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How Nvidia’s Kepler chips could end PCs and tablets as we know them

May 21st, 2012
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Tremendously powerful new processors toiling away in the cloud could make it irrelevant what kind of screen you connect with, ushering in a new age of computing.
Last week, Nvidia launched the first graphics processing unit (GPU) designed for the cloud, dubbed Kepler. Supporting vendors include a who’s who of server providers, such as HP, Dell, Cisco, and IBM — all of which will have products on the market shortly.

The whole concept behind these servers is to serve up a desktop experience from the cloud. This means delivering games, applications, utilities, and media to any device that will run the client: iPads, iPods, Android tablets, smartphones, and even cars and smart TVs. As this technology comes to market, it will increasingly not matter what you are using — you’ll be able to get your stuff on it as long as it is connected with decent bandwidth.
Let’s talk about some of the results.

Gaming from anything
On stage at its GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, Nvidia had one person on an iPad gaming head to head with another on a new LG TV using a service called Gaikai. The demo game was Hawken, a mech-oriented title that isn’t even in market yet. These two were gaming on hardware that couldn’t hope to run top-line graphics intensive game locally. Yet both where pounding away at each other, and the amazing thing was, the guy on the tablet was winning, showcasing that screen size didn’t matter as much as gaming skill.

This is often the problem with games: If it comes out on one platform and you or your friends don’t have that platform, not only can’t you play the game, the developer gets a fraction of the available revenue. But if games were delivered like streamed movies, then they could go everywhere. You could play from your connected AV system in your car, your iPad, or your TV in the home.
This is truly cloud computing, though Nvidia calls it GeForce Grid.

Windows on an iPad
I was out to breakfast the other day, and I have a nasty habit of listening in on the conversation at neighboring tables if it has to do with tech. The guy talking had been a recent convert from Windows to the Mac, and was talking about switching back because the Mac sucks. (His words not mine, no desire to peg the hate-mail meter this week.) He was complaining because he was going to have to dump his near-new MacBook Pro for an Ultrabook, and he was going to lose on that investment.

Well, what if you could run Windows on a Mac, or an iPad, or anything that would host a tiny client? If you like Apple hardware but hate the Apple platform, you can still run Windows. If you want to run Windows on your big smartphone or tablet in an emergency, you can do that, too.

Citrix demonstrated new hardware that could scale to support 100 desktops off one tower that looked smaller than my (admittedly rather large) PC.
This is the freedom to run what you want wherever you want. To not be tied to Apple or anyone else. To have software delivered like it was electricity. Someone else worries about malware, and backups, and making sure a catastrophic event doesn’t destroy your digital life along with your real one.

Galaxy-class performance
One of the most fascinating demonstrations had to do with modeling galaxy-class events. No I’m not referring to something out of Star Trek (the Enterprise was a Galaxy Class Starship). What Nividia showed was the progress from its existing Fermi platform, which can model the birth of the universe, to the Kepler platform, which can model what’s going to happen in a few short years when the Andromeda Galaxy runs into our own. Granted, a few short years in galaxy-class events is 3.5 billion years, so no need to jump under a table (not this would do you any good, mind you). As you can imagine, the scale is massive, and the capability is a magnitude (10 times) greater than what it was with the older hardware.

We often get excited about 20 percent performance leaps, so 10 times the performance is amazing. If this level of advancement keeps up, heck, we’ll be obsolete in a few years.
Universal robotics

You may think I’m joking on this last one, but one of the other Nvidia presenting at the show was Universal Robotics. This is the company bringing to market thinking robots that can respond to sensor-based events. In short, they can see and change their actions based on what they see. I’m hoping the eventual result is more like Robbie the Robot than Terminator, but I have my doubts. In any case, at the Nvidia conference, we once again saw major progress with regard to what you can do in the cloud, and even what machines will be able to do in the near-term future. Granted, they may be the only thing that is left of us in 3.5 billion years to say “oh crap” when the galaxies do collide.
And on that festive note, I’ll leave you to ponder our near, and far, future.

Source:http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-nvidias-kepler-chips-could-end-pcs-and-tablets-as-we-know-them/

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NVIDIA Announces GeForce GRID Cloud Gaming Platform

May 16th, 2012
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NVIDIA puts its head in the clouds
Today at the 2012 NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC), NVIDIA took the wraps off a new cloud gaming technology that promises to reduce latency and improve the quality of streaming gaming using the power of NVIDIA GPUs. Dubbed GeForce GRID, NVIDIA is offering the technology to online services like Gaikai and OTOY.

The goal of GRID is to bring the promise of “console quality” gaming to every device a user has. The term “console quality” is kind of important here as NVIDIA is trying desperately to not upset all the PC gamers that purchase high-margin GeForce products. The goal of GRID is pretty simple though and should be seen as an evolution of the online streaming gaming that we have covered in the past–like OnLive. Being able to play high quality games on your TV, your computer, your tablet or even your phone without the need for high-performance and power hungry graphics processors through streaming services is what many believe the future of gaming is all about.

GRID starts with the Kepler GPU – what NVIDIA is now dubbing the first “cloud GPU” – that has the capability to virtualize graphics processing while being power efficient. The inclusion of a hardware fixed-function video encoder is important as well as it will aid in the process of compressing images that are delivered over the Internet by the streaming gaming service.

This diagram shows us how the Kepler GPU handles and accelerates the processing required for online gaming services. On the server side, the necessary process for an image to find its way to the user is more than just a simple render to a frame buffer. In current cloud gaming scenarios the frame buffer would have to be copied to the main system memory, compressed on the CPU and then sent via the network connection. With NVIDIA’s GRID technology that capture and compression happens on the GPU memory and thus can be on its way to the gamer faster.

The results are H.264 streams that are compressed quickly and efficiently to be sent out over the network and return to the end user on whatever device they are using.

Continue reading our editorial on the new NVIDIA GeForce GRID cloud gaming technology!!

On the client side, GeForce GRID comes into play again to decompress the H.264 stream and then render the final image to be displayed on the device. While this will obviously work on the PC and laptop side of things, there are still questions on whether GRID technology is necessary on the consumer end of phones, tablets and even TVs. Will NVIDIA require Tegra-based tablets and smart phones in order to take advantage of the streaming services with GRID–and does that mean that we will see NVIDIA-powered TVs in the near future?

UPDATE: The answer is no, it does NOT require NVIDIA technology on the decode side and in fact NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsen Huang said “just about any decent H.264 decoder will work.”

The primary benefit of GeForce GRID technology is that it is supposed to lower the latency between rendered images and the time the user sees them–and how soon they can respond to them. The lower bar on this graph, provided by NVIDIA, represents what a typical user’s latency would be on a “console gaming system.” The times here are pretty vague, though the 100 ms game pipeline and the 66 ms display latency seem somewhat reasonable.

The middle bar represents the first generation of streaming gaming – including services like OnLive – that I have discussed (and berated) in the past. Total latency in this case has gone from 166 ms from game time to display time all the way up to 286 ms with addition of 30 ms of capture and encoding time, 75 ms of network latency and 15 ms of decode latency on the client side.

NVIDIA GRID aims to bring the total latency UNDER that of current generation consoles. You still have latencies for capture, network and decode, though they are noticeably lowered. Game pipeline time is cut in half thanks to the performance of Kepler GPUs, and with the GPUs ability to quickly pass information from the frame buffer to the encoders. Capture and encode has gone from 30 ms down to 10 ms with the fixed function NVENC (hardware video encoder) unit on the Kepler graphics units. Decode time is also decreased on the client side with NVIDIA technology and even network latency is reduced from 75 ms to 30 ms.

Honestly, the only timing reduction I have a problem with is the network latency–how NVIDIA plans to solve the problems of physics involved with network infrastructures needs to be proven. The idea of “estimations” or “predictions” can work with some game types better than others, but I think hardcore gamers are going to skeptical until proven otherwise. The only real answer is to build out more data centers to make sure there is one withint a reasonable distance to the consumer.

Source:http://www.pcper.com/reviews/General-Tech/GTC-2012-NVIDIA-Announces-GeForce-GRID-Cloud-Gaming-Platform

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AVADirect’s Clevo P270WM Gaming Notebook Now Packing the NVIDIA GTX 675M

April 3rd, 2012
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A leading custom computer manufacturer, announced that they are now selling the new Nvidia GTX 675M graphics processing unit. The GTX 675M is based off of the previous 580M graphics processing unit that Nvidia integrated in mobile platforms in the past year. They produced ground-breaking performance benchmarks, and reached a whole new level of capabilities that were not tapped by the graphics community, until now. The GTX 675M promises to breach the mobile performance barrier and leave less to be desired.
The GTX 675M provides an array of new features for enthusiasts and professionals to take advantage of:

NVIDIA 3D vision has always been featured in select models. Now, the P270WM notebook offered by AVADirect will have full support allowing enthusiasts to become fully immersed in the experience. NVIDIA 3DTV Play makes connecting an HDMI cable to the P270WM more simple than ever. Allowing AVADirect’s customers to display 3D content on supported HDTVs to include Blu-Ray playback, 3D photos, and favorite game titles! Nvidia Verde support, being excitingly new, will maximize the full power capability of the P270WM creating continuous performance and optimizations for various tasks.

One of the most unique features involves the Hardware Video Editing Acceleration, which combines high-definition video decode acceleration and post-processing to create stutter-free video with immense picture clarity, accurate color, and exact image scaling for real-time mastering of various projects. More importantly, NVIDIA Optimus is supported, to assist with conserving battery life, and supports the new PCI-Express 3.0 interface to deliver ground-breaking performance in a mobile platform, being the P270WM Gaming Notebook.

Coupled with support for the NVIDIA GTX 675M, the Clevo P270WM will have the ability to house four hard disks for a total of 4TB of mobile storage. This support will increasingly grow as hard disk manufacturers seek to increase the capacity of their notebook hard disks, thus assisting AVADirect with providing an even more unique, and truly custom product; available for enthusiasts and professional to take full advantage of. The P270WM has native support for three hard disks total, but upgrading to four will force removal of the optical drive bay.

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/AVADirects-Clevo-P270WM-Gaming-Notebook-Now-Packing-the-NVIDIA-GTX-675M/

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Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 vs. AMD Radeon HD 7970

March 31st, 2012
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Of the major rivalries in the technology industry, few get as heated as often as that of Nvidia and AMD. When it comes to releasing new graphics hardware, the two companies take no mercy: Every year (or thereabouts, if they don’t bother to follow the calendar) they trade off the title of “the most powerful video card in the world” for this price range or that price range, and frequently leave consumers confused by the options available to them.

This is certainly true with regards to the companies’ two recent flagship video cards: the AMD Radeon HD 7970, which came out toward the end of last year, and Nvidia’s just-released GeForce GTX 680. Both are single-GPU models at the top of their respective lines, utilizing all the latest video display technologies; both promise outstanding frame rates in the hottest 3D games; and both cost around $500. So if you’re upgrading your computer, or building one from scratch, how can you choose between them?

To give you a better idea of whether you should buy the 7970 or the GTX 680, we’ve compiled this comparison of the cards’ salient features. Along with each is our verdict about which card succeeds in that category. If you’re looking for powerful single-card graphics for your PC games, either is a fine way to go. But one of these cards excels in more areas, and is thus the ultimate choice for today—and we’ll tell you what it is at the end.

Gaming Performance

Let’s face it: Pretty much the only reason people ever drop $500 or more on a video card is because they want to play the latest games. And in that department, the two cards run pretty much neck and neck most of the time. In our real-world game benchmarks, the 7970 only came out definitively ahead in Aliens vs. Predator, at both 1,920 by 1,200 (59.2 frames per second, or fps, versus 52fps) and 2,560 by 1,600 (37.4fps versus 31.7fps); and the GTX 680 proved superior at everything else (including two AMD-branded titles at the same resolutions, DiRT 3 and Total War: Shogun 2). On our synthetic benchmarks, which measure a broader scope of performance features that don’t necessarily show up in games, the GTX 680 also came out ahead: In Futuremark’s 3DMark 11 it scored 3,151 to the 7970’s 2,754, and beat the AMD card on the Heaven Benchmark 3.0 at 1,920 by 1,200 (43.6fps versus 40.5fps). The 7970 just barely edged out the GTX 680 when Heaven was upped to 2,560 by 1,600 (29.3fps versus 28.9), however. As with so many things, a lot depends on the games you play, but—even though its leads weren’t always decisive—the Nvidia card proved itself the champ more often.

Price

If you can afford to buy either of these cards, clearly cash flow is not a problem for you at the moment. But that doesn’t mean price isn’t—or shouldn’t be—an issue: You undoubtedly want the best one you can get for the least amount of money. Right now, however, that’s not the 7970. It lists for $549, which is also the lowest price we found for one on Newegg. The GTX 680 lists for $499—and a number of those are available on Newegg for just that much.

Source:http://www.thinkdigit.com/Parts-Peripherals/Nvidia-GeForce-GTX-680-vs-AMD-Radeon_9157.html

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More cheap tablets this year

March 31st, 2012
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Consumers can expect Tegra 3-based tablet devices priced at $199 later this year according to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.

According to Huang, $199 tablets are feasible if companies remove features like expensive memory.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire device, which features just 8GB of storage and lacks a camera, sells for $199 in the U.S., and managed to gain 14 percent of the tablet market in its first quarter.

Huang is also disappointed with the Android operating system. “Android hasn’t developed as I’d hoped,” he said in an interview with the New York Times.

“For many people, though, work is still the primary reason to have a computer. They want Windows to work well, they want Outlook to work well. A tablet running Windows 8 with Tegra could be very nice.

Source:http://mybroadband.co.za/news/quick-news/46814-nvidia-ceo-more-cheap-tablets-this-year.html

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Nvidia Builds A Dream Machine

February 9th, 2012
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Steve Scott wants to build a supercomputer that can calculate 1 quintillion floating-point operations per ­second. That’s a one followed by 18 ­zeroes or, in computer speak, an exaflop. Such a machine would be a billion times faster than a MacBook Air and could design wildly efficient ­combustion engines, simulate the workings of an entire cell and model a clean-burning fusion reactor. With enough zeroes Steve Scott can change the world.

The reason no one has built an exa­scale computer yet is the electric bill. An exaflop machine using today’s standard x86 processors would draw 2 gigawatts of electricity, the maximum output of the Hoover Dam. The biggest supercomputer ever built handles 11 quadrillion flops (or petaflops, a 1 with 15 zeroes) and draws 13 megawatts, the juice of nine wind turbines. Scott, one of the world’s leading supercomputing engineers, sees a day coming when we can have computers a thousand times faster than that, without using that much more power.

The prospect has brought Scott, 45, to Nvidia ( NVDA – news – people ), the Santa Clara,Calif. company that is the world’s largest maker of graphics-processing units, or GPUs. Its incredibly complex circuit boards are prized by videogamers for their ability to render battlefield chaos and oozing zombies with stunning realism. Nvidia chips are also prized by the supercomputer community because they can handle six to eight times more operations per unit of energy than an Intel ( INTC – news – people ) chip. Lash together thousands of them and you get a power-sipping supercomputer.

Scott’s last job was as chief technology officer of supercomputer manufacturer Cray ( CRAY – news – people ). In the spring of 2009 Intel pulled out of a joint effort to build ­supercomputer processors with Cray. “I was definitely disappointed,” says Scott, but he doesn’t blame Intel. “The high-performance computing market just isn’t big enough to support the development of competitive processors.”

It’s a humbling admission for Scott, a 19-year veteran of Cray with a Ph.D. in computer architecture from the University of Wisconsin and 27 patents to his name. “Scott is at one of those interesting intersections,” Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang says. “As a computer architect he’s a geek at heart, and yet he really lives to ­understand customers and markets.”

Supercomputers are a little more than a third of the $8.6 billion market for ­high-performance computers, ­according to IDC, but they are a-fast-growing and highly profitable slice that confers great p.r. to hardware makers. Sales overall of high-performance computers will rise 56% to $13.4 billion in the next three years, according to IDC. While Nvidia doesn’t break out numbers for its supercomputer business, its overall professional solutions group is its most profitable, boasting 36.7% gross margins for the first nine months of 2011, compared to 21.1% for Nvidia’s GPU business.

Nvidia can keep growing in supercomputers by exploiting its energy-­efficient edge. Its chips have dozens of simple cores that tackle lots of repetitive computations at once. Supercomputer scientists have been pushing the idea of parallel computing for years. It’s more power-efficient than an Intel Core i5, which is built around two to four quick, versatile cores that compute one instruction at a time. Pairing Intel or AMD chips with Nvidia’s graphics chips in supercomputers (much as they are in personal computers) results in machines that are three times more efficient than ones that rely on CPUs alone.

Three of the world’s five fastest super­computers use Nvidia’s processors. In October the Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced an effort to build the world’s fastest supercomputer, which will use AMD Opteron chips and 18,000 of Nvidia’s graphics-processing units. When it is completed later this year, it might crank out up to 30 petaflops and use around 10 megawatts.

The Department of Energy has ­announced it would like a machine that can hit exascale speeds using just 20 megawatts of power. The same technology could be used to build machines able to do the work of today’s supercomputers on a much smaller power budget. “That would allow a small ­engineering group to do things that today can only be done by a rarefied few,” says Scott. He thinks we can hit that mark by the end of the

Source:http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2012/0227/technology-supercomputer-steve-scott-nvidia-builds-dream-machine.html

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Nvidia warns on Q4 Profits Thanks To HDD Shortage

January 27th, 2012
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If you’ve paid attention to quarterly earnings reports from the major computer OEMs, you’ve likely noticed that the hard drive shortage this fall had an impact, but not a disastrous one. Companies like Intel reported that manufacturer inventories were substantially affected as company’s held off on restocking to see what prices would do, but net sales only fell modestly.

The GPU market, on the other hand, seems to have taken a hit. Nvidia has stated that its Q4 results were hurt by the hard drive shortage, something AMD also mentioned in its Q4 results. We didn’t break it out initially — AMD’s overall GPU results were fairly decent — but in the wake of NV’s statements it’s worth revisiting.

The company has cut its profit forecast by ~12 percent, from $1.06B in sales for the quarter down to $950 million. The stated reasons are the aforementioned HDD shortage as well as “the Tegra 2 mobile business declined more rapidly than expected, ahead of devices based on the Tegra 3 processor ramping into production in the first quarter of calendar-year 2012.”

Both impacts are a bit surprising given NV’s previous guidance. During the company’s last conference call, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang indicated that he thought the HDD shortage situation would be a non-issue, while talking up momentum for Tegra 3 and Tegra 2. One point the CEO hammered several times throughout the call is that Tegra 3 had more design wins going into this quarter than Tegra 2 ever had. If that’s true, Tegra-related revenue will start to pick up again once more phones and tablets start shipping with the chip.

What Do Hard Drives And GPUs Have In Common?

The fact that an HDD shortage would impact NV’s GPU sales is testament to just how much of the industry is driven by integrated graphics. Ten years ago, when only rock-bottom systems shipped with integrated graphics, a discrete GPU was still standard in the majority of configurations. Today, GPUs are a value-added component. As a result, manufacturers hurt by rising HDD prices, compensated by shipping systems with integrated graphics.

The long-term discrete GPU attach rate has been stable for years, but the trend is one reason why NV has pumped so much money into driving products like Tesla and Tegra. The slide below shows the company’s changing revenue — note that “Q3 2012″ refers to Nvidia’s fiscal year. The calendar period referred to as the fourth quarter of 2011 is actually Nvidia’s Q4 2012.

The good news is that both of the factors that’ve hit NV’s revenue should ease off in the first quarter. We expect to see more Tegra 3 design wins announced at Mobile World Congress in late February, while the hard drive shortage will gradually improve throughout the year. We should also hear more about Kepler, and possibly NV’s “Tegra 3+” solution (think Tegra 3 on 28nm) in the weeks ahead.

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/Nvidia-warns-on-Q4-Profits-Thanks-To-HDD-Shortage/

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