SemiAccurate

Last updated
SemiAccurate
Type of site
 Blog
Available in English
Owner Stone Arch Networking Services, Inc.
Created by Charlie Demerjian
Revenue Unknown
URL SemiAccurate.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationYes
Launched2009
Current statusActive

SemiAccurate (S|A in short) is a U.S.-based technology-news and -opinion web site, founded in 2009 by Charlie Demerjian after his departure from The Inquirer . The site lists as its contributors: Charlie Demerjian (the site's founder), Thomas Ryan and Leo Yim.[ citation needed ]

Contents

As of 2017 the site operates under a partial paywall model, making the majority of its content publicly available at no cost to readers - but subscribers to the "Student-" and "Professional-"level tiers receive access to special analysis articles and reports on industry trends similar to white papers.

Notable Stories

In February 2010, SemiAccurate ran a story on the yet to be released, "Fermi", microprocessor from Nvidia, which called the chip, "Hot, Slow, Late and Unmanufacturable." [1]

In August 2010, a tip off from a reader helped SemiAccurate to cover Sony admitting to defective graphics chips in some of its laptops. [2] News organization IDG credited SemiAccurate for first reporting the story. [3]

In May 2011, SemiAccurate published a story on Apple dropping Intel from its laptop line within a few years. [4] This story was covered by a large number of U.S.-based as well as international news organizations. ZDNet and Barron's both weighed in on the validity of the story. [5] [6]

In June 2011, SemiAccurate published a story detailing the scandal that led AMD, Nvidia, and VIA to leave Intel as the lone semiconductor design company in the BAPCo consortium. [7] In response, Nigel Dessau, Chief Marketing Officer of AMD, published a blog titled "Voting for Openness" shortly after this story went up, and explained AMD's side of the story. [8]

In August 2011, SemiAccurate published two stories, one covering the specifications of Nvidia's unreleased mobile graphics line up, [9] and another covering the specifications of AMD's (one of Nvidia's direct competitors) unreleased mobile graphics line up. [10] Softpedia, [11] VR-Zone, [12] TweakTown, [13] and the Tom's Hardware Forum all credited SemiAccurate for leaking these specifications. [14]

Reader Supported

On December 4, 2012, SemiAccurate moved from an ad revenue supported business model to a paywall business model. [15] This paywall model had three tiers, Curious (free), Member ($200 per year), and Professional ($1000 per year).

On May 5, 2013, SemiAccurate amended this model to reduce the number of subscription tiers from three, down to two. [16] Under the revised pay wall model the Curious and Member levels were replaced by the Student level membership ($100 per year), while the Professional level membership remained at the same.

Related Research Articles

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ATI Technologies Inc., commonly called ATI, was a Canadian semiconductor technology corporation based in Markham, Ontario, that specialized in the development of graphics processing units and chipsets. Founded in 1985, the company listed publicly in 1993 and was acquired by AMD in 2006. As a major fabrication-less or fabless semiconductor company, ATI conducted research and development in-house and outsourced the manufacturing and assembly of its products. With the decline and eventual bankruptcy of 3dfx in 2000, ATI and its chief rival Nvidia emerged as the two dominant players in the graphics processors industry, eventually forcing other manufacturers into niche roles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graphics processing unit</span> Specialized electronic circuit; graphics accelerator

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit initially designed to accelerate computer graphics and image processing. After their initial design, GPUs were found to be useful for non-graphic calculations involving embarrassingly parallel problems due to their parallel structure. Other non-graphical uses include the training of neural networks and cryptocurrency mining.

Alienware Corporation is an American computer hardware subsidiary brand of Dell. Their product range is dedicated to gaming computers and can be identified by their alien-themed designs. Alienware was founded in 1996 by Nelson Gonzalez and Alex Aguila. The development of the company is also associated with Frank Azor, Arthur Lewis, Joe Balerdi, and Michael S. Dell. The company's corporate headquarters is located in The Hammocks, Miami, Florida.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dell XPS</span> Line of high performance computers manufactured by Dell

Dell XPS is a line of consumer-oriented laptop and desktop computer series manufactured by Dell since 1993.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dell Latitude</span> Line of business-oriented laptop computers by Dell

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The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device. It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity. The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a chip, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is: a better indication of this is transistor density.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AMD APU</span> Series of microprocessors by AMD

AMD Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), formerly known as Fusion, is a series of 64-bit microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), combining a general-purpose AMD64 central processing unit (CPU) and 3D integrated graphics processing unit (IGPU) on a single die.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larrabee (microarchitecture)</span>

Larrabee is the codename for a cancelled GPGPU chip that Intel was developing separately from its current line of integrated graphics accelerators. It is named after either Mount Larrabee or Larrabee State Park in Whatcom County, Washington, near the town of Bellingham. The chip was to be released in 2010 as the core of a consumer 3D graphics card, but these plans were cancelled due to delays and disappointing early performance figures. The project to produce a GPU retail product directly from the Larrabee research project was terminated in May 2010 and its technology was passed on to the Xeon Phi. The Intel MIC multiprocessor architecture announced in 2010 inherited many design elements from the Larrabee project, but does not function as a graphics processing unit; the product is intended as a co-processor for high performance computing.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">ThinkPad E series</span> Series of laptops by Lenovo

The ThinkPad E Series is a notebook computer series introduced in 2010 by Lenovo. It is marketed to small and medium-sized businesses.

Project Denver is the codename of a central processing unit designed by Nvidia that implements the ARMv8-A 64/32-bit instruction sets using a combination of simple hardware decoder and software-based binary translation where "Denver's binary translation layer runs in software, at a lower level than the operating system, and stores commonly accessed, already optimized code sequences in a 128 MB cache stored in main memory". Denver is a very wide in-order superscalar pipeline. Its design makes it suitable for integration with other SIPs cores into one die constituting a system on a chip (SoC).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clevo x7200</span> Laptop by Clevo

The Clevo X7200 is a 17.3" laptop computer manufactured by Clevo, released in September 2010. Unlike other laptops of the time, the X7200 is designed to run a desktop Intel Core i7 processor for LGA 1366 socket. The X7200 may be configured to use dual link video cards using either Nvidia GeForce GTX in SLI or AMD (ATI) Mobility Radeon 6970 in Crossfire configuration. The X7200 has capacity for three hard drives, allowing various RAID configurations, including RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and also RAID 10 if the optical drive is replaced by a fourth HDD.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">HP ZBook</span> Brand of mobile workstations

HP ZBook is a brand of mobile workstations made by HP Inc. Introduced in September 2013, it is a successor to HP's previous mobile workstations in the HP EliteBook series. The ZBook mainly competes against PCs such as Dell's Precision and Lenovo's ThinkPad P series.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dell Inspiron laptop computers</span> Laptop computer series by Dell

The Dell Inspiron series is a line of laptop computers made by American company Dell under the Dell Inspiron branding. The first Inspiron laptop model was introduced before 1999. Unlike the Dell Latitude line, which is aimed mostly at business/enterprise markets, Inspiron is a consumer-oriented line, often marketed towards individual customers as computers for everyday use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ThinkPad P series</span> Series of laptops by Lenovo

The ThinkPad P series line of workstation laptops produced by Lenovo and was introduced by the company as a successor to the previous ThinkPad W series. With 15.6" and 17.3" screens, the ThinkPad P series saw the reintroduction of physically large laptops into the ThinkPad line. Marketed largely as portable workstations, many P series laptops can be configured with high-end mobile workstation-class Intel processors as well as error correction code (ECC) memory and a discrete Nvidia Quadro GPU. The P series offers independent software vendor (ISV) certifications from software vendors such as Adobe and Autodesk for various computer-aided design (CAD) software. The P52 and P72 models are the last current Lenovo laptops with a dedicated magnesium structural frame.

References

  1. ↑ "Nvidia's Fermi GTX480 is broken and unfixable". SemiAccurate. February 17, 2010.
  2. ↑ "Sony admits to 14 defective Nvidia notebooks". SemiAccurate. August 10, 2009.
  3. ↑ "Sony warns of laptops with faulty Nvidia chips". Smarter News, Analysis & Research Communities. 2009-08-12. Retrieved 2024-03-02.
  4. ↑ "Apple dumps Intel from laptop lines". SemiAccurate. May 5, 2011.
  5. ↑ Dignan, Larry (2011-05-06). "Apple dumping Intel for ARM? Pros, cons and a lot of questions". ZDNET. Retrieved 2024-03-02.
  6. ↑ Barrons blog on the article, retrieved August 26, 2011.
  7. ↑ "Nvidia, AMD, and VIA quit BAPCO over SYSmark 2012". SemiAccurate. 2011-06-20. Retrieved 2024-03-02.
  8. ↑ Voting for Openness - AMD Blogs, retrieved August 25, 2011.
  9. ↑ "Nvidia's 28nm mobile lineup leaked". SemiAccurate. August 23, 2011.
  10. ↑ "AMD's 28nm mobile lineup leaked too". SemiAccurate. August 24, 2011.
  11. ↑ Pop, Sebastian (August 24, 2011). "Leak Reveals Upcoming NVIDIA 28nm GPU Lineup". softpedia.
  12. ↑ "VR-Zone Mobile Graphics Story".
  13. ↑ "Details on NVIDIA's upcoming 28nm mobile lineup leaked". TweakTown. August 24, 2011.
  14. ↑ "News : Nvidia's 28nm mobile lineup leaked". Tom's Hardware Forum. August 24, 2011.
  15. ↑ "SemiAccurate is now reader supported | SemiAccurate". semiaccurate.com. Archived from the original on 2012-12-06.
  16. ↑ "SemiAccurate Forums - View Single Post - Semiaccurate goes partly subscription based". semiaccurate.com. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04.
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