Building

A building or edifice is a structure with a roof and walls standing more or less permanently in one place, such as a house or factory. Buildings come in a variety of shapes, sizes and functions, and have been adapted throughout history for a wide number of factors, from building materials available, to weather conditions, to land prices, ground conditions, specific uses and aesthetic reasons. To better understand the term building compare the list of nonbuilding structures.

Buildings serve several needs of society – primarily as shelter from weather, security, living space, privacy, to store belongings, and to comfortably live and work. A building as a shelter represents a physical division of the human habitat (a place of comfort and safety) and the outside (a place that at times may be harsh and harmful).

Ever since the first cave paintings, buildings have also become objects or canvasess of artistic expression. In recent years, interest in sustainable planning and building practices has also become an intentional part of the design process of many new buildings.

Ethereum

Ethereum is a cryptocurrency which includes a programmable smart contract platform. The unit of currency is called the ether.

Ethereum was initially described by Vitalik Buterin in late 2013, formally described by Gavin Wood in early 2014 in the so-called "yellow paper" and launched 30 July 2015. It is among a group of "next generation" (or "Bitcoin 2.0") platforms.

Purpose

The intended purpose of the Ethereum Project is to build and proliferate a decentralised and pseudonymous replacement for the World Wide Web: incentivized static content publication (Swarm), pseudonymous low-level messaging system (Whisper), trustless transactions (Ethereum) and an integrated user-interface (Mist).

Development

Ethereum is an open source project. Development began in December 2013, with the first Go and C++ proof of concept builds (PoC1) being released in early February 2014. Since then, several further PoC builds have been released, culminating with the public launch of the Ethereum blockchain on 30 July 2015.

AMD Radeon Rx 300 series

AMD Radeon Rx 300 is brand for a series of graphics cards. All used GPUs have been developed by AMD, produced in 28nm and belong to the same microarchitecture family: Graphics Core Next (GCN).

Devices based on the Fiji architecture, which include the flagship AMD Radeon R9 Fury X along with the Radeon R9 Fury and Radeon R9 Nano, are the first GPUs to feature High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) technology which is faster and more power efficient than current GDDR5 memory. However, the Rx 300-numbered GPUs in the series are based on previous generation GPUs with revised power management and therefore only feature GDDR5 memory. The Radeon 300 series cards including the R9 390X were released on June 18, 2015. The flagship device, Fury X, was released on June 24, 2015.

Core architecture

There are chips implementing all three iterations of Graphics Core Next. The table below details which GCN-generation each chip belongs to.

Ancillary ASICs

An ancillary ASICs present on the chips as well, are being developed independtly of the core architecture and have their own version name schemes.

Graphics processing unit

A graphics processing unit (GPU), also occasionally called visual processing unit (VPU), is a specialized electronic circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles. Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating computer graphics and image processing, and their highly parallel structure makes them more effective than general-purpose CPUs for algorithms where the processing of large blocks of visual data is done in parallel. In a personal computer, a GPU can be present on a video card, or it can be embedded on the motherboard or—in certain CPUs—on the CPU die.

The term GPU was popularized by Nvidia in 1999, who marketed the GeForce 256 as "the world's first GPU", or Graphics Processing Unit. It was presented as a "single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that are capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second". Rival ATI Technologies coined the term visual processing unit or VPU with the release of the Radeon 9700 in 2002.