"GPU-accelerated clusters are moving quickly from the kick-the-tires stage into production systems, and NVIDIA has positioned itself as the principal driver for this emerging high performance computing segment. The company's Tesla S1070 hardware, along with the CUDA computing environment, are starting to deliver real results for commercial HPC workloads."

"By using the hundreds of processing units (that usually compute colors and pixels) to process non-graphical data, companies can achieve supercomputer-performance at a fraction of the price and in a much smaller footprint and energy requirements."

"Application developers are finding more and better ways to use the massively parallel compute abilities of the GPU for everyday computing."

"Super Loiloscope is not professional editing software, [however] it possesses a user-friendly interface that unleashes the creativity of the users, not to mention the CUDA acceleration, that although not essential to use the software, brings a huge boost to the performance."

"Wow. So, basically, I'll believe this phantom tech when I see it. Maybe the shots they've put up are just mock-ups, but that would be really irresponsible when you're selling your product based on image quality. I'd love to be proven wrong, and their idea of salvaging information from multiple frames (thus requiring CUDA) is good, but I think they're making promises they can't keep."

"But SimHD rolled with it and just recently sent us this little reel showing off the tech in HD. And it looks like I was wrong. The video looks better at full size, by the way. I guess I underestimated the power of parallel processing. CUDA allows them to refine the image in real time without stressing the CPU too hard. Now, it's worth noting that CUDA is obviously limited to NVIDIA cards, so if you’re a Radeon man, you're out of luck."

NVIDIA Windows 7 Drivers = Good

Windows 7 Release candidate is out now and so are NVIDIA's BETA drivers. AnandTech thinks NVIDIA's driver is close.

"...they pretty much nailed their first full driver set for Windows 7 with all features working."

"Overall, we can comfortably say that Windows 7 is the best version of the Windows operating system to date. As we said in our beta 1 review, Windows 7 has the stability of Windows XP and the look and feel of Windows Vista. The operating system responds quickly and without hesitation and generally feels like it works nicely."

3D Vision Will Make Resident Evil 5 Scarier

NVIDIA 3D Vision has been praised by press because it makes gaming more immersive.

"In Left 4 Dead, we had the sense of a much more immersive depth of field than you get from standard 3D games on a 2D display."

"Resident Evil 5 sounds like a good fit for 3D."

"When you purchase the 3D Vision Glasses Kit, you will be provided with a package that includes some pretty cool-looking glasses,..."

Jen-Hsun on Film, Part II

Part two of Jen-Hsun's interview with Forbes is online. It covers Apple and other topics.

More Good News in Tough Economic Times

Jon Peddie Research has put out their market share data, and it includes some welcomed good news.

"The net result was Intel and NVIDIA were the big winners, breaking an eight year seasonal trend that dictated negative sales from Q4 to Q1. This year Q1 shipments were up."

Congratulations EVGA, Best E-tail Seller!

Retail Vision was held recently and NVIDIA partner EVGA took home a major award. EVGA took home the e-tail Best-Seller award in the Video Cards category for its GeForce 8800 GT PCI Express.

Walt Mossberg has released his very high profile Buyers Guide this week. He loves graphics.

"Graphics: In the new operating systems, adequate graphics chips will be more important than ever, because the computers will offload some tasks typically performed by the main processor onto the graphics chip. So, if possible, spring for what's called a discrete graphics processor, which has its own memory. If you can't afford this, look for an integrated graphics chip, which shares your main memory, that's as powerful as possible. One example is the NVIDIA 9400."

To get the best experience with today's visual computing applications you need to make sure your PC has the right mix of CPU/GPU horsepower.

SLI Obliterates Crossfire

Overclockersclub.com posted a lengthy performance comparison of NVIDIA SLI vs ATI Crossfire systems. They tested 18 games and 2 synthetic benchmarks on 16 graphics cards from the GeForce GTX 260 vs. Radeon HD 4850 up to the GeForce GTX 295 vs. Radeon 4870 x2. NVIDIA SLI mowed them down, winning 36 out of 40 tests in Quad SLI vs. Quad CrossFire, and 37 out of 40 in the other categories.

"I learned that SLI is the more mature multi-GPU solution currently. In each of the three classes, the NVIDIA technology and their video cards lost no more than four times out of 40 tests, with all things being equal - this being in the quad GPU class. Each of the other classes delivered a 37 to 3 margin of victory for team Green."

It is a complete, well thought-out solution with safe guards built in to ensure the end user has the best experience possible. It is supported by a complete ecosystem of software, applications GPUs, MCPs and third party components. It has been this way for years.

CUDA Applications Continue to Roll Out

Super LoiloScope, SimHD, vReveal all hit earlier this month, and on April 20th, Nero Move it was introduced. In Move it, NVIDIA CUDA technology dramatically reduces the time it takes to transfer video files to portable devices, reducing the length of time to perform such tasks as customizing an HD video for an iPod, from hours to minutes.

"The free CUDA update lets users transcode H.264 video with GeForce 8 or better graphics processors, which significantly reduces encoding times (NVIDIA claims a five-fold improvement) and lowers CPU utilization."

"But it's the SimHD upscaling feature that most impressed me. I can say I saw a noticeable improvement on the DVDs I tried."

"The idea is simple: GPUs can increase conversion speed by a lot (5x to 10x?) and ISV (Independent Software Vendors) who don't support GPU compute would be left in the dust. That sounds like a good reason to jump in, no?"

"We now have seven CUDA video applications for consumers [Editor note: two new ones make nine]. If you've always been interested in CUDA, it won't come as a surprise that GPU accelerated or CUDA-based applications can be several or hundreds of times faster than those based on the CPU."

PhysX is Snowballing

Sega is also licensing NVIDIA APEX technology to accelerate PhysX content authoring speed and improve PhysX effects quality. Of course, customers can enjoy existing PhysX titles today such as Mirror’s Edge, Sacred 2, Cryostasis, Unreal Tournament 3, GRAW2, Warmonger, Crazy Machines 2 and Metal Knight Zero. NVIDIA PhysX is currently the only legitimate shipping, GPU-accelerated physics effects technology for PC gaming today. PhysX technology is included in over 100 titles across PCs, XBOX 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and the iPhone.

Mercury Research Market Share Data Says NVIDIA Up

According to Mercury Research, overall graphics shipments were up 3.8% from Q4 of 2008, which is attributed to improved desktop sales. Overall, NVIDIA had a very slight overall market share gain of 0.3%, while AMD/ATI lost over 1% share.

In total discrete, standalone graphics (which includes desktop and mobile), NVIDIA made solid gains with an increase of nearly 3%, putting their total market share at 66%. For desktop discrete only, the share gains were 5.4% over Q4, resulting in a market share of nearly 67%.

Heterogeneous Computing on CNET

CNET recently did a story on heterogeneous computing and how graphics chips will be tapped to accelerate more tasks in upcoming operating systems from Apple and Microsoft.

"Graphics chips aren't just for games anymore. The trend toward general-purpose graphics processing is defined by an acronym that doesn't exactly roll off he tongue: GPGPU. But the essence of General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units is pretty simple: use the scores--or even hundreds in higher-end chips--of processing cores inside GPUs to speed tasks that, in some cases, would be done much less efficiently by the central processing unit (CPU)."

Tesla in the News

Austin-American Statesman did a story on Tesla this week.

"Tesla is NVIDIA's bold move to stretch its business well beyond graphics. With considerable software development and some hardware tweaking, NVIDIA can turn advanced graphics chips into powerful number-crunching engines that can attack some of the same parallel-processing problems that cluster computers and even low-end supercomputers go after."

BNP Paribas plans to migrate homegrown applications for Monte Carlo modeling to GPUs, which will reduce the time it takes to execute the huge numbers of calculations necessary.

"BNP Paribas is now migrating to GPUs because it has moved to a more advanced Monte Carlo model over the last three years and found that this model was testing the limits of the clusters of CPU-based machines that it has used until now. In essence, the problem arises from the fact that its new model uses simple, so-called vanilla, options as outside input to enable it to price exotic options more accurately, in that it takes real-world pricing into account more precisely."

Jen-Hsun on Film

Forbes has a video spotlight of NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on the future of NVIDIA.

Dell Studio One 19

Dell launched the Studio One 19, an all-in-one touch screen PC with NVIDIA GeForce 9200 or 9400 GPU.

Intel to the Naughty List?

On the heels of the first NVIDIA ION-based systems comes news that Intel may have been engaged in unfair business practices.

"Intel Corp., the world's biggest computer-chip maker, faces a fine by the European Union and a ban on rebates on sales to computer makers, said two people who have seen a draft decision in an eight-year-old antitrust case."

According to Bloomberg:

"In a similar case, Intel was fined about $25 million in 2008 by South Korea’s antitrust regulator for allegedly offering discounts to prevent customers from buying AMD products. Intel is also under investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for alleged unfair business practices. AMD has a related civil lawsuit pending against Intel in federal court in Delaware."

The New York Times thinks the fine may set a new record.

"Some legal experts speculate that Intel's fine could reach about a billion euros, or $1.3 billion."

"Intel has been engaged in a lengthy, multifaceted battle with antitrust authorities across the globe. In Japan, Intel agreed in a consent decree in 2005 to modify its practices, without admitting wrongdoing. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission is also investigating."