NVIDIA nTeresting News 12-March-2010

In this Issue:

• NVIDIA Optimus technology is a game changer. People love using two GPUs and extending battery life at the same time.
• NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told Fortune that he is ready to let the judge decide if NVIDIA or Intel is in the right.
• 3D Vision is an awesome technology. Metro 2033 uses it to the max.
• PC Pro weighs the merits of the CPU in comparison to the GPU. The GPU is gaining stature.
• With the NVIDIA Tesla Bio Workbench scientists can get their research done economically....and on the fast.

Optimus Continues Receive Accolades

NVIDIA Optimus technology optimizes the mobile experience by letting the user get the performance of discrete graphics from a notebook while still delivering great battery life.

"NVIDIA Optimus solution delivers twice the battery life and this new Switchable Graphics technology will bring a revolution to PC graphics for laptops." - Betanews (Korea)

Optimus accomplishes this by automatically and seamlessly selecting the right graphics processor for the job between an NVIDIA discrete GPU or an Intel integrated GPU.

"The Optimus works intelligently in the background and automatically switches between the integrated and discrete GPU depending on the application launched. There are no keys to press and the magic happens automatically, allowing users to get an longer battery life even if they need better graphics performance from time to time." - HyperGear (Philippians)

People love it because it just works.

"NVIDIA Optimus takes GPU changing tech out of the hands of the user making notebooks with integrated and discrete GPUs much easier to use." -APC Magazine (Australia)

Optimus is a key new feature of the Next Generation ION GPU...so what should you do if you are looking for a netbook?

"Consider postponing a netbook purchase until NVIDIA ION 2 graphics are rolled out. ION 2 will greatly aid netbook performance, letting you switch between integrated and discreet graphics" -PC Magazine (US)

Is Optimus really a big deal?

"And thanks to NVIDIA's new Optimus technology, you can have your cake and eat it too." - PC Magazine (US)

Really?

"NVIDIA Optimus adds sun to the landscape." Xataka (Spain)

Jen-Hsun: Not Looking to Settle

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was interviewed by Fortune Magazine about the two lawsuits NVIDIA is involved with against Intel. Check out the video here.

Intel has a well documented history of legal woos. On Nov. 12 2009, Intel paid $1.25 billion to rival AMD to drop antitrust and patent lawsuits as well as complaints filed with agencies, including the FTC. On May 14, 2009 the European Commission fined Intel a record $1.45 billion for antitrust actions. In February 2008 Intel paid Transmeta $150 million to settle a patent infringement suit. On June 5, 2008 Korea fined Intel $26 million dollars for antitrust volitions. In March 2005, Japan's FTC ruled that Intel had engaged in anti-competitive behavior.

3D Vision Will Blow Your Mind

Oles Shishkovstov, Chief Technical Officer from 4A Engine, spoke with PC Games Hardware on the technical implementation of DX11, PhysX and 3D Vision in his new game Metro 2033. He thinks 3D Vision is a game changer:

PCGH: If you had to advertise the visuals of Metro 2033 what would you mention? Can you list some very modern and advanced rendering techniques that you renderer utilizes (HDR, SSAO, Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Tone Mapping and other post effects...)? Don't be afraid to use technical terms.

Oles Shishkovstov: First and foremost: 3D Vision. The game was developed in 3D and for 3D. That's the only game developed that way as far as I know. Playing the game under DX11 in 3D Stereo is just mind-blowing, it's much, much more amazing than watching Avatar in IMAX.

Is the CPU Dead?

This is the question that PC Pro explored. He used the NVIDIA ION GPU as an example of what a PC may look like in the future.

"...here at PC Pro we've been impressed by the graphical capabilities of low-power Ion-based systems, including the recommended Samsung N510 netbook and the Asus Eee Box EB1501 nettop. In the future, it's easy to imagine that in this segment of the market the CPU might become almost irrelevant, with graphics hardware providing a more significant differentiation between models."

CPUs are an important component of the PC. However, too often PCs ship with insufficient graphics processing power and the result is an unbalanced PC that can't run the applications you want. For the best experience, you should buy a PC with the right balance of CPU/GPU horsepower... an Optimized PC.

"Move up to the high end and you find cards such as the NVIDIA GTX 295 integrating a massive 480 cores. It's clear that by exploiting these devices developers can harness a level of parallel processing horsepower that a CPU can't hope to compete with.

Ultimately, though, whatever ends up on the desktop, there's no doubt that GPU computing has changed the game forever."

Whether you're using the latest operating systems, viewing or editing photos, finding directions, playing a game, or watching a Blu-ray movie, a balanced PC with an NVIDIA GeForce GPU yields the best experience.

Tesla Drives New Computational Economies

Bio-IT World provides breaking news, analysis, and opinion on enabling technologies that drive biomedical research and drug development. They looked at the Tesla Bio Workbench, a web community which enables scientists to push the boundaries of biological research by turning a standard PC into a "computational laboratory" capable of running complex bioscience codes in fields such as drug discovery and DNA sequencing more than 10-20 times faster through the use of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. Tesla Bio Workbench consists of:

"The number of algorithms that are available to run on GPUs is rather impressive. On the sequence analysis side, BLASTP, HMMer, Smith-Waterman, MUMmerGPU, ClustalW, MEME, and Infernal are all available for download. For those interested in docking, algorithms such as autodock and piper have shown impressive speedups of 10 to 16 times in tests.

Molecular Dynamics fans will find plenty to like at the bioworkbench web site, with AMBER, GROMACS, HOOMD, LAMMPS and NAMD all demonstrating significant speedups. VMD is available to animate and analyze large biomolecular systems at up to 100 times faster than on a standard CPU. TeraChem is a general-purpose quantum chemistry package that has been shown to demonstrate as much as a 50 times speedup.

It is wonderful that these programs are available for the price of a download! Perhaps the best part about accelerating with GPUs and CUDA is the remarkably low cost of entry. A $50 graphics card is all that you need to get into the game, and scalability is only limited by the size of your pocketbook. The Tesla card and servers hold the high end with what NVIDIA claims is the world's first Teraflop processor."

Get your mad scientist on at the NVIDIA Tesla Bio Workbench website.