| NVIDIA nTeresting 30 January 2010 |
| Written by NVIDIA - Brian Burke | ||
| Saturday, 30 January 2010 | ||
NVIDIA nTeresting 30 January 2010In this issue
Tablets are here, and they're here to stayInterest in tablets skyrocketed to an all-time high this past week as Apple announced its iPad tablet. Apple is one of our long-time technology partners, and they use NVIDIA technology in products such as the MacBook, iMac, and Apple TV line. The iPad reaffirms our vision that 2010 is the year of the tablet. The right technology, medium and killer applications are all finally coming together to make this new generation of tablets massively appealing. Powering many new tablets coming this year, NVIDIA Tegra is incomparable when it comes to delivering the complete web, HD video playback and sharing, uncompromised multimedia and mobile gaming, and amazing battery life. Tablets powered by Tegra support full Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for stutter-free viewing, provide access to Flash-based sites such as Hulu and Netflix, and run the full versions of popular mobile games such as Farmville. Tegra also provides at least 16 hours of HD video playback and 140 hours of audio playback on tablet devices so the power cord can be left at home. Ars Technica praised Tegra's capabilities over other tablets, commenting "I can easily imagine an Android-based tablet that's designed by HTC, powered by NVIDIA's Tegra 2, does 1080p video (vs. iPad's 720p maximum resolution), and has much better 3D gaming performance, but at the cost of two hours of battery life. And if someone made such a thing, I would rather buy it than an iPad. I'd even pay over $500 for it." Looking at a slew of upcoming tablets, Mashables said, "Made by Compal, the 7-inch Android 2.0 tablet runs on the new, high-powered next-generation Tegra 2 processor NVIDIA announced at CES. With this chip, a device can support 1080p video playback, yet retain startlingly good battery life." Hexus looked at many new Tegra-powered tablets, commenting, "CES 2010 saw the launch of NVIDIA's Tegra 2... and here's where they reckon Tegra 2 will make a real difference." World's Fastest NetbookNot all netbooks are created equal. PC Magazine named the ASUS 1201N Eee PC "the fastest netbook in the market" thanks to its ION GPU and dual-core Atom CPU. That performance translated to faster video encoding, the ability to play games like WoW and Spore "without restrictions", and flawless HD video. "1080p video-tested at various bit rates and formats-played back beautifully on the system and over the HDMI interface (with a Samsung LN55A950 LED Display). And all of my testing was done at full screen." How do ION netbooks compare with CULV and AMD Neo CPUs? You may be surprised. "Even netbooks that run on an AMD Neo processor (like the MSI U210) or an Intel Pentium CULV (Toshiba Satellite T115-S1105)-processors considered speedier than a single core Atom-fell short of the ASUS 1201N in terms of performance." Intel wants you to think that netbooks are weak, to force consumers to spend more money on bigger, faster, full-featured notebooks. But not everyone needs a bigger, faster, more expensive notebook. If all you want is a small and affordable PC that can handle all your basic tasks plus mainstream games, Flash video, and video conversion, ION netbooks are ideal. Get Hands-On with Parallel Programming
So you're hearing about all the momentum behind GPGPU, and you're itching to try it out and write your first parallel application, but it would be great if you had the advice and guidance of someone that knew this stuff inside out. Well, you just got lucky! Both David and Wen-mei have been teaching parallel programming ever since we released the CUDA architecture. The hands-on experience they have gained from delivering countless lectures and working closely with students provides an insight to up and coming developers that no other book can deliver. Amazon logged more than 1000 orders for the book in the first few hours of it being on sale and leading lights in academia have already endorsed the text:
"David Kirk and Wen-mei Hwu are pioneers in this increasingly important field, and their insights are invaluable and fascinating. This book will be the standard reference for years to come." - Hanspeter Pfister, Harvard University Interested in teaching yourself CUDA C or OpenCL? Go grab yourself a copy of Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach here GPUs Help Virginia Tech win Best Paper award
Shortening design cycles and getting products to market faster is critical to pretty much every type of company in the world, especially those involved in chip design, and we should know J "Speeding up simulation of complex hardware models is extremely important for semiconductor electronics industry to producer newer and newer products in shorter times, thus improving the quality of computing and consumer electronics products faster. If such models can be simulated 10 times faster, then if validating a model took 10 days in the past, now it would take one day. This is why faster simulation performance probably attracted the attention of the ASP-DAC '10 awards committee." Shukla said.
More info on their work is in their press release Gotta say, I love Muvee - I've had endless fun cobbling together all my favorite pics and videos, overlaying some cool tunes and then sitting back to watch it all render out into a final movie, super-fast of course thanks to a CUDA-enabled GeForce GPU in my system.
Turns out it's not just the videophiles that are having fun with Muvee - we learned this week that gamers are using the software to put together mashups of their gameplay to showcase their "mad skills" - and the ones I've seen have done a pretty nice job of it too. |
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