The president of VMware said after seeing it (and not knowing what he was seeing), “Wow, what movie is that?” And that’s what it’s all about — dispersion of disbelief. You’ve heard me talk about this before, and we’re almost there. I famously predicted at a prestigious event three years ago that by 2015 there would be no more human actors, it would be all CG. Well I may end up being 52% or better right (phew). – Jon Peddie
via Nvidia Pulls off ‘Industrial Light and Magic’-Like Tools | EE Times. Jon Peddie has covered the 3D animation, modeling and simulation market for YEARS. And when you can get a rise out of him like the quote above from EETimes, you have accomplished something. Between NVidia’s hardware and now its GameWorks suite of software modeling tools, you have in a word created Digital Cinema. Jon goes on to talk about how the digital simulation demo convinced a VMWare exec it was real live actors on a set. That’s how good things are getting.
And the metaphor/simile of comparing ILM to NVidia’s toolkits off the shelf is also telling. No longer does one need to have on staff computer scientists, physicists and mathematicians to help model, and simulate things like particle systems and hair. It’s all there along with ocean waves, and smoke altogether in the toolkit ready to use. Putting these tools into the hands of the users will only herald a new era of less esoteric, less high end, exclusive access to the best algorithms and tools.
nVidia GameWorks by itself will be useful to some people but re-packaging it in a way that embeds it in an existing workflow will widen the level of adoption.Whether that’s for a casual user or a student in a 3D modeling and animation course at a University. The follow-on to this is getting the APIs publishedto tap into this through current off the shelf tools like AutoCAD, 3D StudioMax, Blender, Maya, etc. Once the favorite tools can bring up a dialog box and start adding a particle system, full ray tracing to a scene at this level of quality, things will really start to take off. The other possibility is to flesh out GameWorks in a way that makes it more of a standalone, easily adopted brand new package creatives could adopt and eventually migrate to over time. That would be another path to using GameWorks as an end-to-end digital cinema creation package.
Where you’re going to see the biggest benefits to DDR4 is in the mobile/portable device category. On the desktop there might be a slight increase in speed, but not like the big bumps of previous generations of DDR architectural moves. So figure on 10% maybe depending on the chipset and CPU and the 3rd level cache on the cpu die. That combo is more likely to affect your overall system speed than just moving to DDR4 DIMMs on the motherboard.
SK Hynix?s high-capacity DDR4 modules are based on Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology.
DDR4 capable motherboards and CPUs aren’t yet on the market, but that hasn’t stopped SK Hynix from putting some serious work into making high capacity DDR4 modules. On Tuesday the South Korean sem…
Qualcomm finally unveils its high-end 64-bit enabled SoCs, but they won?t be available until the first half of 2015.
Qualcomm has launched its first batch of ARM v8-based SoCs last month, but this time around it is detailing its plans for the high-end segment. The Snapdragon 810 and …
It’s an accepted fact that a VDI environment can create some challenges for the IT infrastructure. Mashing hundreds of desktop workloads onto a disk array that was designed for more general-purpose applications can lead to poor or inconsistent performance. This can lead to another challenge, meeting user expectations.
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Performance and Expectations
When a VDI project is undertaken, it’s assumed that the user ‘experience’, how responsive their desktop applications are, will be the same or better than with the legacy infrastructure. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case, based in the storage challenges that often accompany a VDI project. Making things worse, many users are getting spoiled by the performance of flash in tablets and flash boot drives in laptops.
This combination of demanding storage requirements and heightened user expectations has driven many companies to conclude that their VDI project must be supported by a…
RotoMAAK: Rotocasting Done Right | EE Times. After the printing press was invented, there was a long lag in between when Photocopying was invented. It’s time to do the same for 3D printing. Don’t print all originals, duplicate them instead with a Rotocaster like the RotoMAAK. Make sense doesn’t it? Especially considering the cost of materials. Why just today the Guiness Book of World records is attempting to measure a feat of 3D printing using 50 printers running parallel. Wouldn’t it be just as efficient to create one single model and cast the 50 copies in a shorter period of time? But consider this, Lulzbot a contract manufacturer has that many and more that CAN print the same object simultaneously: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_jUObUGLTA 109 Lulzbots all working printing the same exact item, printing all originals from the same 3D design file. Still this seems wasteful to me given the amount of material used in each one. Knowing there’s a potentially faster, cheaper alternative like photocopying when Xerox hit the big time in the early 1960s, now THAT to me is the killer app. 3D Printing or CNC milling operations are stupendous at making the one off, the original the bespoke item you need. But for multiples? Just seems like a unproductive time sync that other existing industrial processes could be used to help speed up and make less expensive. So if given the choice between casting versus printing multiple originals, just try costing out short runs of cast items. You might surprise yourself and get it faster, cheaper and higher quality in the end.
Wow this has gotten my brain to working overtime. How small can you go with System on Chip like fully integrated Raspberry Pi modules? Could you fit this not just on an SO-DIMM but also maybe an SDXC sized memory card? Or a Micro-SDXC card? Imagine that. And if you want to see an even better write-up of this announcement, go over to Make magazines online website here:
They’ve got Vimeo video and other great analysis looking at this system on an SO-DIMM board. Very interesting stuff.
Lithium ion battery by Varta (Museum Autovision Altlußheim, Germany) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A pair of battery vendors are hoping that a new design which incorporates the use of an ultracapacitor material will help to improve and extend the life of lithium-ion battery packs.
First a little background info on what is a capacitor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultracapacitor#History
In short it’s like a very powerful, high density battery for smoothing out the “load” of an electrical circuit. It helps prevent spikes and dips in the electricity as it flows through a device. But with recent work done on ultra-capacitors they can be more like a full-fledged battery that doesn’t ever lose it’s charge over time. When they are combined up with a real live battery you can do some pretty interesting things to both the capacitor and the battery to help them work together, allowing longer battery life, higher total amount of charge capacity. Many things can flow from combining ultracapacitors with a really high end Lithium ion battery.
Any technology, tweak or improvement that promises at minimum 10% improvement over current Lithium ion battery designs is worth a look. They’re claiming a full 15% in this story from The Reg. And due to the re-design it would seem it needs to meet regulatory/safety approval as well. Having seen the JAL Airlines suffer battery issues on the Boeing 787, I couldn’t agree more.
There will be some heavy lifting needing to be done between now and when a product like this hits the market. Testing and failure analysis will ultimately decide whether or not this ultra-capacitor/Lithium ion hybrid is safe enough to use for consumer electronics. I’m also hoping Apple and other manufacturer/design outfits like Apple are putting some eyes, ears and phone calls on this to learn more. Samsung too might be interested in this, but are seemingly more reliant for battery designs outside of their company. That’s where Apple has the upperhand long term, they will design every part if needed in order to keep ahead of the competition.
Just a sample of what’s yet to come when Oculus Rift eventually hits the market. Jaunt is developing the hardware/software required to shoot cinematic 3D movies. It is in prototype now. And it is very early days still even with the Oculus Rift VR head set. But now is the time for companies like Jaunt to stake their claim, and start up before the VR land rush occurs.
A children’s choir is circled around me, singing. Individual voices become clear and then fade away again as I turn from side to side, listening as the notes mix and blend together before disappearing into the vaulted ceiling above our heads.
The choir fades to black, reminding me of where I really am: a dark room in Palo Alto with a set of Oculus Rift goggles strapped to my head. What I just watched is akin to the most advanced home movie ever filmed. The children were not actually singing to me, but to a ball-like camera that films video and audio in 360 degrees.
Jaunt, a Palo Alto startup that revealed itself today with news of $6.8 million in venture funding, intends to use its unique camera to prove that virtual reality is not just for gaming. The company is developing an assortment of software and hardware that will allow Hollywood — and potentially anyone — to…
Flash has certainly become more affordable over the past several years and we continue to see more and more storage products introduced that include flash in one form or another. But most flash implementations are hybrid in nature, requiring that the ‘right’ data be positioned in flash at the right time. This usually means caching or tiering algorithms to move that data around or simply pinning an application’s entire data set in flash while it’s being run.
There is another alternative to this complexity of worrying about which data is hot and which is cold and whether there’s enough flash capacity available at the right time; the All-Flash Array. These arrays greatly simplify this entire data management process since everything that’s stored on them is accelerated. They’re pretty much a ‘set and forget’ solution that eliminates performance problems, in most cases.
I got the updates (as far as I know) off of that New Zealand file share about 2 weeks ago. Everything seems to be working fine where I’ve done the upgrade. It does make Win8.1 more palatable. I think now MS should just keep refining it ever quarter or so. One of these versions will be the one that people will migrate to.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 