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Microsoft Details Its 24-Core 'Holographic Processor' Used In HoloLens (pcworld.com)
The processor powering Microsoft's HoloLens augmented reality headset has been a mystery -- until now. During the annual Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California, Microsoft revealed some juicy details about the secretive chip. PCWorld reports: "The HoloLens' HPU is a custom 28nm coprocessor designed by TSMC, The Register reports. The chip packs 24 Tensilica digital signal processor (DSP) cores. As opposed to more general-purpose CPU cores, DSPs are a specialized technology designed for rapidly processing data flowing in from the world -- a no doubt invaluable asset while rendering augmented reality environments in real time. Microsoft's HPU also contains roughly 65 million logic gates, 8MB of SDRAM, and 1GB of traditional DDR3 RAM. It draws less than 10W of power, and features PCIe and standard serial interfaces. The HPU's dedicated hardware is up to 200 times faster than performing the same calculations via software on the less-specialized 14nm Intel Cherry Trail CPU. Microsoft added custom instructions to the DSP cores that allow the HPU to churn through HoloLens-specific tasks even faster, The Register reports. The HPU can perform roughly 1 trillion calculations per second, and the data it passes to the CPU requires little additional processing."
Microsoft rules. Linux drools. Suckas
No more of my money. Go away now. Bye bye!
Dragging around a great big ball and chain.
How many of those 1 trillion calculations per second are for telemetry and serving ads?
I don't care what hardware you pimp, Microsoft. After your abusing everyone's privacy with your Windows 10 spyware, nothing you do matters anymore. Now go fuck yourself.
signed
former Microsoft fanboy
DSPs are special processors that generally have many dedicated multiplier cores, as well as other math functions implemented directly in hardware. This allows them to do things like fixed point math operations very fast, sometimes in as little as a single digit clock cycles neglecting pipeline delays. In some cases certain math intensive functions such as video encoding/decoding are implemented directly in hardware too for the same benefits.
Was the line that made me opt to never buy anything Microsoft makes again. Fuck those racists.
nt
TFA notes "8MB of SRAM," which makes more sense.
Oh great, looks like the editors are hard at work again...
I've looked over all the information and I tell you with great certainty that this "HPU" is really a GPU with a few custom bits.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Holograms - seen without the aid of special glasses or other intermediate optics.
It does seem to be GPU cores. To put this in perspective, NVidia's top of the range mobile chip has 256 Maxwell cores. And the NVidia ones support CUDA, so it will be doing similar bulk parallel execution.
Marketing spin aside, hopefully they simply licensed a chip and badged it, rather than waste a lot of money trying to make a custom graphics chip. That would be f**ing dumb given how competitive the graphics market is.
A teraflop in a pair of (ugly) glasses. Who woulda thunk it?
I would recommend according to sources on the net to be on the look out for shape shifting aliens disguised as humans, who, like the hybrid humans+aliens, must consume human flesh to maintain their human appearance.
Hey aliens and hybrids, we're onto you!
Human flesh is being found more and more in common food today,
There exists a certain barrier in normal, everyday thought which hides the reality of these creatures and their hybrids along with the smell and taste of human flesh in common food as well as the scent of these creatures. they all smell the same. while the aliens and hybrids are safe within their homes, they prepare higher concentrates of human flesh in food because they can get away with it and unless you're in the right state of mind, you wouldn't smell the human flesh in the food. They use some type of masking agent so you normally can't smell the taint. They have been studying us for years upon years and much of what you hear coming from government/military experiments are just a preview of things to come.
A certain modification to the mind can bring the typical human into a different frame of mind where these... "things" can be smelt/detected. there are other effects which follow, too, but the frame of mind of the individual would often be too flooded with different events occurring within and outside of the human mind/body.
Never trust a mason or someone giving you food/drink out of the blue, even if you've known these people for your entire life. always buy food at random, never return to the same product more than # of dice rolls. Always buy food and drink in sealed containers. Look for typical "Illuminati/occult" symbols and don't purchase from these companies.
Things are not what they appear to be on Earth, unless you are enabled to really see. Then you'll probably wish you never had. (like in The Matrix where the delicious fake steak is being consumed and a deal struck)
It's a boring, failing dinosaur of a company.
Why all the shilling on this site?
Maybe you should rename yourself, "Microdot."
... a beowulf cluster of these things!
We have one at work and I've tried out some of the demos. It's a pretty impressive piece of kit.
This article is awful, both here on slashdot and pcworld. It shows that neither site is suitable for reporting on tech or IT journalism.
TSM doesn't design chips, they build them. Others design the chips, hand over that design to TSMC to get actual hardware back. TheRegister correctly reports this "bult by TSMC"
8MB SDRAM and 1GB DDR3 RAM. That is the same thing! DDR3 is a form of SDRAM and of course SDRAM makes no sense whatsoever here. Instead again, TheRegister correctly reports: 8GB SRAM, which is typically used for caching purposes: small size but fast, just like L1 to L3 caches in most/all CPUs which are also for caching.
Neither slashdot nor pcworld senior editor can correctly transcribe a simple news tidbit from another site.
I thought they were just a fab company :|
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Cadence designs signal processors, TSMC builds them, Microsoft licenses them, nobody buys them.
How do you sell a $3000 headset in a commodity market? FFS Microsoft, could you be any more pathetic.
A product with real innovation. Well done, Microsoft!
Basically an APU.
https://regmedia.co.uk/2016/08/22/hololens_large.jpg
Looks alot like AMD/Intel APUs, but anyway reminds me of the movidius myriad and TI Keystone 2.
Not the future we expected - we have "hoverboards" and "holographic displays" but they are marketing hype instead of what the words used to mean.
No, the developer edition launched only in March of this year, the actual sale edition isn't released yet. In the meantime, my drone has a VR headset, it cost $6+ $20 for the software to fly the drone in VR. Works great to, follows your head as you turn and look up and down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_HoloLens
"The PRE-PRODUCTION version of HoloLens, the Development Edition, shipped on 30 March 2016, and is targeted to developers in the United States and Canada for a list price of $3,000"
And anyone can have a VR headset if they have a phone with a gyroscope and $1, it was mainstream year before last. If the phone is a high end phone, it will be a lot faster than this Hololens too.
http://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-vr-headset.html
"Seems so far it is hugely successful though incredibly pricey as each device is multiple thousands of dollars.."
Samsungs new VR headset doesn't even use it, its based on their phones:
http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/gear-vr/?cid=ppc-
But hey, keep up the faith brother!
So, what's a "Hologram", the word they derive the name from? Well, it's a picture that isn't really tangible, it's just a virtual picture, and in the correct light, it only appears to display something real. But that looks really convincing, despite nothing really being there.
In one word: Vaporware.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Maybe I'm just being oversensitive, but it begins to annoy me, the way important terms get misused and watered down by IT companies. Not long ago there was something (I have happily forgotten the details) that misused the term 'tensor' for some sort of HW or SW - it had nothing to do with the hugely important and useful mathematical tool, of course, not even in the most stretched sense; it was just "We need some snazzy word for this crap, let's call it tensor". And now "holographic processor" - I find it hard to imagine an application of holography that would justify it's use in a processor, even a graphical one.
It may seem like a very minor problem, but I think it does some harm - when you come to learn an important topic, it is better not to come burdened with confusing misuses of the terms involved; it is hard enough to approach, say, topology, even when you have perfectly good and sensible intuitions about continuity from calculus, but at least there is some sort of "natural" bridge from continuity in the Real numbers to continuity in topological spaces.
Fft ftw
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Sounds slightly similar to Cell, sans the child-core local caches.
Regardless, it does sound like nice hardware, and it is about time we start getting good processors out there for these sorts of tasks instead of being stuck at fucking sub-10.
Multicore is far superior even for general purpose devices because you can ALWAYS split a general purposes jobs up.
That includes every facet of the OS so they don't halt each other. (whether software itself supports it is up to the devs)
Developers need to get off their collective asses and learn mulithreading and multicore already. IT IS TRIVIAL TO LEARN.
It is just some extra timing and synchronization, it isn't some mystical magicks.
It adds SO MUCH to a project they always hate themselves for not learning it sooner.
Yes, it will not help every task, there are tasks that are serial in nature, but hey, guess what, our brains manage serial tasks in parallel as well. That is up to processor designers to figure out. (admittedly our brains are terrible at serial tasks anyway, they brute force them a million times until one is right)
Remember that coffee table, Microsoft Surface, that they removed the branding from so it became Microsoft 'PixelSense'?
That was 4 years ago and it seems to have been quietly left to die out of the light of failure....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense
Too Zune?
The stunning amount of ignorance being displayed by the commenters here just makes me a bit sad when I remember how you people used to be. Seriously, where are you people getting the ideas that DSPs aren't reprogrammable, or that they've somehow been made obsolete by FPGAs (wtf), or that FPGAs are in any way superior for low power (wtf??) or any number of other things I'm seeing people pull out of their asses here? Fuck's sake people, know the limits of your knowledge and quit speaking outside them. It's really kind of embarrassing.
Nice to see the editors are as bad as always though, some things never change. 8MB of SDRAM indeed.