Aug

5

Intel takes on AMD and Nvidia with new graphic chips Larrabee

Filed Under GPU and Gaming, Microprocessor | 3 Comments 

Over the last two days, the PC industry was quite excited about Intel’s forthcoming high end discrete graphic chips, Larrabee, which are scheduled to launch some time in end of 2009 or early 2010. Larrabee is expected to compete head on with the GeForce and Radeon graphics chips from NVIDIA and AMD, respectively (Ref). Remarkably, Intel builds up its graphic chip capability solely through its in-house development effort without acquiring the know how through acquisitions of other graphics companies. In comparison, AMD has obtained its graphics chip capabilities through the acquisition of ATI in 2006.

Compared to NVIDIA’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon which use proprietary graphics-focused cores, Larrabee will use the popular x86 cores with x86 instruction sets, much like a mulit-core CPU. However, Larrabee’s cores will be much simpler than the Core 2 Duo’s cores. It is being designed explicitly for stream processing and rasterized 3D graphics (DirectX/OpenGL) for games. It is also capable of performing ray tracing and physics processing in real time. Another interesting fact is that the design of Larrabee was coming from Intel’s previous Pentium 4 design team (Ref).

You may call Larrabee a GPU, or a mutli-core CPU or whatever. But the truth is the difference between GPU and CPU is now blurring.

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Jul

29

Explosive Growth for Thin Film Photovoltaic (TFPV) Market

Filed Under Related Industry, Video Gallery | 2 Comments 

According to NanoMarkets newest report “Thin Film Photovoltaics Markets: 2008 and Beyond”, thin-film photovoltaic (TFPV) market will grow from almost $2.4 billion ($US) in revenues in 2008 to over $12 billion in 2013. By 2015, NanoMarkets expects that TFPV will have a market opportunity of over $22 billion (Ref). The explosive growth is unfathomable a few years ago when TFPV was just a tiny niche area of photovoltaic’s business and was associated with low-margin products such as calculators. However, the advances of TFPV technology and the perennial shortage of crystalline silicon have driven TFPV technology to become the mainstream for PV market. In addition, TFPV technology shows great potential for low-cost, low-weight and flexible solar cells.

The current TFPV technology is still largely based on amorphous silicon (a-Si) which is well understood. However, non-silicon TFPV technologies, such as Copper Indium Gallium Deselenide (CIGS), cadmium telluride (CdTe), and GaAs etc, are gaining traction and may soon replace a-Si TFPV technology. In particular, GICS seems to offer all the virtues of TFPV with energy conversion efficiencies comparable to conventional PV of about 20 percent. One interesting development of CIGS TFPV technology is the possibility of building a flexible PV panel, such as CIGS on foil technology (Ref). A recent report from Lux Research claimed that TPFV build on flexible surfaces will make up 28 percent of the solar market by 2012 (Ref).

Below is a video on the manufacturing of solar panel from Q Cells:

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