Graphics

Advanced Micro Devices discussed the Hemlock high-end graphics card due next week and third-generation ultra-thin laptop technology, among other topics, at the AMD Financial Analyst Day on Wednesday.

"Hemlock will get launched next week," said AMD Senior Vice President Rick Bergman, speaking Wednesday morning at the conference which was streamed live. "It's in production. You'll be able to buy it at e-tailers around the world. You can see there are two GPUs. Five Teraflops out of this baby," he said. (GPU stands for graphics processing unit. A teraflop is a trillion floating point operations per second, a key indicator of graphics performance.)

Hemlock is expected to be appear as an HD 5900 series product--what some reports have called the HD 5970.

Bergman also addressed AMD's third-generation "Nile" ultra-thin laptop platform. "Bring the real PC experience into the ultra-thin. Battery life well north of seven hours," Bergman said. This is due… Read more

It's been years since the concept of a digital convergence was seriously debated. Today, it's rare to see a single-function electronic device.

Digital still cameras can record video, and camcorders can take still photos. Even cheap cell phones include cameras. There are Web browsers in cell phones, cameras, televisions, and digital picture frames. In fact, it seems like it's only a matter of time before everything with a battery or power cord will be connected to the Internet.

So it's a little startling to see a new gizmo that does nothing but display text, especially when … Read more

Buoyed by Netbook sales, shipments of Intel graphics chips surged and Advanced Micro Devices gained on Nvidia in the third quarter.

Third-quarter shipments of graphics processors jumped 21.2 percent over the second quarter, according to market researcher Jon Peddie Research. Graphics chips drive the images produced on PC users' screens.

A total of 119.45 million units were shipped in the third quarter, exceeding the record 111 million units that shipped in the third quarter of 2008, according to Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "So the market has caught up with, and exceeded, last year's … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices posted a third-quarter loss of $128 million, lower than Wall Street projections, while also reporting revenue that beat expectations.

The loss, at 18 cents a share, compares with a loss of $134 million, or 22 cents a share, for the same period last year. Analysts had expected a loss of 42 cents a share.

Revenue was $1.4 billion, an 18 percent increase over the second quarter of this year, while falling 22 percent compared to the third quarter of 2008. Forecasts had called for only $1.3 billion in revenue.

"There was strength in notebooks … Read more

In the first part of this series, I claimed that a great secret in the microprocessor industry largely determines whether new products succeed or fail.

I noted that this secret shouldn't be a secret at all because many people (including myself) have talked about it over the years, but clearly a lot of people are in the dark because they continually disregard it and develop products that are doomed.

I gave several examples of products that failed because their creators didn't know the great secret. Those products included RISC processors, media processors, and intelligent RAM chips, in which processor cores were integrated with memory to eliminate one of the great bottlenecks in computer performance.

During my eight years at Microprocessor Report, I covered the markets for media processors, 3D-graphics chips, network processors, and what I coined extreme processors--chips with large numbers of simple cores running in parallel. Many of these chips were cheaper, easier to design, and twice as fast as competing products--and still failed.

However, some did succeed. The critical factor that made the difference in most of these cases is the essence of the so-called secret.

One of those successes is the graphics processing unit, or GPU.

I was reminded again of the secret at Nvidia's recent GPU Technology Conference, where many of the talks dealt with GPU computing.

(Disclosure: I recently wrote a technical white paper for Nvidia.)

Although the GPU field dates back only five or six years, GPUs have already earned a place alongside CPUs. Each is clearly superior for certain kinds of applications.

This is true in spite of the fact that GPUs aren't nearly as easy to program as CPUs. Like other forms of parallel programming, GPU programming requires new hardware (the GPU itself), significant new extensions for programming languages, and a different mindset for programmers--one that simply wasn't part of standard computer-science curriculum for most of the last 50 years.

… Read more

Listen carefully. I am about to reveal one of the great apparent secrets of the microprocessor industry. This secret largely determines whether new products succeed or fail.

I don't know why it seems to be a secret. It's simple enough. I figured it out early, in my first job in the industry, and I've seen it demonstrated over and over since then. I'm hardly the only one who knows this secret; I've seen dozens of talks that allude to it, and a few that mentioned it specifically. I've talked about it myself in articles I wrote for Microprocessor Report and other publications.

Unfortunately, I've also seen hundreds of products brought to market in apparent ignorance of this simple rule, and they've all failed, wasting the billions of dollars invested in their development. Assuming the developers weren't throwing away their money on purpose, I conclude they must not have known the one basic fact that doomed their projects, which means it must be a secret.

The secret is...… Read more

Updated at 4:40 p.m. PDT: adding to discussion of next-generation Nvidia Ion chip.

As graphics kingpin Nvidia tries to reshape itself into a broad-based computing company, it is taking big gambles with potentially big payoffs, while it fends off challenges from rivals Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

The world's largest supplier of standalone graphics chips for PCs needs to grow. Established markets have matured and Nvidia must seek out other ways to make money.

"In almost every market they have entered they have become dominant," said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, which tracks the graphics chip market. "Almost 90 percent market share in the workstation business and 55 to 65 percent in the graphics business. But if you're that successful you can't really grow the market anymore, and if you want to keep growing your company, then you have to get into new markets."

Enter supercomputing and Nvidia's brand-new Fermi architecture. "That's a huge market and big margins," said Peddie. Fermi was announced last week at an Nvidia conference to great fanfare when prestigious Oak Ridge National Laboratory said it plans to use Fermi in a future supercomputer.

It would be an understatement to say that the Fermi chip potentially packs a computing wallop. The chip integrates an astounding 3 billion transistors, about three times the number of transistors in Nvidia's most powerful graphics chip now on the market, and it has been designed with features that make it more suitable for high-performance computers, the first time that Nvidia has architected a chip this way.

Fermi GPUs, each containing 512 processing cores, would enable "substantial scientific breakthroughs" that would be impossible without the new technology, Jeff Nichols, Oak Ridge's associate lab director for computing and computational sciences, said last week.

Nvidia hopes to parlay this computing power into the mainstream. (For a comparison of Fermi with AMD's newest graphics chip see: ATI and Nvidia face off--obliquely.)

"Fermi will offer Nvidia the opportunity to grow our consumer business by having the fastest raw graphics power," said Drew Henry, general manager of Nvidia's bread-and-butter GeForce graphics business. "But it's also going to expand our business by allowing people to process better video and photo applications and to use the GPU for many, many more mainstream applications." (GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)

… Read more

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI division are taking different approaches to graphics processing in the next generations of their products. Both strategies have strengths and weaknesses, and I think it's too soon to pick the eventual winner in this long-running fight.

Before I get into my analysis, I should say that Nvidia paid me to write a white paper on the implications of its new GPU architecture (code-named Fermi) for high-performance computing applications. The white paper was released as part of the Fermi launch event at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference last week.

Nvidia also paid for white papers from two other well-known microprocessor analysts, Nathan Brookwood of Insight64 and my friend and former colleague Tom Halfhill of Microprocessor Report. UC Berkeley professor David Patterson wrote a fourth white paper, and Nvidia wrote one of its own. All of these works take a different approach to the subject; all are worth reading if you need to understand what Fermi is all about.

In short, I think the Fermi architecture has been more thoroughly white-papered than any graphics chip design in history. All five of these documents are available on the Fermi home page on Nvidia's Web site, and just in case that page is moved or changed, you're welcome to take advantage of my own mirror of my white paper.

I've spent much of the last several days reading these documents plus David Kanter's excellent article on Fermi over on his Real World Technologies site. David managed to get some details on Fermi that Nvidia didn't give to the rest of us.

I've also had time to go through the coverage of ATI's recent launch of the RV870, which is what Nvidia's Fermi-based chips will be competing against. The first of Nvidia's chips bears the internal code name of GF100, and it's huge. Here's a life-size photo:… Read more

Nvidia's new Fermi chip is being billed as a supercomputing chip but Nvidia doesn't want you to forget that it is also aimed at Apple's Snow Leopard and Windows 7.

The Fermi chip was announced with much fanfare on Wednesday as key silicon in a future supercomputer from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But, wait, Fermi is also going to be great at accelerating stuff in Snow Leopard and Windows 7--not to mention a great gaming chip, according to Bill Dally, chief scientist at Nvidia who spoke during a conference call with analysts on Thursday.

The Fermi graphics … Read more