Visual Transistor-level Simulation of the 6502 CPU

If you have ever dreamed to see a chip operating at a transistor level, take a look at this crazy project presented at Siggraph this year: a transistor level simulator of the 6502 CPU (that was powering the Apple 2) !
Greg James, Barry Silverman, Brian Silverman who are leading this project built the simulator by reverse engineering the chip from high resolution die shots they used to reconstruct the full polygon model of the chip circuits !

They provide the simulator as a javascript applet you can use to program the virtual chip and see the circuits operating : http://visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html 

The Siggraph talk can be found there: http://visual6502.org/docs/6502_in_action_14_web.pdf

Realistic 3D projection on a building

Awesome !

NVIDIA nextgen Kepler and Maxwell architectures codenames unveiled

During the opening keynote of the GPU Technology Conference, Jen-Hsun Huang unvailled the codenames and the roadmap for the next 2 generation of NVIDIA GPU architectures !

So we now publicly know that Johannes Kepler and James Clerk Maxwell are the two next scientists that will succeed to Enrico Fermi !
 


Sources : 


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OpenGL 4.2+ speculations @g-truc

An awesome post from Christophe Riccio about his speculation for next OpenGL releases:
http://www.g-truc.net/post-tech-lastest-full.html#post0330

Here is the summary:

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CUDA 3.2 RC

Available to registered developers.

Here are the interesting new stuff I found:

  • Support for malloc() and free() in kernels: dynamic global memory allocation !
  • This is implemented with a new syscall linking mechanism that seems to allow kernel to be linked to precompiled system calls. Infos on the linking mechanism (.calltargets , .callprototype ) can be found in section 10.3 of the PTX ISA manual. I hope this mechanism will get exposed for user functions in the API !
    • 64 bits addressing support in CUDA driver AP: Allows manipulating more than 4GB of device memory.
    • New System Management Interface (nvidia-smi) for reporting various hardware counters informations
    • New stream synchronization function cudaStreamSynchronize(): allow GPU-side inter-streams synchronisation.
    • A set of new calls is available to allow the creation of CUDA devices with interoperability with Direct3D devices that use SLI in AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) 
    • New flag to driver API texture reference (CU_TRSF_SRGB), which enables sRGB->linear conversion on a read.
    • Reference manual adds architecture information on GF10x (GF104, GF106, GF108) class hardware (compute capability 2.1)
    Changes in PTX ISA 2.2:
    • Add tld4 (fetch4) instruction for loading a component (r, g, b, or a) from the four texels compising the bilinear interpolation footprint of a given texture location.
    • Add kernel pointer parameter state space and alignment of the memory being pointed to.

    New CUDA Libraries
    • CUSPARSE, supporting sparse matrix computations.
    • CURAND, supporting random number generation for both host and device code with Sobel quasi-random and XORWOW pseudo random routines.

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