Graphics

Live from Hot Chips 19: Session 3, Multicore II

This is the fourth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford. The previous installments looked at IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

The first talk in session 3 is from Advanced Micro Devices, describing the ATI Radeon HD 2900. (I checked, and AMD does still use the ATI brand name for some of its products; this is one of them.)

This is another chip I described briefly in one of my Siggraph 2007 pieces (here). The 2900 has 320 cores (which AMD calls "stream… Read more

Live from Hot Chips 19: Session 2, Nvidia

Welcome back to the ongoing Speeds and Feeds coverage of Hot Chips 19 at Stanford. They give us comfy chairs and free Wi-Fi, so blogging about it is the least I can do. By the way, Dean Takahashi of the San Jose Mercury News is also blogging from Hot Chips, so you can get another perspective on the event here.

Session 2 is the first of two sessions of "Multi-Core and Parallelism" presentations. This one happens to be all about Nvidia. Session 3, up next, will include presentations about AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2900, Intel's 80-core "Tera-Scale" processor, the TRIPS project at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Tile Processor from Tilera.

The first presentation in this session, "The Nvidia GeForce 8800 GPU," is an overview of that chip. As I mentioned in my Siggraph coverage, the 8800 includes 128… Read more

Post-Siggraph book review: "GPU Gems 3"

As I described in my recent blog entries about Siggraph 2007, there's a lot of cool stuff going on in hardware and software development for graphics processors (GPUs).

GPUs are programmable devices like the more familiar CPUs, but the programing model is very different. A CPU core implements a simple linear model; programs consist of one instruction after another, though a good CPU scans the instruction stream for opportunities to execute a few instructions in parallel. A busy GPU, on the other hand, always… Read more

Siggraph 2007 wrap-up

Here are a final few tidbits from my last day at Siggraph:

Microsoft Research gave a great presentation on HD View, a company project based on capturing, assembling, and displaying multi-gigapixel image. These images are stitched together from hundreds of pictures captured through… Read more

After HDTV, what's next?

One of the last things I did at Siggraph this year was to spend about 20 minutes enraptured by the best video I've ever seen. It's called "4K" (after the number of pixels on each horizontal line), and you'll be seeing it in theaters within the next few years.

The Siggraph Computer Animation Festival included one session of video driven by a Sony SXRD SRX-R105 projector displaying 4,096 by 2,160 pixels at 24 frames per second with progressive scan (or 2160p24 for short).

That's four times the number of pixels you'll see on a home HDTV set-- or in… Read more

How many processors are in your PC?

These days, most new PCs have dual-core central processors (CPU). That's one chip with two complete microprocessors on it, both sharing one path to memory and peripherals.

If you have a high-end gaming PC or a workstation, you might have one or two processor chips with four cores each. An eight-core PC is a very powerful machine--in real terms, up to eight times faster than the best desktop PCs you could get in 2004. For many years, PC performance doubled roughly every 18 months; multicore technology has produced annual doubling for three years now.

But that's not really … Read more

Graphic content at GH2007

During my time at Microprocessor Report, I watched the growth of the market for 3D graphics chips grow from just a handful of seed companies (notably 3dfx, 3Dlabs, PowerVR, and Rendition) to a virtual forest. At one point, I was tracking over 50 companies, most of which never launched a product.

So in 1999, when the organizers of the Siggraph/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware (a name wisely since shortened to simply Graphics Hardware) were looking for someone to help… Read more

Bright ideas-- Notes from the Emerging Display Technology conference

Yes, occasionally I'll be doing real news here that you won't see elsewhere. Maybe these pieces will earn me some links from other blogs, pushing my Technorati authority score above 5 and catapulting me into the ranks of the million most talked-about blogs. Well, I can hope. (If you do link to this entry, link to the version on my main blog here, or Technorati won't give me credit for it!)

Today I'm covering Emerging Display Technology 2007, an academic conference co-located with Siggraph 2007 this week in San Diego, CA. The research presented here runs the gamut (that's a little display pun there) from display design to… Read more

What could you make from an iPhone?

Since the iPhone's June 29 launch, we've seen several teardown reports--some from professionals, some demonstrating more enthusiasm than skill, and some that are just awful (but funny).

What's inside? Well, you can read the details in reports from various analyst firms, but it breaks down like this:

A microprocessor A 3D graphics controller DRAM Flash memory An LCD A touch sensor A cell phone module Wi-Fi and Bluetooth controllers An audio chip A microphone and a speaker An accelerometer A camera module A SIM card Assorted other interfaces, connectors and buttons A lithium-ion battery Power-supply circuitry

All … Read more