Nvidia Engineer Releases Open-Sourced Vulkan Graphics Driver for the Raspberry Pi

Long-time Slashdot reader frootcakeuk quotes an article from Hot Hardware: Earlier this year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation hooked up with Igalia to start development on an open-sourced Vulkan graphics driver for the Raspberry Pi. However, Martin Thomas, an engineer at Nvidia, beat them to the punch. Thomas announced yesterday via his personal Twitter that his RPi-VK-Driver is ready for primetime. The…

Dell’s All-AMD Gaming Laptop Hailed as a ‘Budget Blockbuster’

AMD “has a potent combination of both CPU and GPU technologies,” writes Slashdot reader MojoKid, that “can play well in the laptop market especially, where a tight coupling of the two processing engines can mean both performance and cost efficiencies.” One of the first all-AMD laptops to hit the market powered by the company’s new Ryzen 4000 mobile processors is the…

Nvidia’s AI Recreates ‘Pac-Man’ For 40th Anniversary

Nvidia recently taught its AI system to recreate the game Pac-Man just by watching it being played. Hypebeast reports: No coding or pre-rendered images were used for the software to base the recreation on. The AI model was simply fed visual data of the game being played alongside controller inputs. From there, the AI recreated what it saw frame by frame,…

NVIDIA Ampere A100 GPU For AI Unveiled, Largest 7nm Chip Ever Produced

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the company’s new Ampere A100 GPU architecture for machine learning and HPC markets today. Jensen claims the 54B transistor A100 is the biggest, most powerful GPU NVIDIA has ever made, and it’s also the largest chip ever produced on 7nm semiconductor process. There are a total of 6,912 FP32 CUDA cores, 432 Tensor cores,…

AI Drives Innovators To Build Entirely New Semiconductors

“AI has ushered in a new golden age of semiconductor innovation,” reports Forbes:
For most of the history of computing, the prevailing chip architecture has been the CPU, or central processing unit… But while CPUs’ key advantage is versatility, today’s leading AI techniques demand a very specific — and intensive — set of computations. Deep learning entails the iterative execution of millions…

NVidia, AMD Battle To Buy Out TSMC’s Capacity

Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: As NVidia and AMD battle it out with their GPUs in consumer gaming, behind the scenes both manufacturers were competing against each for manufacturing capacity with TSMC’s lines. It appears that early on in the 7nm line, NVidia lost out as it is rumored their strategy was to use Samsung more only to go back to…

Microsoft Announces Surface Book 3 With 10th-Gen Intel CPUs and New NVIDIA GPUs

Ammalgam shares a report from Redmond Pie: Microsoft has officially announced the Surface Book 3. Not much has changed for the device in terms of external design, but internal circuitry is where it’s at. This newest addition to the Surface family was formally unveiled alongside the Surface Go 2 today. And the detachable PC finally got the long overdue refresh. Microsoft…

Microsoft’s Big Xbox Game Pass Bet is Starting To Pay Off

Microsoft now has 10 million subscribers to its Xbox Game Pass service, the company said during an investor call yesterday. It’s the first time Microsoft has publicly disclosed Xbox Game Pass numbers, and it’s a sign that the company’s ambitious bet on subscription gaming is starting to pay off. From a report: Microsoft has been trying to build a “Netflix for…

Lenovo Will Start Offering ThinkPads With Linux Pre-Installed

The world’s biggest PC company (in terms of shipments) now offers select models with Linux pre-installed. In doing so, it joins the existing club that includes Dell and other smaller players like Purism, ZaReason, and System76. From a report: If Linux has a special place in your heart, you will want to know Lenovo is partnering with the Fedora Project to…

Minecraft Ray Tracing Launches April 16, and It Is Breathtaking

Microsoft and Nvidia are releasing Minecraft with RTX in beta for everyone April 16. This update adds ray-tracing effects like lighting, reflections, shadows, and more. And this is potentially the next generation for Minecraft visuals. VentureBeat reports: Nvidia and Microsoft developed the game together, and they are finally ready to let everyone see it for themselves. You can get the game…