AMD was one of the first consumer graphics companies to enter the professional graphics space in 1994 (Matrox being the first in 1987). Naturally, ATI with its economy of scale took a commanding lead in the fledgling COTS workstation AIB market, dominated at the time by proprietary solutions. As the workstation market moved into COTS CPUs, led by Dell, COTS … Read more
ATI, founded in 1985 as Array Technology Inc., in Thornhill Canada just outside of Toronto, was a pioneer in the graphics chip and add-in board market. It was acquired by AMD in 2006 and formed what is now the Radeon Technology Group. In the fall of 1995, ATI announced its first combination of 2D, 3D, and MPEG-1 accelerator chip … Read more
Increasing the yield by using smaller die could offset the flattening of Moore’s Law.
Semiconductor Industry Association Moore’s observation about memory density doubling every one and a half years or so was in retrospect somewhat obvious. Nonetheless, it laid the foundation for futurists and forecasters to predict technological miracles that are still forthcoming. I remember Jensen Huang saying in the early days of Nvidia, “Moore’s Law is our friend.” He was right then, … Read more
Obsolete data – this is as of 28 March Donate computing power to help conquer COVID-19: By downloading Folding@home your system can contribute to researchers running simulations. The calculations are enormous and every contributed compute cycle can help. Each simulation run is like buying a lottery ticket. The more tickets one buys, the better our chances of hitting the … Read more
courtesy of PTC Khronos has integrated Ray Tracing Pipelines into the Vulkan open standard API together with the option of ray launching from any shader and some new ways of offloading intensive setup tasks to multi-core CPUs Microsoft announced the development of a ray-tracing extension to DirectX 12 called DXR in March 2018 at the same time that Nvidia … Read more
New ANARI API will streamline data visualization Analytic rendering is image generation performed primarily to gain and communicate insights into complex data sets. Scientific visualization is the primary application domain using analytic rendering today, followed by the emerging data analytics space. Recent advances in rendering technology for image generation—especially the introduction of real-time ray tracing—significantly advanced data visualization and … Read more
If Intel isn’t going to roll out 7 nm until late 2021, then that means the dGPUs Intel has said it will release later this year will be at 10 nm. Otherwise, Intel will use a merchant fab like Samsung or TSMC to get a 7-nm dGPU to be competitive with AMD and Nvidia who is expected to announce a … Read more
The Finnish headset company Varjo is building no-compromise VR. In 2019, the company started making a strong case for its high-resolution products including its VR-2 headsets and its new mixed reality headset, the XR-1, being sold to developers. The company has been iterating on the same design built around human-eye resolution, integrated eye tracking, and support for industrial applications. The … Read more
From the network to the far edge
PTC issued an optimistic release for the fiscal first quarter of 2020. The company came through a rough 2019 with problems in its channel and problems converting customers to subscription at the expected rate. The company said it knew about the problem and that they’ve pulled the right levers to fix it. They seem to be right. The company had … Read more
I had a conversation with Jacob Smith, the CMO of Packet. Packet is a company that manages the raw infrastructure in data centers and has various products that automate data center tasks. They are being acquired by Equinix, of dot com infamy, who has quietly returned to a very large presence in US data infrastructure. The fun part of it … Read more
