nTeresting - January 27, 2012

In this Issue

·         GPUs and CUDA make supercomputing more affordable and greener.

·         3D Vision is the best 3D gaming solution.

·         Android gains on Apple, with a little help from Tegra.

·         CUDA has a new release.

Greener, More Affordable Supercomputing

A big consumer for supercomputing power is science and research.

"Pretty much every area of science is driven today by theory, experiment and simulation," said Steve Scott, chief technology officer of the Tesla business unit at NVIDIA. "Scientists use machines to run a virtual experience to understand the world around us."

NVIDIA’s CUDA allows you to use the parallel processing power of GPUs for more than just graphics. You can use it in general computing.

“A promising solution comes from a company well known among PC gamers. About a decade ago, NVIDIA created graphics processing units (GPUs) that focus upon running many tasks efficiently — a necessity for creating the rich graphics of a video or game playing on a computer.”

This makes supercomputing more affordable.

"When you can build a petascale system for $100,000, it starts becoming very affordable for even small departments in a university or even small groups in private industry," Scott said.

It is also well documented that GPUs are making supercomputing more eco-friendly.

“The energy savings can be huge when a GPU uses almost 8 times less energy than a CPU per computer calculation or instruction.”

And with our new ARM-based processors, the footprint needed to harness the power CUDA is becoming even smaller. CUDA on ARM will help supercomputers become ever smaller and and even greener than today.

3D Vision is Superior

NVIDIA 3D Vision technology is a combination of NVIDIA GeForce GPUs, specialized 3D glasses, software, and certified displays, and projectors that deliver an immersive 3D experience on your desktop or notebook PC. It is the undisputed champ of 3D gaming. How do we know? PC Welt says so.

“3D fans should unhesitatingly buy it: stereoscopic gaming on the PC was never was as good as it is with NVIDIA 3D Vision 2!”

It is a better experience than the competition can offer.

“While I couldn't stomach much of Arkham City in (AMD’s) HD3D, I spent some time playing on the 3D Vision 2 setup. As in BF3, enabling stereo 3D added to the experience.”

Tech Report did a story pitting 3D Vision 2 vs. AMD HD3D. They tested the new 27-inch ASUS 3DV display vs. the 23-inch Samsung HD3D display.

“To the user, 3D Vision's software implementation is remarkably seamless and consistent.”

Unlike other 3D solutions, 3D Vision just works.

“Inconsistent game compatibility is still a potential issue. In our experience, NVIDIA is far and away the winner on that front.”

AMD has a faux-“open strategy”. ‘Open 3D initiative’ is AMD’s code for ‘we have no 3D strategy so we will let third parties do all the work, control all the quality and support customers with updates and profiles’. The net result is the customer’s experience suffers.

“AMD, meanwhile, suffers from a fragmented hardware ecosystem and patchy support for even major titles. Battlefield 3 still has visual bugs with the latest driver release, and Arkham City lacks proper support of any kind right now. More worryingly, we encountered a rendering bug in Portal 2, a game that's been out for over nine months and really ought to work without issues at this point.”

AMD’s disarray in 3D may be the consequence of a lack of strategy or the result of having insufficient resources to develop the technology they need. If the latter is the case, the problem may resurface in other areas and affect their ability to compete in the future.

NVIDIA 3D Vision technology supports the richest array of 3D content available, including more than 650 3D games, Blu-ray 3D movies, 3D photos and streaming Web video.

Android is Gaining

Apple has the lion’s share of the tablet market, but Android is closing the gap.

“Tablets powered by the Google operating system swelled to 39% of the market in the fourth quarter of 2011, says Strategy Analytics. That’s up from 29% in the year-earlier period. “

This groundswell may be driven by lots of cool Tegra tablets.

“Tegra has dominated Android tablets, but there are some new areas where it should gain market share in 2012. Next year we expect to see Tegra gain share in smart TVs, cars, and baseband processors.”

Designs like the Asus Eee Transformer Prime will help extend our strong momentum.

“I don’t have sales figures, but based on buzz and reader commentary, the Asus Transformer was a pretty popular Android tablet in 2011. It’s a new year though and Asus has kicked things up a notch at CES with the Transformer Prime and NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 processor. The Tegra 3 is a quad-core chip with a fifth core for light tasks, which helps battery life. And there are a dozen GPU cores as well, which makes for the best gaming on a tablet I’ve seen yet.”

See it in this video.

CUDA is New Again

This week we had the release of Parallel Nsight 2.1. This new release not only supports CUDA 4.1, but also brings a wealth of new features and design refinements to CUDA development:

“NVIDIA today announced a major new update to the companies CUDA parallel computing platform. This new version features three key enhancements that make parallel programing with GPUs easier, more accessible and faster for computational biologists, chemists, physicists, geophysicists, other researchers, and engineers to advance their simulations and research by using GPUs.”

This new release makes it easier to accelerate scientific research with GPUs. Key features include:

·         Re-designed Visual Profiler with automated performance analysis and expert guidance

·         New LLVM-based compiler helps your applications run up to 10% faster

·         1000+ new imaging and signal processing functions in the NPP library

You can get a glimpse of the new user experience in this short video.