NVIDA nTeresting News

In this Issue:

• The tech industry converged on Germany for CeBit and Embedded World.
• Epic and NVIDIA unveiled support for PhysX, APEX and 3D Vision for the Unreal Engine 3 at Game Developers Conference.
• GeForce.com is playing host to the Crysis 2 demo.
• GPUs and Einstein@home helped scientists discover a new pulsar.

German Has Tradeshows Times Two
Germany was bustling this week with two major tradeshows: CeBit and Embedded World.

CeBit, hosted at the Deutsche Messe AG in Hannover, Germany from March 1-5. CeBIT is the world's largest trade fair showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions for home and work environments.

NVIDIA took the opportunity to show Europe that computing is evolving. It's no longer just about your desktop experience; it's about having a supercharged core inside every device you use. NVIDIA graphics processors were shown powering Super Phones, Tablets and PCs. We also showed off a new version of our 3D Vision glasses.

"NVIDIA is apparently answering the wishes of its customers and will bring a revised version of their 3D glasses to the market. They will be ready Mid-2011. The main motivation for the revision is a cost reduction."

NVIDIA also showed the highly-anticipated game Crysis 2 running on a variety of systems, including this 3D Vision-enabled notebook.

NVIDIA was also the only third party company on hand at the Microsoft press conference for the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate where we showed off GPU-acceleration of the world's most popular computing activity, surfing the web.

One of the many Tegra 2-powered Super tablets creating a stir at CeBit was the Asus eee Pad Slider

"The tablet uses a 10.1-inch diagonal screen with a resolution of 1280x800 pixels, coupled to NVIDIA Tegra 2 system-on-a-chip. The operating system is Android Honeycomb, and it has 16 to 32 Gbytes of flash memory (depending on the version) along with the option to integrate a 3G module. As you can see from the pictures the keyboard slides from the bottom of the tablet, and it can be extracted whenever the user needs it."

Embedded World Exhibition and Conference is the world's most important event for the embedded community, and was held March 1-3 in Nuremberg, Germany.

NVIDIA partner CompuLab used Embedded World as a stage to introduce Trim-Slice, a miniature desktop computer powered by NVIDIA Tegra 2. With 0.6" thick all-metal housing, Trim-Slice is CompuLab's smallest and most energy-efficient computer to-date.

MSC Vertriebs GmbH showed off the MSC Q7-NT2, its first ARMprocessor-based Qseven module. The compact module consumes only about 5 watts and is specified for an extended ambient temperature range from -40°C to +85°C.

"Designed primarily for digital signage use, the Q7-NT2 is an impressive piece of kit - and, given that the Qseven standard has only supported the ARM architecture since an update in September, another example of ARM's growing encroachment on Intel's turf."

You may not have been aware of NVIDIA in the embedded space before, but in fact we've been established in this sector for some time. Companies have been using tailored versions of our technology for applications such as gaming machines, medical imaging, automotive and industrial automation for some time. Now our low power, high performance system-on-chip strategy has come together under the NVIDIA Tegra brand and we're using Embedded World 2011 to demonstrate how Tegra's capabilities are presenting exciting opportunities for breaking new ground in embedded applications.

Unreal Engine 3 Rocks GDC
Not to be left out, San Francisco played host to the Games Developer Conference. This was the perfect venue to announce that Epic has added support for PhysX, APEX and 3D Vision Technologies to the Unreal Engine 3.

"And it would seem that their partnership has been quite a fruitful one, given the fact that all parties who license the aforementioned engine will get out of the box support for all of the aforementioned technologies.

In other words, NVIDIA's making it possible for gamers to get even more visually-impressive games, a lot faster, which is quite a commendable effort (especially if said gamers use the company's graphics cards, of course)."

Unreal Engine 3 even runs on NVIDIA Tegra 2 system on a chip.

NVIDIA And Crysis 2
Want to try Crysis 2? Grab the demo on GeForce.com. Featuring two maps, two modes and four weapons, the Crysis 2 multiplayer PC demo is guaranteed to provide hours of first-person shooter fun before the full game is released on March 22^nd. You might even win a Maingear SHIFT Superstock PC jam-packed with top-end technology that won't even break a sweat while playing Crysis 2 with all options enabled at the highest resolutions.

It's a New Pulsar, Einstein
Thanks to our work with the volunteer distributed computing project https://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/, NVIDIA GPUs were involved in a recent pulsar discovery - the pulsar PSR J1952+2630. A research paper revealing details of the discovery can be found here. A new version of the Einstein@Home software has also just been released and has been optimized to deliver a 20X increase in performance on CUDA-enabled GPUs.

Nearly half of these volunteer PCs already have superfast graphics processing units (GPUs) in addition to central processing units (CPUs). GPUs, originally designed for rendering highly sophisticated video game graphics, can now be programmed to process information between 10 and 20 times faster than CPUs. "It's like we've got about another a half million functioning machines," on the network, Allen says.

GPUs now deliver the lion's share of the overall computational power of the project - eventually they expect GPUs to deliver 90%, with CPUs contributing the rest.