Just as we were starting to believe that 16-core CPUs were amazing, AMD has come along and dropped a 32-core bombshell. It’s called Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX, a workstation chip that cuts through renderers like butter. We’re putting it up against the forthcoming 2950X, and six other unsuspecting processors.

Storing data is easy, but storing data reliably is a fair bit harder to pull off. Sure, RAID protects against a disk failure, but is not a safe backup solution in of itself, nor does RAID offer protection against data corruption. Synology’s DS1618+ solves this by offering a combined Btrfs & RAID solution in a 6-bay NAS that can be upgraded to meet practically any home or business need.

With the release of DirectX Raytracing and NVIDIA’s RTX API, it’s time we took a look at the history behind ray tracing, and how it came about. With SIGGRAPH just around the corner, we speak to Turner Whitted, who used his knowledge of sonar to pioneer ray tracing as a method for rendering computer graphics back in 1979.

Every two years, the Hackers On Planet Earth conference fills up the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York’s Manhattan borough. Within the walls of the hotel are multiple floors filled with some of the smartest minds. There are many inspirational and eye-opening presentations, lots of vendors and workshops, and of course, lots of Club-Mate to be drank.

The workstation PC market got a shot in the arm last fall when AMD launched its Ryzen Threadripper platform, offering a 16-core CPU for a reasonable price. That led many to ponder what should be in their next machine. Join us as we pit comparable AMD and Intel machines against each other in over twenty workstation scenarios.

Continuing our workstation performance analysis, we’re tossing our usual fleet of GPUs against eight separate tests, all made possible through SPECgpc’s SPECviewperf 13. With this testing, we can show current state of viewport performance in SolidWorks, CATIA, Maya, 3ds Max, Creo, and Siemens NX – as well as visualization tools for medical and energy.