Last week, Khronos Group and, more specifically, the ARB released OpenGL 4.0. It’s been approximately six months since OpenGL 3.2 and less than a year since OpenGL 3.1. So ARB has been eager and working hard to get OpenGL up to speed with Direct3D. Maybe even a little too eager, one might think, as such a rapid pace of publishing new specification versions will most likely be confusing to the adopters. The developers are still barely using the 2.x line of the API, so adopting 4.0 can take a good while. Oh, and you need compatible drivers from HW vendors, too – something which will probably take a while as well.

Anyway, the spec is out and it’s time to take a look at what’s new. The new features include double precision floats, shader subroutines, instanced geometry shaders and arrays, as well as a heap of other new additions. Most importantly, however, OpenGL 4.0 introduces two new shader stages: sample shaders and tessellation shaders. The former enable the developers to have more control over sample operations, such as anti aliasing, while the latter offer mechanisms for programming [Continue Reading...]

In December 2008, the Khronos Consortium announced ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.0 specification for parallel programming. Six months prior to that, all the major processor vendors had been vigorously questioning, redesigning and improving the draft specification contributed by none other than Apple the consumer device manufacturer. Many asked, why would Apple be interested in investing in such low level technology in the first place, and then donating it away for free? The answer – to be in front line to benefit from the eventual demise of Moore’s law.

Ever since Intel’s co-founder Gordon E. Moore published his infamous concept in the mid-sixties, Moore’s law has been used to predict the long-term evolution of exponential increase of transistor counts in integrated circuits. The trend of doubling the transistor count every two years has been maintained from 1970’s all the way into new millennia. However, even Moore himself recognizes that the Law has it’s end on the horizon – in ten to twenty years, the size of the transistor is approaching the size of an atom. Even before that barrier, the more ruthless laws of economics will interfere. The sheer cost of designing [Continue Reading...]

Blogger Dana Blankenhorn recently interviewed Symbio’s CEO, Jacob Hsu and posted this entry on SmartPlanet.com, a CBS Interactive blog.  Here’s a copy of his post -

This summer Taiwan will declare its independence.

Not from China. Not from America.

From Microsoft.

Symbio CEO Jacob Hsu has been working with Taiwanese OEMs for 10 years and says they are finally ready to kick off the traces and become their own brands.

This surprised me. I was at last year’s CompuTex show, in Taiwan, looking for Linux, and it just wasn’t there.

While many of the Taiwanese businesspeople I talked with expressed a desire to go outside the Microsoft orbit, every booth featured Windows gear, usually with Intel chips.

But Android, the mobile operating system Google has built on top of Linux, is [Continue Reading...]