical AI implementation. Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun Huang revealed a number of the upcoming projects at the GPU Technology Conference in Munich earlier this month. This included the NVIDIA Holodeck, a virtual reality design space and CAD editor, as well as the TensorRT 3 library, … Read more

Intel Q3 2017 results

$16.1 billion in sales, $4.5 billion profit, sales and profits up from last quarter. In its calendar Q3 2017, Intel reported that its revenues and profits were up and in all of its business centers and feels it is on track in its transition away from being a PC-only chip supplier. “We executed well in the third quarter with strong … Read more

AMD Q3 2017 results

$1.22 billion in sales, $16 million GAAP profit for the quarter, sales and profit up from last quarter. AMD reported its calendar Q3 2017. Revenues and operating income were up as well as its graphics and compute groups revenue and profits. “Strong customer adoption of our new high-performance products drove significant revenue growth and improved financial results from a year … Read more

A look at monitor options

I’m seeing more; am I doing more? Anyone who has known me has most likely heard me say, the more you can see, the more you can do. That rule applies to monitors, and almost any vehicle you can think of, where “doing” in a vehicle translates into staying out of danger. In monitors it translates into productivity.  Most people … Read more

Toshiba agrees to sell memory chip business for $18B but must overcome a few more obstacles

Toshiba’s struggles to maintain status on the Tokyo Stock Exchange In 2006, Toshiba acquired Westinghouse’s nuclear subsidiary with the hope they would be able to participate in nuclear projects in the United States. Subsequently, the nuclear subsidiary has filed for bankruptcy after experiencing a rough year of cost overruns and price surges on projects in Georgia and South Carolina; projects … Read more

What you call VR, I call a CAVE

Back in the fall of 1991, when many of you were still in school, and the old guys reading this were trying to figure out how to get two or more AIBs to work together, Tom DeFanti, Dan Sandin and colleagues designed the very first — and trademarked — CAVE (cave automatic virtual environment), and built it at the University … Read more