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takyon writes:

Microsoft has talked about a "holographic processing unit" powering its HoloLens augmented reality device. Now it has released details about the device's processors at the Hot Chips 2016 conference:

Microsoft today revealed a first look at the inside of its Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) chip used in its virtual reality HoloLens specs.

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. It handles all the environment sensing and other input and output necessary for the virtual-reality goggles. It aggregates data from sensors and processes the wearer's gesture movements, all in hardware so it's faster than the equivalent code running on a general purpose CPU. Each DSP core is given a particular task to focus on.

The unit sits alongside a 14nm Intel Atom x86 Cherry Trail system-on-chip, which has its own 1GB of RAM and runs Windows 10 and apps that take advantage of the immersive noggin-fitted display.

Also at PCWorld.

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