Week's News in Bullets
NVidia vs. Samsung
- nvidia first filed a lawsuit vs. Samsung & Qualcomm over GPU patent infringement.
- nvidia lost a case against Samsung in December, but is appealing.
- Samsung counter-sued for four counts of alleged memory technology patent infringement.
- One allegation dropped, two ordered a mistrial.
- The remaining patent infringement allegation went to a jury, which ruled that the patent was not infringed upon by nVidia.
Micron announces volume GDDR5X in summer of 2016
- Faster than GDDR5, lower power consumption, and better overall performance. Less throughput and performance than HBM, but much cheaper.
- Mass production in the summer.
- First samples received from fab plant. Data throughput at about 13Gbps on GDDR5X. That's a 47% speed difference over the 8Gbps of GDDR5.
Unity Engine adds Steam VR support
- Steam VR now supported within Unity Engine. Implementation of VR – specifically the HTC Vive VR by Valve – is now easier as a result. Wider scale support of Valve VR.
AMD and HP embrace FreeSync
- HP announced it is adding FreeSync support to its APU-enabled laptop line-up by the end of the year.
- The argument is that FreeSync allows better power savings on top of its gaming experience advantages.
AMD Zen details reported at CERN presentation
- AMD Zen is the first major high-end CPU launch since the 8350 first shipped.
- CERN, the european nuclear research organization, said in a presentation that Zen CPUs will increase IPC performance by 40%.
- It was also revealed that simultaneous multithreading is supported up to 32 cores for servers, and that Zen will be on 14nm FinFET process node.
- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.
