July 2009

7/20/09

NVIDIA News Brief - 7/20/09 @ 8:18 am - By: MikeC - Source: Email
Tesla Saves Money
The National Institute of Meteorological Research (NIMR) conducts R&D on weather prediction technologies and ways to reduce earthquake damage in line with its objective of minimizing loss caused by weather conditions and tremors.
Its work involves complex simulations using massive amounts of data which, in turn, requires a supercomputing environment delivering high performance and stability. NIMR has enhanced its R&D outcome through the adoption of Tesla, the GPU-based supercomputing solution, and CUDA architecture.
Researcher Yong-hee Lee of NIMR said, "Adoption of the supercomputing system based on NVIDIA Tesla and CUDA gave a boost to our work on the WRF model. We are currently applying Tesla and CUDA to ultra short-term forecasting. The drawbacks of CPU-based supercomputing solutions are huge costs, the need for extensive space, and high electricity usage. NVIDIA CUDA-based solution has substantially resolved these problems."
Notebook Benchmarks Cause Cyber Chaos
A little controversy started when NVIDIA blasted out their Alienware M17x reviewer’s guide benchmarks to press. Some web sites did not like the drivers and CPUs that were in the notebook it was compared too. People did not realize that NVIDIA picked the best CPU available for the competing notebook and that the drivers they used were the same one consumers are pointed to and that come loaded on the system from the factory. The benchmark results provided by NVIDIA accurately reflect the consumer's experience. After an explanation, the situation became clear.
"We went and asked questions around, and the answer we got was quite surprising: Crossfire was enabled, but the drivers in question don't come with game profiles that NVIDIA used. This is a showstopper, folks. You paid $2,300 to buy a notebook with two 4870 cards in Crossfire, and you're sure as heck that you'll play games."
NVIDIA has worked diligently over the past year to modularize its driver architecture and develop a unified driver install package that will not only work with laptops from all manufacturers but also maintain all of their specific model customizations such as hotkeys and suspend and resume functionality. The explosive growth in notebooks makes not supporting driver updates increasingly painful for consumers.
How important is it to provide your customers with notebook drivers? Very important according to AnandTech.
"In fact, drivers can be so critical that with NVIDIA now providing quarterly notebook driver releases, it's pretty much impossible for us to even consider recommending anything else for a gaming notebook until the other GPU vendors follow suit."
This drives home the point that providing notebook drivers direct to consumers is a huge advantage for NVIDIA. A gaming notebook with multiple GPUs that has no way to update drivers will not function correctly with any game that ships after the driver because you will not have the necessary driver profiles.
Then the M17x reviews hit.
"...ridiculously powerful NVIDIA graphics card deliver a gaming punch like no other."
“...The real star here is the SLI configuration of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280M. With two of these powerful GPUs working ogether, we got 168 frames per second at 1,920x1,200 in Unreal Tournament 3, making this our gaming laptop performance leader by a wide margin."
In the end, reviews on CNET and PC Magazine echoed NVIDIA's benchmark results and their world's fastest laptop claim.

CUDA Applications: People Like Them
Websites around the world are taking a closer look at the many applications that are available for consumers that use the GPU to do their processing. BearEyes in China chimed in first.
"NVIDIA CUDA's contribution to video is well recognized. From Badaboom and TMPGEnc (video converters), to vReveal and TotalMedia Theatre (video optimizers) and PowerDirector 7.0 (video editor), CUDA is pervasive in each aspect of the video field and Badaboom was just the beginning of CUDA's power being realized."
Tom's Hardware in Italy looked at Badaboom, the media converter that uses the GPU to accelerate transcoding.
"You can expect an acceleration of at least 30 % passing the CPU to the GPU. We want to take a closer look at Badaboom, for this time. We wanted to show the skeptics the advantages of CUDA for transcoding video and show that the software is very simple to use.
The latest issue of the French magazine PC Update (print) did an extensive review of all the available trancoding solutions in the market.
"From an encoding speed perspective, the use of the GPU is really more powerful than a large CPU and saves lots of time... without hesitation our choice is Badaboom. It's image quality is good, it offers enough encoding parameters and costs only 25 euros."
In the UK, Bit-tech has admitted they are biased in an article titled "I'm a GPGPU snob when it comes to video transcoding."
"Since my PC houses a still very capable GeForce 8800 Ultra, I decided it'd be worth having another look at Badaboom, the CUDA compatible GPGPU video transcoder. It's come a long way since we first saw it and for the most part it works great - a 30 minute episode of animation or TV takes 3-5 minutes to do in the morning. By the time I'm out the shower it's ready to zip to the iPod and I'm out the door."
Parallel programming is THE next big thing for the world of computing because it delivers dramatic acceleration for a variety of applications. NVIDIA has a great roster of applications that run on CUDA architecture. In fact, video is the next killer application for the GPU, and a number of new video applications are able to tap into the computing power of the GPU thanks to CUDA.
Quadro Sweeps FirePro
F-Center.ru in Russia has an article that compares the Quadro 10th generation to the AMD FirePro. This very detailed review includes tests for SPECviewperf, 3ds max, Autocad, Maya, Solidworks, Lightwave, Cinebench, and 3D Mark Vantage. NVIDIA won every test. Every one.
"Secondly, thanks to optimized drivers, NVIDIA managed to make even its inexpensive new generation Quadro FX series cards in some cases perform at the level of AMD high-end solutions. We can see this situation for example in 3ds max, AutoCAD and Solidworks. By the way, do not forget that NVIDIA is ready to offer to engineers and 3D modelers, using 3ds max and AutoCAD, dedicated performance drivers enhancing performance even further."
Quadro products are created with professional applications in mind. NVIDIA provides a full range of robust professional solutions, spanning from graphics boards, visual computing systems, to software development tools that have become the standard for professional visualization environments.
Whether you're a designer developing the latest automobile, a 3D artist working on the next blockbuster film, or a financial trader on Wall Street, NVIDIA Quadro solutions deliver unmatched power and performance from a rock-solid stable platform.
ION Continues to Impress
The NVIDIA ION-based ASRock NetTop ION 330 AMCP7A-ION made the review rounds last week with impressive results. Benchmark Reviews gave it 9.1 out of 10.
"The ION GeForce 9400 GPU easily trumps the graphics performance of Intel's integrated graphics chipset inside an Eee PC, and even some notebook systems are kept at bay, which is no surprise... The ASRock NetTop ION 330 AMCP7A-ION could very well be the perfect start towards building the ultimate HTPC, which is why it receives our Golden Tachometer Award."
Driver Heaven awarded the ASRock Nettop 330 their Silver Award.
"ASRock have created a very desirable product in the form of their ION/ATOM based NetTop."
NVIDIA sees the CPU and GPU together as co-processors. By combining a ION GPU with an Atom processor, NVIDIA is able to deliver premium PC performance and features in low-cost, small form factor PCs.
3D Vision is Wanted
MSNBC is running a story on "9 Gadgets We Covet." They want NVIDIA 3D Vision.
"And I definitely like the idea of making my video games even more immersive. And gaming doesn't get more immersive than when you're playing with NVIDIA's new GeForce 3D Vision Kit — a set of glasses and gadgetry that makes you see your games in honest-to-goodness stereoscopic 3-D."

NVIDIA News Brief - 7/12/09 @ 3:28 pm - By: MikeC - Source: Email

Better Graphics = More Battery Life

While it may seem interesting that a GPU can actually extend battery life, CNET News investigated.

"After extensive use of two versions (the January 2008 original and October 2008 refresh) of the MacBook Air, my conclusion is that a decent graphics chip can--over the long haul--not only deliver the expected boost in performance but, surprisingly, contribute to better battery life while, even more surprisingly, bringing down the heat to acceptable levels."

That is the power of co-processing. Using the right tool for the job is more efficient than forcing an ill-equipped processor to do tasks it is not good at.

MaximumPC Checks Out vReveal

vReveal is a software application that cleans up bad video. It runs fastest if you use the GPU as a co-processor and offload the work from the CPU using NVIDIA CUDA technology. In the August '09 issue on page 89, they reported the following.

"The vReveal app is able to clean up bad video far better than what you can do with consumer video editing packages and it does it very quickly, too, thanks to its GPU support. The app uses NVIDIA's CUDA platform to tap the GPU's wealth of parallel processors to process video far faster than you could with any current CPU."

NVIDIA sees the CPU and GPU working together as co-processors. GPU Computing continues to have transformative effect by enabling massive parallelism for the masses.

Tegra in the WSJ and Financial Times

The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times had articles on the NVIDIA Tegra processor last week. First, the Wall Street Journal.

"Less widely understood is that Tegra also has dedicated circuitry for encoding and decoding high-definition video. A general-purpose microprocessor in a laptop doesn't handle those video chores as well, and the battery drains quickly.
That's not just NVIDIA's opinion. Adobe Systems, whose Flash software format is used by YouTube and other popular Web sites, also notes the shortcomings of early netbooks that mainly used Intel's Atom microprocessor or other x86 chips to handle video. 'Performance was poor if you played a lot of Flash content,' says Anup Murarka, Adobe's director of technology strategy and partner development."

In the Financial Times story, analysts were upbeat.

"Analysts were enthusiastic about Tegra after NVIDIA's analyst day last week. Those at Thomas Weisel Partners described it as the most compelling ARM-based netbook/smartbook processor currently in the market."

At Computex, NVIDIA announced a collaboration with Adobe as part of the Open Screen Project. This project optimizes and enhances Adobe Flash Player, a key component of the Adobe Flash Platform, to leverage GPU video and graphics acceleration on mobile phones, portable devices and systems including Tegra-based handsets, netbooks and tablets.

Flash is the visual Internet. More than 80% of Internet Web pages include Flash animations or video. When the Flash Player leverages the visual computing power of the GPU in Tegra, consumers get a rich, desktop-class Web experience on a wide range of devices.

NVIDIA Has GPU Computing Leadership

Waters Magazine is one of the key publications for financial technology professionals worldwide. They completed an in-depth case study on NVIDIA Tesla.

Moreover, Tyc says that the fact that CUDA is tied to NVIDIA hardware is not an insurmountable problem. "There are no major differences between the two languages, so porting an application from CUDA to OpenCL doesn't seem like a huge task to achieve."
Connor expects AMD to make inroads into their market share this year. Tyc also remains hopeful. "We would like AMD to come out with something interesting because we don't want to be locked in with NVIDIA. For now though, it is the only vendor providing stable development tools for GPUs," he says.

NVIDIA is the pioneering force behind using the GPU for computing. Their C with CUDA extensions were an inspiration for OpenCL and other programming interfaces. With C and Fortran language support and drivers for APIs including OpenCL and DirectX Compute available from NVIDIA, GPU computing is now mainstream.

3D Visionary Likes 3D Vision

Lenny Lipton is a 3D pioneer and a well-known author, filmmaker and stereoscopic vision system inventor. MacVideo interviewed him last week and he talks about NVIDIA 3D Vision.

EVGA Folding Team to #8

Folding@home is a distributed computing project that studies protein folding and misfolding. Accurate simulations of protein folding and misfolding enable the scientific community to better understand the development of many diseases, including sickle-cell disease (drepanocytosis), Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, mad cow disease, cancer, Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis, and other diseases.

The EVGA folding team has rocketed up the folding stat charts by using NVIDIA GPUs to run folding@home software. Teams have been folding since 2001, but EVGA has only been folding for about a year and they are already the #8 best producers ever. Congratulations EVGA folding team!

Off to See the Blizzard

BlizzCon is a celebration of the Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo franchises and the communities that surround them. This two-day event will contain Q&A panels featuring Blizzard Entertainment developers, social events for players and developers to meet one another, and hands-on gameplay featuring favorite Blizzard Entertainment games, all running on NVIDIA GPU technologies.

A Blizzcon ticket is a hard one to get, but NVIDIA wants to help. Buy any qualifying NVIDIA GeForce graphics card between July 1, 2009 and August 1, 2009 and receive an entry code for a chance to win an all expenses paid trip to Blizzcon 2009 for you and a guest. The entire trip is valued up to $2400 USD! The same entry code is also good for one free digital download of the complete World of Warcraft Classic with unrestricted 30-day access to character classes, cities, quests, chat, and other features.

The Force and the Crimson to GTC

What do Lucasfilm and Harvard University have in common? They're both icons for excellence set to headline the GPU Technology Conference this fall. Richard Kerris, the CTO of Lucasfilm and Hanspeter Pfister, the computing visionary and the head of NVIDIA's CUDA Center for Excellence at Harvard University, will join NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang in keynoting the GPU Technology Conference.

The inaugural GPU Technology Conference will take place September 30 to October 2, 2009. The event will focus on how developers, engineers, and researchers are using the GPU to solve the world's most important computing challenges. The conference will encompass three simultaneous events -- the Emerging Companies Summit, the GPU Developer Summit, and the NVIDIA Research Summit.

NVIDIA News Brief - 7/05/09 @ 12:03 pm - By: MikeC - Source: Email

ION Puts the 'Co' in Co-Processing

NVIDIA see's the CPU and GPU working together as co-processors. Intel Atom is a solid CPU because of its low power footprint and highly-capable processing ability. A GeForce 9400-based PC with an Atom CPU delivers a premium PC experience to a whole new category of PC. Pocket-Lint.com wrote a piece on ION explaining what it is, what it brings to the market, and why consumers should care.

"For the very first time these high definition capabilities, from video playback to editing and encoding will now be possible on an affordable computer – all thanks to the 16 core offering of the ION chip pairing and at 10 times the [processing] power of the Atom processor. Also advanced graphical game play with highly intense computer games that need that processing power is possible on these devices, extending the usefulness of the netbook beyond just browsing the Internet and light office work."

CNET wrote about the upcoming ION-powered Samsung Netbook.

"On Monday, NVIDIA confirmed that Samsung will bring out a Netbook based on the graphics chipmaker's ION chipset, another design that breaks the Netbook mold."

ION Videos

Videos that focused on ION appeared on Hot Hardware and Slash Gear in the US and The Gadget Show in the UK. The Zotac ION motherboard won Benchmark Reviews Golden Tachometer Award, while PC Welt in Germany gave it an award for price and an award for innovation.

Laptop used the following to describe the ION-powered Lenovo S12.

"The good news is that the performance looks pretty stellar...”

Recently NVIDIA announced over 20 new ION-based products. They are excited about the broad adoption of ION by many of their partners.

CUDA Creates a Digital Divide

CNET is seeing a new digital divide - one that is caused by the performance difference seen in GPU-powered applications and non GPU-powered applications.

"It seems to me that such dramatic performance differences create a new (and less socially significant) kind of 'digital divide.' As more applications learn to take advantage of GPU co-processing, the practical advantages of GPU-equipped systems will eventually become overwhelming."

So what should you do?

"Personally, I no longer recommend the purchase of computers without GPUs. The lack of a GPU is what dooms most Netbooks to premature obsolescence. Long before the usual lifespan of three or four years has passed, GPU-less Netbooks will be perceived as useless even by the least demanding users."

Tom’s Hardware Italy recently showed the effects CUDA can have on the right software.

"There is no doubt that CUDA offers a significant advantage, even with the less powerful card. After this analysis, there is another sure thing: the increase in performance that we measured are only the tip of the iceberg, and the even better news is that many users can now benefit from a significant increase in performance at a small price."

EliteBastards points out that one area that greatly benefits from the power of the GPU is transcoding files for use on different devices.

"...speaking of GPU transcoding we have to make mention of how impressive NVIDIA's CUDA capabilities are in this application..."

HPCWire: "NVIDIA Owns GPU Computing"

Hamburg, Germany last week hosted the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC). In their podcast from the show Michael Feldman, editor of HPCWire and Addison Snell, VP and general manager of Tabor Research discussed how GPU Computing was the talk of the show floor.

They commented that it would be hard for anyone to claim that AMD Firestream has any momentum whatsoever in the HPC space when compared to the support seen at the show for Tesla and CUDA.

ComputerWorld also recently did a story on how the GPU is changing supercomputing.

"What's helping the low end (of the Top500 supercomputer list) is the increasing use of GPUs (graphics processing unit), which cost less than CPUs (central processing unit) and are a good fit for simulations, modeling other high-performance uses."

Autodesk Supports CUDA

Autodesk announced that it has increased the performance of the latest release of Autodesk Moldflow Insight 2010, part of its software suite for plastics injection molding, by further leveraging cutting-edge GPU technology from NVIDIA.

NVIDIA's Chief Scientist--The European Tour 2009*

Last week Bill Dally was in tour in Europe to share his vision for the future of the GPU. Read his interviews at MuyComputers (Spain), Hardware.fr and Clubic (French) and HWupgrade (Italian).