SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the remember-when-'core'-referred-to-memory? dept.
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @06:05PM
This software for vehicle simulation and room-sized racecar simulators runs on Redhat Linux:
http://www.vi-grade.com/index.php?pagid=vehicle_dynamics_carrealtime [vi-grade.com]
Basic integration rate is 1000 steps/sec and obviously they are doing things to run realtime.
Several years ago we wrote an add-on delivered as a shared object (*.so). Our stuff compiled OK, and ran with our own test code, but wouldn't run on their system. After pulling our hair out, they finally gave us a full virtual machine of their operating environment with all the right options and versions of everything (including some older versions). Then it worked.
Must be a nightmare to maintain, but they probably ignore security updates, these machines are off-line (for the most part).
Before you ask, I don't know if they are having any problems with systemd.