| NVIDIA nTeresting - 8 January 2010 |
| Written by NVIDIA - Brian Burke | ||
| Sunday, 10 January 2010 | ||
NVIDIA nTeresting - 8 January 2010In this Issue
ION=Best.of.2009.Yet more ‘year-end' accolades for the NVIDIA ION GPU. This time on Dvice. "The year dawned with the debut of the NVIDIA Ion platform, hailed as industry-changing tech at CES 2009. By the end of the year the platform had fulfilled those high expectations."
That is too bad for netbooks with out ION GPUs, as Tom's guide points out. "the weaker Atom processors paired with Ion managed to perform almost as well as the ultraportable did and in some cases better. The only limitation to these machines during our tests was the CPU itself, specifically the Atom. It almost seems like NVIDIA, with ION, is carrying the weaker CPU forward and helping to make an obviously weak netbook nearly as powerful as an ultraportable." But it is great news for Ion netbooks like the Asus 1201N, per Anandtech: "As far as Atom netbooks go, the ASUS Eee PC 1201N is currently my favorite of the bunch.... But without better IGPs in current CULV laptops, ION tips the scales more in the 1201N's favor. You get a thin and light netbook that excels at being a portable multimedia station." 3D Vision=Best.of.2009Not to be outdone by its ION brother, NVIDIA 3D Vision continued its impressive run on ‘of the year' awards, by adding Legit Reviews to its pile. "Legit Reviews was a little skeptical of the new technology and gave it a 30-day test drive before we posted our analysis. After 30 days of gaming in 3D we were changed forever and even after watching movies like Avatar in 3D it doesn't fully compare to gaming in 3D. We'll admit we are spoiled by getting to play with new technology like this, but not everything is this good." With IGN, Yahoo, BenchmarkReviews in the pile of ‘Best of' awards, that is not a bad haul. Optimus PrimedSneaky Rene Haas, the GM of the notebook group at NVIDIA, did a teaser for our upcoming Optimus technology on the NVIDIA blog. "NVIDIA Optimus technology works on notebook platforms with NVIDIA GPUs. It is unique to NVIDIA. It is seamless and transparent to the user. Its purpose is to optimize the mobile experience by letting the user get the performance of discrete graphics from a notebook while still delivering great battery life. Look for more details next month." After that, speculation ran rampant. Sorry, but you just have to wait from more info. The only details we are providing at this time are on the NVIDIA nTersect blog. Look for more details next month. Dell+Quadro = World's Fastest Mobile WorkstationWhen Dell set out to make the fastest mobile workstation ever, they knew they needed fast graphics...and fast workstation graphics means Quadro FX3800. "Dell's Precision M6500 mobile workstation is the fastest notebook available today from any source, with the fastest processor, graphics card, and memory." Quadro FX 3800 is ideal for demanding design professionals on the go and delivers the ultimate professional graphics for your 17" mobile workstation. But does it really? "The graphics system consists of the just-released NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800M adapter, with 1GB of dedicated RAM and a 650MHz internal clock -- the fastest currently available model of mobile graphics cards." It really does. With the M6500, you can have it all and take it with you when you go. Intel's New (Still Bad) IGP ReviewedReviews of the hotly anticipated Clarksdale and Arrandale platforms from Intel are trickling out. While they did manage to get more performance on the IGP front, the fact is the performance is still WAY below MCP79, not to mention discrete graphics. Intel is starting from a ridiculously low base performance. So "50% better" is still 3x-4x worse than even Atom+MCP79 - which is a generation older technology. "The new Westmere 32nm execution core runs a bit faster with less power and we hope to see better overclocking as we see BIOS maturation. Now for the love of God, please divorce Westmere cores from that piece of junk Intel calls a "Graphics Media Accelerator!" "Better Still, battery life didn't seem to take a hit even with the extra performance though high-end, high-res gaming was still a lesson in futility when working without a discrete graphics card. Overall, the chip was a welcome addition to the fold, but we got the feeling that the first wave was priced too high and offered too little of a performance increase on the gaming side to really warrant a wholehearted recommendation." Intel hasn't made progress on graphics--a bump up from ‘really, really bad' only got them up to ‘really bad.' And with GPU Computing on the rise, graphics is not just for gaming anymore. It is clear that graphics performance requirements will outpace the performance that Intel integrated graphics will deliver. AMD OpenCL+ Radeon 4XXX=BrokenSeems that our OpenCL leadership is showing. While people are happily using NVIDIA GPUs with Open CL, folks are having issues with AMD GPUS. "We're developing using openCL, and have one dev machine with an NVIDIA GTX 260, and another with an ATI 4870. . . I'm sorry to say we are getting approximately 5x the performance from the NVIDIA card, than from the ATI." Performance is so bad, Taylor adds, that his 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad processor outperforms the Radeon "by a factor of two." AMD later said that Radeon HD4XXX owners are out of luck for OpenCL: "This is entirely dependent on how you coded the kernel and what OpenCL features you are using. There are known performance issues for HD4XXX series of cards on OpenCL and there is currently no plan to focus exclusively on improving performance for that family. The HD4XXX series was not designed for OpenCL whereas the HD5XXX series was. There will be performance improvements on this series because of improvements in the HD5XXX series, so it will get better, but it is not our focus." Too bad Radeon owners, OpenCL applications are not for you. NVIDIA is the pioneering force behind using the GPU for computing. Our C with CUDA extensions was an inspiration for OpenCL and other programming interfaces.
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