July 24, 2013, Siggraph, Anaheim, CA—We met with Imagination to look at their latest software and acceleration hardware for graphics. The Caustic tools can use the ray-tracing accelerator card, has a simplified user interface, and has visualization links to other tools. The ray tracing technology is moving into the professional markets for some parts of…
May 2, 2013, Neuro-Gaming Conference, San Francisco—Augmented and virtual reality technologies are entering games. A panel moderated by Jason Jerald from nextGen Interactions considered the issues related to game design and development. panel members were Walter Greenleaf from the Stanford Longevity Institute, Laurent Scallie from Atlantis Cyberspace, and Palmer Luckey from OculusVR. Scalie opened that…
March 19, 2013, GPU Technology Conference, San Jose, CA— Jules Urbach from OTOY and LightStage described some tools that can be used for both cinema and game asset creation. The converging workflows and cloud-based rendering solutions enable designers to take advantage of the increased performance available in the latest hardware. Cloud services are changing the…
March 19, 2013, GPU Technology Conference, San Jose, CA— Mark Muench and Christopher Pond from ESPN described their development efforts that allows use of 4K video in telecasts. Some of the issues associated with this high resolution imagery include applying multiple GPU processing, theoretical vs. practical transfer rates, gpuDirect, bandwidth, bus speed, and playback, together…
March 27, 2013, Game Developers Conference, San Francisco—Joost van Dreunen from SuperData Research talked about how new devices will change games. Developers who take advantage of the new platforms can take advantage of alternative business models to increase revenues and make more money. The trends in these devices are changing distribution and publication. In the…
February 26, 2013, RSA Conference, San Francisco—Scott Chaney from Microsoft proposed some interesting concepts from a software company. The challenges of securing computers from attacks and the costs of a security breach are common headline material these days. One concept is to ensure end-to-end trust. This idea requires a hardware-based security structure to address the…
February 25, 2013, TCG Security Sessions, San Francisco—A panel considered the implications of advanced persistent threats (APT) with respect to the NIST 800-147 and -155 standards. Paul Roberts from The Security Ledger moderated the panel. Members were; Frank Molsberry from Dell, Stacy Cannady from Digital Management, Sunil Gottumukka from Microsoft, and Robert Thibadeau from Wave…
February 14, 2013, EECS, University of California, Berkeley—The annual EECS status update focused on cloud and computer-based functions, and the need for optimization in all aspects of computing. The ASPIRE project (Algorithms and Specializers for Provably-optimal Implementations with Resiliency and Efficiency) is looking at extensions to their parallel computing work. Krste Asanovic is looking at…
October 31, 2012, ARM TechCom, Santa Clara, CA—Xilinx announced a new version of their Zinq, all programmable FPGAs. The applications focus for the new families are in security and safety, driven by increased interest and more software in security. We talked with David Beal and Stephane Monboisset about the customer-driven additions to the FPGA platforms….
August 2012 – At SIGGRAPH 2012, Imagination Technology was showing a number of their graphics cores and compute cores that now spread from mobile devices through settop boxes and high resolution displays (through 4K). These products were shown in the context of their new API support for the Kronos OpenGL ES3.0 release. This API is…