Microsoft revealed information about the internals of the new holographic processor used in their Hololens at Hot Chips, the first peek we have had. The new headset is another win for Tensilica as they provide the DSP and instruction extensions; previously we have seen them work with VIA to develop an SSD controller and with AMD for TrueAudio solutions. Each of the 24 cores has a different task it is hardwired for, offering more efficient processing than software running on flexible hardware.
The processing power for your interface comes from a 14nm Cherry Trail processor with 1GB of DDR and yes, your apps will run on Windows 10. For now the details are still sparse, there is still a lot to be revealed about Microsoft's answer to VR. Drop by The Register for more slides and info.
"The secretive HPU is a custom-designed TSMC-fabricated 28nm coprocessor that has 24 Tensilica DSP cores. It has about 65 million logic gates, 8MB of SRAM, and a layer of 1GB of low-power DDR3 RAM on top, all in a 12mm-by-12mm BGA package. We understand it can perform a trillion calculations a second."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Fujitsu: Why we chose 64-bit ARM over SPARC for our exascale super @ The Register
- Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Now Bundled with Select AMD CPUs @ Guru of 3D
- Google begins posting Nexus images for the Android 7.0 Nougat update @ Ars Technica
- Your wget is broken and should DIE, dev tells Microsoft @ The Register
- Epic Games forum hack exposes 800,000 credentials @ The Inquirer
- Open Source Hardware Comes of Age @ Hardware Secrets
- Total War : Warhammer Giveaway Contest @ TechARP
trillion calculations sounds
trillion calculations sounds like a lot, when you just look at the number given for CPU / GPU flops.
But if you decompose the work a GPU does in “calculation” the texture units are formidable. Just for the trilinear portion they execute the equivalent of 36 multiplication & addition per cycle. (not including all the setup, IO, cache logic, texture decompression, …)
A GTX 960, just for trilinear (100% in parallel to the rops & compute units, the cache, etc..), can compute 2.5 trillion calculation a second.
This is the #1 reason why a general purpose CPU cant come close to a GPU for real-time rasterizing.
This is why, if AMD or Intel to Nvidia can find core logic to implement as a hardwired block, the speedup can be massive.
(and also, because of the nature , would be parallel execution)
At some stage this might happen for “rays” as its used way more today then even a couple of years ago.
I’ll be more than a few of
I’ll be more than a few of those cores are happily spying and recording/noting all the recognizable product labels they can throughout the house. What’s that, why it’s shredded wheat box on the kitchen table, let’s push out some ads for prunes to the VR headset! And those shoes, at what angle of VR headset’s negative inclination can the wearer’s shoes be seen. what’s that no shoes at all, just some big round protrusion! Well maybe some fat free meals ads, or pregnancy related ads, or both.
Tensilica? They made the CPU
Tensilica? They made the CPU core in the popular-with-hobbiests ESP8266. Looks like they have more tricks up their sleves.