Hardware

Apple rolls out the chips—M1 Pro and Max

Apple knows how to make transitions. The company proved it by transitioning away from the PowerPC platform to Apple and now they’re showing the same discipline as they move away from Intel and on to their own Arm-based family of chips. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, says the company is a year into a two-year transition that started with the … Read more

New SPUD to Splay lets you play

 Alex Wesley with collapsible projection screens (Source Next Corps Illuminate)   Alexander (Alex) Wesley founded Arovia with George Zhu, CTO, and Justin Mintzer, CMO, in Houston, Texas, in April 2015. Wesley started Arovia after leaving optical metrology developer, Zygo in Connecticut in 2014. In between, he developed the Spontaneous Pop-Up Display (SPUD). The idea for SPUD came from years of … Read more

Germ-free ultrathin notebook from Acer

Acer America announced the Aspire Vero notebook. The company says it is their first sustainability-focused product. It is one of Acer’s first products powered by Windows 11, is eco-friendly, EPEAT Silver-certified, which features post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic throughout the chassis and keyboard with 100% recyclable packaging. It also has antimicrobial Corning gorilla glass, an alkali-aluminosilicate thin sheet glass formulated with … Read more

MetaX to build GPUs, ASICs, and FPGAs

In September 2020, Chen Weiliang started MetaX (Mu Xi) Integrated Circuit Co. in the Pudong Lingang Special Area of Shanghai’s Free Trade Zone. At their founding, Weiliang said the company would develop artificial intelligence processors consisting of ASICs, FPGAs, and GPUs. Weiliang, with a Master’s degree from the Institute of Microelectronics of Tsinghua University, had been a senior GPU researcher … Read more

Jingjia Micro JM9000 series GPUs

Celebrating its 15th anniversary, Jingjiawei, a Chinese GPU chip company (also known as Changsha Jingjia Microelectronics Co.—Jingjia Micro), announced in mid-September 2021 that its new-generation GPU had completed tape out and packaging phases. The product has not completed the test work yet and is not yet in production or available. Information about the company’s pursuit of developing a GPU was … Read more

HP makes working at home comfortable

According to some back-of-the-envelope calculations and other data, we estimate the average cost for a tech worker’s space and support facilities in an office is about $15,500 a year.¹ If you could have your employees and contractors work at home, and all you had to do was outfit them with a new computer every three or four years for $500 a … Read more

Portrait Displays gets embedded in projectors and chips

Portrait Displays announced a new collaboration with MediaTek that the companies say will enhance smart TV viewing experiences. MediaTek claiming to be the number one television chipset provider says it will, with Portrait Display’s help, provide realistic and authentic visual imagery, taking the scenery straight from the director’s lens into viewers’ living rooms. Displays (TVs, Monitors) that are Portrait Display … Read more

AMD’s big cache exposed at Hot Chips

AMD changed the rules when it introduced its chiplet packaging approach and demonstrated it could beat Amdahl’s Law and scale-up processors. At Hot Chips 2021, they revealed a bit more about their packaging magic, and their 3D V-Cache uses a novel new hybrid bonding technique. This manufacturing scheme can create up to an impressive 192 MB of L3 cache per … Read more

What the Olympic visitors saw

Image provided by The Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Image created with the cooperation of NTT   For the Olympics, NTT Docomo built and launched (literally and figuratively) a barge with a very large NTT Docomo display, the company has named Kirari! The barge displayed live transmissions of 12k ultra-wide composited images of an entire sailing … Read more

More, faster memory from Samsung

640K should be enough for anybody—said Bill Gates, apparently never.  I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time. I did not say that in 1981 when the PC came out. I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t! (Source: … Read more

Samsung asks, how smart is your memory?

(Source: Samsung)   Samsung used the 2021 Hot Chips conference, thirty-third in the series, to further reveal and promote a novel alteration of how high-speed memory could be built with AI technology. Samsung’s revelations included the successful integration of its processing-in-memory (PIM)-enabled High Bandwidth Memory (HBM-PIM) into a commercialized accelerator system. That, said Samsung, would broaden PIM to include DRAM … Read more

The Arc of the Alchemist

No, not a new Steve Winward song, a new GPU family   As you know, or should know, Intel has been up to their old trick of changing names and requiring you to get an upgrade to your Captain Midnight decoder ring. They did a few weeks back when Pat Gelsinger came in and introduced the world to Angstroms. And … Read more