gpu

Nvidia and Rambus have settled a longstanding patent license dispute.

The agreement covers a "broad range" of chip products offered by Nvidia and settles all outstanding claims, including resolution of past use of Rambus' patented innovations, the companies said. The term of the agreement is five years.

Though neither financial nor technological details were disclosed, the dispute between the two companies has not exactly been private.

In 2008, Rambus sued Nvidia, accusing the graphics chip supplier of violating 17 Rambus-held patents on memory controllers. At that time, Rambus claimed that chipsets, graphics processers, and media communication processors across … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Texas Instruments is offering one of the most revealing demos of Windows 8 on ARM yet at CES.

That's not saying a lot, though, as demos of Microsoft's next operating system on ARM processors have been extremely restrictive, if nonexistent to date in public (Nvidia's untouchable, relatively static CES demo is behind closed glass). But TI pushed the boundaries a bit in a demo for CNET at CES.

The demo tapped TI's freshly minted OMAP4470 ARM processor, according to Bill Crean, an OMAP product marketing manager.

Needless to say, I was not permitted to take … Read more

Owners of upcoming iPhone and iPads could enjoy a boost in graphics power 20 times greater than that offered by current models, according to enthusiast site AppleInsider.

Such a leap in power would come courtesy of new graphics processing units developed by U.K.-based Imagination Technologies, which builds the GPUs for Apple's mobile products.

Announced at CES on Tuesday, Imagination's new PowerVR Series6 GPU core chip family is touted as providing 20 times or more of the performance of the current generation.

As a result, "it enables Imagination's partners to deliver amazing user experiences in … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Texas Instruments is showing its latest and greatest ARM processor inside a Windows 8 tablet at CES this week.

TI's OMAP4470, the latest version of its dual-core chip now inside Android tablets, will be shown running on a pre-release version of a Windows 8 tablet, the chipmaker said today.

"The OMAP4470 processor's...powerful multitasking capabilities prove the ideal match for Windows 8 key features including a fast & fluid touch-first user interface," TI said in a statement.

TI ARM chips are being used today in high-profile Android tablets such Motorola's XyBoard and Toshiba's ultra-skinny Excite X10. The 4470 is a performance upgrade of the 4460.

"The company calls it the OMAP 4470, but it is more than just a faster speed grade of the OMAP 4460; the new design includes significant graphics and memory improvements as well," mobile chip analyst Linley Gwennap wrote in a blog last year. … Read more

Regardless of the condition of your OS installation, if your system's hardware is not working properly then you will undoubtedly see undesired behavior that can stem from slowdowns and hangs to full system crashes and data corruption.

Because of the importance of having working hardware, Apple includes a hardware test routine on all of its new Mac systems, some of which are on the boot drive of your Mac, an others that are on the included OS X installation DVDs that came with older systems.

If you experience problems with your system crashing, hanging, or overheating with no change … Read more

Quanta has sued Advanced Micro Devices over a defective chip used in an NEC laptop.

Quanta Computer, the world's largest contract manufacturer of laptop computers, sued AMD for breach of contract, alleging the chipmaker sold defective products, as first reported by Bloomberg.

The suit is centered on the ATI RS600ME, an integrated graphics solution, an AMD spokesperson told CNET. Integrated graphics chips include other circuitry and also act as a chipset, which supports the main central processing unit or CPU.

"AMD and its ATI Technologies Inc. unit sold chips that didn't meet heat tolerances and were unfit … Read more

Low-cost ultraportable laptops and family-friendly all-in-one desktops are a common sight in the CNET Labs; massive gaming rigs less so.

It's gotten to the point now that when one of these high-end systems appears, someone in the office always asks, "Does anyone even buy these things any more?"

PC gaming, while not dead, is not the arms race it was more than five years ago, as only a handful of 2011 games (Battlefield 3, The Witcher 2) are designed to really push PC hardware.

Game publishers know they need to create games that can play on a wide variety of systems, and much of the growth in PC gaming comes from social and casual games that run on nearly any hardware, and predating that, MMOs such as World of Warcraft that also had forgiving system requirements. … Read more

Nvidia chips are now in three of the five fastest supercomputers in the world. How did Nvidia get there so fast?

I spoke with Steve Scott, chief technology officer at Nvidia's Tesla products group, to find out.

First, a quick primer on Tesla and graphics chip-based supercomputing. Tesla processors are basically graphics processing units (GPUs) that have been redesigned for supercomputers. The results are impressive enough that some of the most important supercomputing sites have signed on. The U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, probably the premier U.S. supercomputing site, will use Tesla processors in its next supercomputer,… Read more

When Apple released OS X Lion, a number of mid-2010 MacBook Pro users noticed that their systems began hanging or crashing after performing seemingly random tasks that involved graphics manipulation or when waking from sleep. When this happened, the systems would show a black screen and be unresponsive until the user forced it to reboot.

After acknowledging an issue with these machines in a knowledge-base article, Apple soon issued a couple of software fixes for both OS X Lion and Snow Leopard, which installed updated video drivers and OpenCL framework components. For many people these updates addressed the problem; however, … Read more