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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."
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.
A teraflop in a pair of (ugly) glasses. Who woulda thunk it?
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
What was that movie with Roddy Piper?
That's not what makes something a hologram. There is nothing that precludes holograms from being put on glasses to effectively "overlay" on what you see. What makes a hologram distinctive is that your brain perceives it as a truly three-dimensional image. When you focus on a hologram, you are focusing at the distance of the object that is presented in the hologram, not on the surface of what the image is being made on.... like a mirror.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
what do you mean so long to get this to market? it has been in the market for a long time now and is being used by quite a few large companies for various engineering, design and architecture work. Seems so far it is hugely successful though incredibly pricey as each device is multiple thousands of dollars..
As far as I can see from available information, the HoloLens has a focal distance somewhere around 2 meters away from your face.
Whereas in a "true" hologram, you capture the interference patterns of all light rays that pass through the volume of your photo sensitive film. Shining a laser through that film will recreate light rays with the same direction and intensity. As if you were looking through a window at the original scene.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
FFS, god damn kids.
it is NOTHING like a GPU.
it is an array of DSPs. boring old DSPs.. nothing new here at all.
quite a few of them on the same chip, but still, just DSPs. in fact quite standard DSPs.
Which is pretty much exactly what you would expect for this application.
Now please stop trying to impress people with 'I've looked over all the information' and go back to your madz gamerzing.
Not the future we expected - we have "hoverboards" and "holographic displays" but they are marketing hype instead of what the words used to mean.
Indeed, and that's what got me to the State Science Fair in 7th grade. Why anyone would let a 13 year-old take home an expensive laser, let them processes photographic plates in a light-sealed bathroom by themselves...lol
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.
And lemme guess: Not taking your pills puts you in that "right state of mind" to see through all this?
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.
Even MS would have to admit that 640x480 is a useless resolution for AR - how are they supposed to force you to view all their advertising if you can't make sense of it due to pixelation?
Yes, your smartphone has a ton of varied, dedicated hardware.
Even your grandma's 1990s dumbphone does that, or a $20 DVD video player. Your smartphone has more complicated versions of both, and an image processor that makes an actual usable picture from the camera sensor, and a video encoder, and a jpeg encoder/decoder I guess, and a whole GPU on top of that.
So Microsoft is using yet another processor for another new, separate task.
I liken the whole thing to some kind of mobile Kinect. I think this one had a built-in DSP too.
Not that I should particularly care. but execution, latency, robustness may make or break such things.
that's like saying who would want a Ferrari because a Toyota Tarago can carry more people, is exponentially cheaper to buy run and insure. They are two completely fucking separate markets. HoloLens is for AR, something neither Vive or Rift are capable of doing, Vive and Rift are for VR, something HoloLens is not capable of doing.
AR would just present some dinky version of the thing being designed fixed to a table top or similar. It might be cute but it doesn't seem as practical. It certainly seems a reach to pitch Hololens to such limited professional use and hope it will take off.
The Cell was a forerunner to GPGPU computing. You wrote a "kernel" for each SPE, streamed data in and gathered data coming out. Signal processing, crypto, physics, tweening, collision detection etc. It was basically what GPUs became in due course, providing a way to do general purpose computation in parallel and faster than a CPU could do by itself.
640x480 should be enough for everybody.
You'd think that AR would need even higher resolution to look good. The generated image is always being viewed side by side with reality.
They were the stupid ones that gave two completely different product lines the exact same name.
The reason it failed is that cheap multi-touch started hitting PCs left and right. If you can get a 27" all-in-one computer with 10-point multi-touch for under $1,000 there is no reason to spend $10,000 to solve your problem - all you need is custom mounting. The rest of the features just weren't compelling enough to spend so much more.
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.
Wouldn't that be nice for a change?