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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: 2) by edIII on Wednesday August 24 2016, @06:23PM
I don't think that is the real issue at all, meaning Linux vs Microsoft. It's Freedom vs Proprietary instead.
The Hololens sounds kick-ass, and I want. Yet.... I know the code is Microsoft, which means, NSA. While that may not be entirely fair, Microsoft's only response is completely transparency under the extreme toxicity of the current relationship between tech and national security. The Patriot Act literally means that no executive can ever be trusted again, and by extension, any corporation ever again. Moreover, I think the world has shifted towards completely and utterly UNTRUSTED status, and we must take it in our own hands to establish chains of trust similar to verifying SHA-256 hashes on downloaded packages.
I would purchase a Hololens, assuming I'm not slave class in a dying America, but if and only if there are no blobs, binaries, or DRM, anywhere, in any circuit. Once vetted by the community as being reasonably clean with how-tos on how to perform verification yourself, I would have no problems purchasing hardware and software from Microsoft.
Since we can very safely assume that Microsoft will NEVER release a clean Hololens, it in fact, doesn't exist. That's where I'm going. A future in which the hardware ecosystem I have access to may be 10 years behind state-of-the-art, but it will be free. It will be FREE.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.