NVIDIA nTeresting - 11 December 2009

In this Issue:

• 3D Blu-Ray is the next big thing in multimedia. Looks like NVIDIA is getting it right and others are getting it wrong.
• Intel had a busy week of antitrust news, mad shareholders and product cancellations. Making a GPU is hard to do. NVIDIA does it well.
• Notebooks equipped with NVIDIA ION and GeForce GPUs are still winning praise. Don't skimp on the GPU when you make your next purchase.
• The world's smallest, full HD computer on a chip is NVIDIA Tegra. Tegra-based products from Samsung and Microsoft are the stars of the show on Hexus.
• Tom Peterson uses a Fermi SLI system to achieve ‘net stardom. His 15 minutes are up.
• Dell built the world's most powerful mobile workstation around NVIDIA Quadro GPUs.
• Three new Quadro processors debuted at AutoDesk University.
• The film 2012 hits new visual heights with NVIDIA Quadro-based workstations.

How Blu Will You Be?

CES 2010 is coming fast, and 3D and Blu-Ray will be big news...especially when you combine the two. Everyone is getting ready for the upcoming 3D Blu-ray standard that the Blu-ray Disc Association has been working hard to complete. NVIDIA is leading the way.

"For now, NVIDIA remains the sole company that has the entire 3D family ready for consumers including the hardware (3D Vision glasses, displays) and software (Corel, Arcsoft, game developers) required."

NVIDIA has been on press tour showing GeForce GPUs hardware accelerating 1080p 3D Blu-ray playback on our GeForce GT 240 GPUs, with our 3D Vision active shutter glasses and Acer's new 1080p 3D monitors. It looks stunning!

"Watching the 3D Blu-ray movie using NVIDIA 3D Vision was just like watching a 3D movie at the theater."

"I was lucky enough to be one of the few people to see 3D Blu-ray in action and I must say, I was very impressed."

On a related note, AMD is talking up 3D Blu-Ray, too, but they smartly have not shown it to anyone yet. AMD is planning on showing passive polarized, line interleaved 3D monitors at CES 2010. Passive polarization is inferior to active shutter technology. Passive polarized solutions have two major drawbacks:

• They aren't 1080p, so you only get half resolution 540 lines.
• They have lots of ghosting/double image and the quality isn't that good

"This solution has one terrible side effect on the image itself - it halves the vertical resolution and gets us back in the time we played games at 640×480 resolution. Even worse, it makes 386 pixels screen height."

"...the low resolution this screen provides is simply a deal-breaker."

We are not alone in believing in shutter glasses as the best solution for 3D. Andrew Parsons, the Chairman of the U.S. Promotions Committee of the Blu-ray Disc Association said :

"Active glasses are the only way to get 1080p per eye. Passive [polarized] glasses are not as good."

You can't do 3D as an afterthought.

"AMD was really noisy about its (ATI's) support for this standard and it is quite clear that NVIDIA has much more experience with 3D stereo as its been playing and investing in it for quite a while."

Passive polarized is so 2004...

Larrabee Won't Be Anytime Soon..and More Mess

Last week was a busy one for Intel news. Reports swirled about one of the Intel antitrust investigations.

"The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is pressing ahead with efforts to build an antitrust case against Intel (INTC), the world's largest maker of semiconductors, according to an attorney at rival Advanced Micro Devices and other people who have been contacted as part of the investigation. The FTC inquiry goes beyond issues raised in a now-resolved clash with AMD and involves Intel's relationship with rival NVIDIA in the $12 billion market for graphics chips, which handle computerized images, the people say."

Fortune pointed to Intel's fight against NVIDIA ION as a reason for more legal wrangling.

"NVIDIA's ION chip is designed to work alongside the chip giant's Atom processor, but lately it's been priced out of the market by - you guessed it - Intel. All of this has piqued the interest of the Federal Trade Commission, which is looking into whether Intel has improperly used its power in the computer chip market to choke rivals."

Meanwhile, an Intel shareholder called for the bigwigs to fork over the dough for the AMD payout.

"An Intel Corp. investor, frustrated that the chip maker has been hit with $2.7 billion in fines and settlement payments, has filed suit in U.S. District Court in Delaware against the company and its top executives. Charles A. Gilman wants the court to force company executives, including Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini, to fork over money for the fines and payments so shareholders don't take a financial hit."

Then, Friday after the market closed, Intel let fly this little nugget:

"It looks like Intel's bid to become a major player in consumer graphics chips has ended in disaster - for now. The world's biggest chip maker has been working for years on Larrabee, a chip with dozens of cores for processing graphics. It was the company's major competitive thrust at NVIDIA and the graphics division of Advanced Micro Devices. But the company has canceled the consumer version of Larrabee..."

Making GPUs is hard.

"The fact that a company with Intel's technical prowess and financial resources has struggled so hard to succeed with parallel computing shows just how exceptionally difficult a challenge this is."

The GPU is the processing architecture of the future. Our customers are passionate about our products because they value innovation, our GeForce and ION brands, and the work we do with developers to make games work and look better. x86 is the old style computing architecture. The future is visual computing...on a GPU. In a free market, the best performing products will always win out.

NVIDIA Notebook GPUs=Awards

Word is out. You should not buy a PC -desktop, notebook or netbook, doesn't matter- with underpowered graphics capabilities. That is why notebooks equipped with NVIDIA GPUs continue their winning ways. An optimized PC is one that has the correct balance of CPU and GPU horsepower. PC manufacturers around the world are building optimized PCs and NVIDIA is taking the lead on educating consumers on how to configure their PCs to deliver the computing experience they desire.

Geek.com loves the NVIDIA ION-based HP 311:

"At $399 HP's Mini 311 is almost impossible to beat right now. It offers up a lot of graphics power, a very good battery life, and a nice design."

Men's Health in Germany likes ION, too:

"The graphics performance is the huge advantage of this device. It plays HD videos with a resolution of 1920 x 1080p without any problems. No other netbook with standard graphics units can manage that. The Mini 311 contains NVIDIA's graphics processor ION which gives the netbook a huge power push."

Tech Report Recommends the NVIDIA-powered Dell Studio 14z:

"With a starting price of $750, the Studio 14z most certainly qualifies as a budget notebook. The system feels a lot more mature and refined than a lot of the budget offerings we've seen lately, though. Dell's done a good job with the hardware, adopting a GeForce 9400M integrated graphics chipset that's a far more competent gamer than anything Intel has to offer."

TechWorld has named the NVIDIA ION-powered Lenovo S12 its product of the week:

"I've always thought that paying any price for a badly limited product was a bad deal. Because you can actually live with the S12, because it was the first and one of the most attractive netbooks with ION graphics, and because Lenovo just treated me to one of the best desserts I've had in years last night, the Lenovo S12 with NVIDIA Ion is my product of the week."

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. And don't forget that GeForce notebook GPUs offer graphics performance that is second to none, and ‘graphics plus' such as PhysX support for in-game physics, CUDA-support for GPU computing applications and downloadable drivers from the NVIDIA Verde driver program.

Tegra on Film

Hexus has posted two interviews with NVIDIA's Bea Longworth discussing the Microsoft Zune HD, Samsung YP-M1 and NVIDIA Tegra. If you have a handheld equipped with NVIDIA Tegra you can watch them anywhere you wanted in HD-over, and over and over again, for hours and hours.

NVIDIA Tegra, built from the ground up for mobility, battery life and entertainment, is the world's smallest, full HD computer on a chip. Smaller than a US dime, Tegra is the ideal choice for device manufacturers looking to design feature rich yet small and elegant portable devices for the always connected generation.

Handsome Tom Has a New Toy

Aspiring supermodel Tom Peterson was seen this week in a pic of his Fermi SLI rig!!!

"Here are some buzz-pictures of a two GF100 in SLI (and the guy with his thumb up is Tom Petersen, NVIDIA's director of technical marketing). GF100 is the codename for the first GeForce GPU based on the Fermi architecture."

Don't quit your day job, Tom.

Fermi is the world's first computational GPU architecture, with several world's firsts on the GPU. These take time to design and perfect. Fermi is an awesome graphics processor and we're confident that it will let us keep the performance crown. We will talk about the gaming side of Fermi very soon.

NVIDIA = ‘World's Most Powerful'

How to build a ‘world's most powerful' computer. Step one, call NVIDIA. That is the plan Oak Ridge Lab followed:

"If you had any doubt that cGPU movement is not real and that CPU is the only way to go for HPC, wake up and smell the coffee. Oak Ridge National Laboratories just announced that they will deploy NVIDIA Tesla cards based on Fermi architecture inside their next supercomputer system and perform a "warp drive" advancement in computing space. The future Fermi-powered supercomputer is going to be 10 times more powerful than the currently world's most powerful supercomputer."

And that plan worked for Dell too, as they launched the world's most powerful mobile workstation this week.

"The Dell Precision M6500 is also the first mobile workstation to offer the new NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800M graphics solution..."

If you want your computer to hit peak performance - regardless of if it fits in a room (Tesla), your hand (ION and Tegra) or on your lap (GeForce and Quadro) - equip it with an NVIDIA graphics processor.

New Quadros at Autodesk U

At Autodesk University this week NVIDIA launched new Quadro professional graphics solutions for desktop and mobile workstations, designed to boost productivity and enhance creativity of 3D design professionals running Autodesk applications. These new offerings include NVIDIA Quadro FX 380 LP low profile entry-level graphics solution and NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800M and Quadro FX 2800M mobile workstation solutions. These solutions are part of the hardware recommendations for AutoCAD, by Lynne Allen, Autodesk Evangelist.

The GPU That Destroyed Cities

In the new film 2012, a lot of stuff gets blow'd up real good. Two Hollywood film production studios relied extensively on NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions to create over 500 spectacular effects for "2012," the newest film from director Roland Emmerich that depicts in jaw-dropping detail the cataclysm of epic proportions that awaits the earth in 2012. Uncharted Territory and Scanline VFX utilized NVIDIA Quadro GPUs to deliver ground breaking (pun intended) visual effects in the blockbuster hit. Stephan Trojansky Visual Effects Supervisor-2012 for Scanline VFX discusses the project.