Microsoft Details Its 24-Core 'Holographic Processor' Used In HoloLens (pcworld.com) 113
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. No more, Microsoft. (Score:1, Insightful)
No more of my money. Go away now. Bye bye!
But not in the HoloLens itself (Score:1)
Dragging around a great big ball and chain.
1 trillion calculations per second (Score:5, Funny)
How many of those 1 trillion calculations per second are for telemetry and serving ads?
Give up, Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
signed
former Microsoft fanboy
Re: (Score:3)
DSPs (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
FPGA killed the DSP star. I wonder why microsoft picked obsolete tech on a cutting edge product...
Because they are not bloody hipsters and used whatever works best rather than worrying about what hipsters thing is the new hotness?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sooo you don't actually know what a DSP is? Or by the sounds of it an FPGA either. But hey, by all means have an opinion on it! How embarassing.
Re: (Score:1)
lots of angry grandpas on here upset that someone dares to threaten their crusty old tech...
depending on how you use it an FPGA allows you to do signal processing like an ASIC, but fully configurable like a microcontroller. in both speed & low power, the FPGA wins hands down. in a bleeding edge product, you can change the FPGA with a firmware update, while the DSP is stuck in time. hell, you can license DSP cores to build in your FPGA.
Re: (Score:3)
I think you're angry that they picked the right tool for the job and have it working as planned. But hey I guess you know more than a team of silicon engineers at a profitable company...
Re: (Score:1)
you can change the FPGA with a firmware update, while the DSP is stuck in time.
er, what?
they're reprogrammable like any other commonly used, uh, programmable device.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes & No. DSPs start off as FPGAs, while they iron out all bugs, and optimize the design. That also takes care of supporting low volume business. Once the bugs are out, and production ramps up, that's when the cost savings of going from FPGA to DSP becomes significant enough to make worth doing.
So this story just says that Microsoft is entering the semiconductor market as a fabless manufacturer. I would have hoped for them to have done this in the 90s, w/ DEC's Alpha - they would have had a comple
Re: (Score:2)
Too Many White Males (Score:1, Troll)
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Where are all these unemployed white men you speak of?
Not the AC, but the employment figures have been horribly misrepresented since Obama took office. They've eliminated people unemployed for more than 6 or 12 months (I forget which offhand) as "not seeking employment", they've eliminated the 18-25 age group as "students" (unless they have a job, in which case they get counted,) they've eliminated the 60+ group as "retired," anyone on disability, anyone employed for any time period (even not 40 hours/livable timespans,) and a few other gotchas. To top it al
Re: (Score:1)
That 100 million contains people actually a large part of retirees. Why would my retired grandma in a nursing be considered part of the labor pool?
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/ar... [cnsnews.com]
That article seems to give a detailed accounting of the numbers and what they mean. Yes it includes retired, but also it is higher than it has been in a very long time, so what does it matter? The number of retirees hasn't exploded enough to explain the rise of non participating people, it is however an indicator for the people who were cut out of the unemployment numbers because they still haven't found jobs. This article also has the numbers of people working part time
Re: (Score:2)
Not the AC, but the employment figures have been horribly misrepresented since Obama took office. They've eliminated people unemployed for more than 6 or 12 months (I forget which offhand) as "not seeking employment"
Except that was happening long before Obama took office. They're called discouraged workers. Also, discouraged workers are tracked and their numbers are published by the Department of Labor since 1967. But don't let facts enter into your posts.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh and the last change to how unemployment figures were reported was in 1994. Just so you know, that's more than a decade before Obama was even a US senator. So to blame him for this is quite rich.
Re: (Score:1)
Oh and the last change to how unemployment figures were reported was in 1994. Just so you know, that's more than a decade before Obama was even a US senator. So to blame him for this is quite rich.
Aside from the fact that's either uninformed or a lie (it's the internet so who knows which of the two,) are you saying the Clintons are to blame?
it's a GPU (Score:1)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not released yet (Score:1)
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 anyo
Re: (Score:2)
VR =/= AR. Show me any competing device that does AR, which is displaying pictures over top of the actual background. This device does something that VR headsets cannot do.
Last I checked, VR headsets are not see through.
Re: (Score:2)
AR would just present some dinky version of the th
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re:it's a GPU (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Ironic, Given HoloLense Doesn't do Holograms (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
As far as I can see from available information, the HoloLens has a focal distance somewhere around 2 meters [pcworld.com] 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.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow (Score:2)
A teraflop in a pair of (ugly) glasses. Who woulda thunk it?
It's pretty neat (Score:2)
Awful article (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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 think you mean 8MB SRAM, and you can't transcribe either ;)
TSMC *designs* ASICs now? (Score:2)
I thought they were just a fab company :|
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the journalist may be mistaken. Another story I read on this said the design came from Cadence, which makes a lot more sense. Cadence sells a core that customers can further customize (using Cadence's software of course). It then can be fabbed by a place like TSMC.
Not the future we expected (Score:2)
"Holographic" (Score:2)
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.
Misuse of scientific/technical words (Score:2)
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 ha
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
see below (Score:1)
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 re
Re: (Score:1)
Sounds like silicon dedicated to do a particular task.
That's not terribly remarkable.
Re: (Score:2)
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?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
640x480 should be enough for everybody.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
And lemme guess: Not taking your pills puts you in that "right state of mind" to see through all this?