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posted by martyb on Wednesday August 24 2016, @05:21AM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday August 24 2016, @06:24PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Wednesday August 24 2016, @06:24PM (#392708)

    That's ok. It's a modern x86 so it doesn't do real time anyhow.

    Real Time: The ability to write a piece of code, compile it to assembly, count the instructions, and tell with 100% certainty how long a computation will take.

    Intel Real Time: You write a piece of code. It compiles to x86 bytecode you think is machine code. It goes to a silicone interpreter that converts the instructions to machine instructions without any guarantees on completion time except for "It's over 3GHz so it's fast enough".

    After 20 years of this, people think Linux & Windows can do real time since you can tinker the plumbing enough to put your code on one core, the kernel on the other and have enough bus to put locks everywhere so nothing gets out of sync. And people wonder why avionics and automobile are so crappy nowadays...

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @09:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @09:43PM (#392777)

    Real-time can also means a system with an guaranteed maximum on interupts service time and a deterministic tick based scheduler

    • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday September 01 2016, @07:10PM

      by RamiK (1813) on Thursday September 01 2016, @07:10PM (#396318)

      Not when low latency or direct input processing (no buffers) is concerned.

      And without that, there's no point to real time.

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