Nvidia's archive
Can 3D Keep Intel on Top?
Intel this week announced a $12 million investment into a visual computing research program focused on using three-dimensional imaging for entertainment, data analysis, medical imaging and scientific research. The Intel Visual Computing Institute is located at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, and will receive the $12 million over the next five years. The investment is […]
Cisco’s Chambers Sees the End of Business Machines
When it comes to the way people interact with technology, the lines between business and personal have been erased, according to Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers. Speaking on his third-quarter earnings conference call yesterday, Chambers said:
I carry the same two devices in my business life and my personal life. A PDA and my Flip. […]
Nvidia Touts New GPU Supercomputer
Nvidia today unveiled a system for high-performance computing that uses four graphics processors to provide 1 teraflop of computing power, and multiple units can be easily combined to form a GPU-based computing cluster. The system competes with CPU-based clusters that employ Intel or AMD chips, but offers faster performance on some tasks while using less […]
Intel Going Mobile With Moorestown, Pushing Nehalem Everywhere
Intel made a series of announcements last night that push its low-power Atom processor closer to the smartphone side of the mobile computing spectrum. It announced more details of its Moorestown platform aimed at mobile Internet devices. The platform is coming in 2010 and includes an Atom processor that consumes 10x less power when idle; […]
Hybrid Computers Will Hide in the Cloud
Heterogeneous computing, where hardware vendors mix a variety of processors (graphics processors, CPUs, embedded chips or DSPs) on a server to increase energy efficiency and processing speed, will become a reality in the data center in the next decade, says an IBM executive. Such arrangements increase complexity and can cause headaches for developers and customers, […]
Can Intel Thrive in a Post x86 World?
The way we use computers is changing, as device makers and users emphasize mobility and incredible graphics. I’ve argued that these trends signal the end of x86 computing, but what I’ve ignored is Intel’s drive to bring its brand of x86 computing to these markets, which are traditionally based on other instruction sets. If it […]
TI Wants to Use DSPs for Low-power Computing
Texas Instruments is looking to hop on the trend of using non x86 processors in the data center, according to Kathy Brown, general manager of the company’s wireless base station infrastructure business. Last night over dinner, Brown said the wireless chip powerhouse was trying to build a software framework that would enable researchers to run […]
Smartphones and Netbooks: Closer Than Kissing Cousins
You know how you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover? Well, when it comes to smartphones and netbooks, a semiconductor research firm is predicting that in fact the cover — or rather, the device casing — may soon be one of the only ways to tell the two apart. Portelligent has analyzed […]
Nvidia’s $99 Computer Still Needs a Carrier
At the Mobile World Congress trade show that wrapped up yesterday in Barcelona, the mobile and the PC world may have collided, but carriers still have the upper hand. Nvidia, for example, said it will use its Tegra chipset and Windows CE to create a mobile computing platform that could cost as little as […]
Intel/Nvidia Catfight Is About More Than IP
Intel on Monday night filed suit to stop graphics chipmaker Nvidia from tying its graphics chips to certain future Intel CPUs. The suit filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery alleges that Nvidia doesn’t have the right to integrate a Nvida GPU with future Intel processors, such as the high-end Core i7 chip code-named Nehalem, […]
Trends to Watch For at Mobile World Congress
Next week, while most Americans are lounging about in honor of President’s Day, the people responsible for your mobile phones, netbooks and cellular networks will converge on Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress trade show. Check back on Monday for clues as to what type of devices you’ll be toting in your pockets and purses […]
Intel Launches New Atom to Beat Down ION
Intel has started shipping a new Atom processor aimed at netbooks a bit earlier than anticipated, PCWorld reported last night. The latest Atom (dubbed N280 for those who like that sort of thing) is notable because it also contains a graphics core called the GN40, which will allow the Atom to play back HD […]
Microsoft Smartphone Confirmed?
A few days months ago, Stacey reported on the rumors that Microsoft is building a Microsoft-branded smartphone based on Nvidia’s Tegra chipset. It seems those rumors might be true. Doug Freedman, chip analyst with research firm Broadpoint AmTech, wrote in a note to his clients this morning (emphasis mine):
we have been able to identify NVDA’s […]
Intel Follows the Crowd With Integrated Chips
Today Intel detailed its plans to stop focusing on horsepower and think about the whole car. The chipmaker has decided to stop pushing Gigahertz (basically, how fast your computer can think), and start integrating radios in one package, or on a single chip — a form factor known as a System on a Chip (SoC).
The […]
Nvidia Wants To Get Your Graphics on the Go
The desktop computer is in decline, hurt by netbooks and a grim economy. But as demand for desktops and even notebooks falls, so do Nvidia’s revenues. To keep growing sales, Nvidia is counting on scientific computing, mobility and visual computing. It’s proven it can grow sales on the scientific side (revenue for that division grew […]
With ION, Nvidia Covers the Mobile Market
I just got back from Nvidia’s Austin office, where I saw a demo PC running the ION platform that marries a GeForce 9400 GPU with the more powerful of the Intel Atom processors. ION seemed like a sweet deal when Nvidia launched it in December, and seems even better now that I know it doesn’t add […]
StatShot: GPU Shipments Nosedive
The drop-off in demand for personal computers is hitting the graphics chip market hard. Jon Peddie Research has issued a report showing that total GPU shipments fell to 72.4 million in the fourth quarter — down 2 percent year-over-year and 35 percent from the third to the fourth quarter. This is the first time fourth-quarter […]
Netbook Is Nothing But a Cheap PC
You know that saying – if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck then it must be a duck. Same goes for portable personal computers — whether you call them net books or laptops. Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia agrees. “Netbooks are not a new category, instead they are just cheap PCs,” he said […]
Graphic Evidence That AMD Paid Too Much for ATI
Qualcomm said today it has purchased AMD’s handheld graphics unit (acquired during AMD’s $5.4 billion acquisition of graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies) for $65 million. The deal shows that AMD is betting big on full-performance machines, from servers to laptops — rejecting its rival Intel’s move into the netbook and smartphone world. It also bolsters the […]
Nvidia Cuts Sales Estimates by Half
Today, graphics chipmaker Nvidia said it expects its fourth-quarter sales to come in 40-50 percent lower than the $897.7 million it posted in the third quarter. That puts its revenue estimate between $448.9 million and $538.6 million — a huge drop from last year’s record-setting fourth-quarter sales of $1.2 billion. In its apparent desire to […]
SC08: The New Data Center Conference?
The folks in charge of the SC 08 conference being held in Austin, Texas, this week have trumpeted the phenomenal growth of the supercomputing show, with attendance up by almost 10 percent from the previous year, but I’m beginning to doubt that high-performance computing is driving this growth as much as the broad changes in the data center world. As Ori Aruj, CEO of switch chipmaker Dune Networks, told me when I asked why he was at the show, “This is no longer about high-performance computing and research. This is now a data center conference.”
I’m inclined to agree with him, as there are a lot of networking and storage vendors here with really large and visible booths that seem outsized compared with the HPC market opportunity. There are also attendees here from companies that have little or no business in supercomputing, such as Dune Networks, Isilon or Rackable Systems. Some of the 219 industry exhibitors (as opposed to the 118 research exhibitors) can’t possibly make enough in the HPC market to justify such a large presence at the show, although a product manager at Ciena, which makes networking gear, pointed out that HPC installations can act as an effective advertisement for other business.
So here among the 10,764 attendees at the show one might be forgiven for occasionally forgetting that Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia and a host of other consumer brands aren’t here to talk about basic computing — but supercomputing.
SC08: Michael Dell Details Everyday Supercomputing
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Inc., in a speech at the SC08 Conference in Austin, Texas, today highlighted the democratization of supercomputing thanks to the use of standards and off-the-shelf parts. That democratization, he noted, blurs the line between high-performance computing and corporate computing, which powers services such as Facebook and Microsoft’s cloud computing service (both of which are built on Dell hardware, of course).
It also means high-performance computers will be found everywhere — even on your desktop. In his speech Dell gave a boost to Nvidia and its use of GPUs in supercomputers by announcing that Dell would add 1 teraflop to its personal HPC workstations through a Nvidia Telsa card. The idea of a supercomputer on your desktop is a big theme at the show this year, with vendors ranging from Cray to SiCortex highlighting their high-performance workstations, and vendors such as Microsoft pushing new HPC software.
Moving far beyond the desktop, Dell also announced the creation of a 96-teraflop supercomputing test bed called Project Hyperion in partnership with Lawrence Livermore Laboratories and several other vendors. A teraflop is a measure of how many floating point operations per second a computer can handle. The fastest computer today is running at more than 1 petaflop, a thousand times the power of a teraflop. The goal of the Hyperion testbed is to figure out file systems, cluster management software and networking technology in a peta-scale environment. That environment is getting closer as more power can now be crammed onto fewer machines than ever before.
As an example of the increasing power, Dell pointed to server density improvements thanks to the use of blade servers and the ability to place as many multicore processors on them as possible. He gave the example of a Dell cluster built in 2003 that used x86 processors on 1,250 servers to create a 9.8-teraflop computer. In 2008 it took 155 servers to build a 10.7-teraflop computer.
As compute power has become democratized and cheaper — Dell also noted that five years ago $1 million could buy someone 2 teraflops of computing vs. 25 teraflops today — the world is finding more uses for it. That means that in addition to the traditional scientific uses such as climate change research and gene sequencing, companies use HPC to create animated films and to virtually build products before they are ever manufactured. It also means HPC is a bright spot amid a tumbling economy.
Nvidia Machine Takes a Spot on the Top Supercomputer List
For the first time ever, a supercomputer using Nvidia chips has achieved a spot on the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The Nvidia-containing machine is ranked No. 29 on the list that was released late Friday; it’s a cluster built by NEC and Sun Microsystems that uses chips from Nvidia, Intel and AMD. As Nvidia and AMD, which bought graphics chipmaker ATI in 2005, push graphics processors for scientific computing, this is a big milestone. The rest of the list was pretty anticlimactic, with IBM’s Roadrunner computer narrowly beating Cray’s Jaguar computer to stay on top of the twice-annual Top 500 list. Both machines are petaflop computers, meaning they can achieve a quadrillion floating point operations a second — a record that was broken by Roadrunner back in June.
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