NVIDIA nTeresting Newsletter - 3 August 2012

In This Issue

· You can watch the Olympics from almost anywhere, thanks to GPUs.

· Windows 8 passes a major milestone, gets RTMed.

· The most recent Steam survey reinforces that GeForce = gaming.

· Tegra-based OUYA console gets a delivery partner in OnLive.

· GPU-based supercomputers make ice cream even yummier.

The Olympics Go Mobile

2012 may be the first "mobile Olympics" because so many people are expected to watch the games on portable devices. Just four years ago, the iPhone was one year old, the iPad hadn't been released yet, and Android was in its infancy.

This year, hundreds of millions of viewers may watch the games on their mobile device. The challenge of serving up high quality, digital video - live - to so many devices is enormous.

How will it be done? GPUs, of course!

Elemental Technologies, of Portland, OR, will handle encoding/transcoding duties to stream live or archived video to nearly any type of device. They expect to serve as many as one billion people in 70 countries throughout North America, Latin America and Europe.

Elemental uses NVIDIA GPUs to convert video three times faster, using two-thirds less power, than with CPUs alone.

Major Windows 8 Milestone is in the Rearview Mirror

Microsoft announced that Windows 8 has been RTMed.
"Today, I am excited to announce that Windows 8 has been released to manufacturing (RTM)! This means we've completed the product development and testing of the product and have started handing off the final code to our OEM partners. They can now begin preparing new Windows 8 PCs and devices they'll introduce starting with General Availability."

So what is next for Windows 8?

"Today marks an important milestone in the Windows 8 project. The Windows 8 team is proud to share with you that a short while ago we started releasing Windows 8 to PC OEM and manufacturing partners. This means our next milestone will be the availability of exciting new models of PCs loaded with Windows 8 and online availability of Windows 8 on October 26, 2012."

What does Windows 8 mean for GPUs?

"With Windows 8 we set out to enable all applications to have the beautiful and high-performance graphics enabled by modern graphics hardware.

Windows 8 promises to be an exciting new way of interacting with your PC. To learn more about Windows 8 and graphics hardware check out this detailed blog post authored by Rob Copeland the group program manager on our Graphics at Microsoft.

Full Steam Ahead With GeForce

Stream is a major online game platform and lets you instantly access your favorite games. Over 1,100 games are available to purchase, download, and play from any computer. One of the other things Steam does is survey users systems to see what hardware gamers are using to play games. NVIDIA takes the lion's share of gaming GPUs.

"On the graphics front, 47% of Steam users are running an NVIDIA GPU."

And GeForce wins the popularity contest.

"If we drill down into the graphics numbers, we see that NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 is the most popular GPU of the DirectX 11 generation. Its 10% share is notably higher than that of the next closest rival, the GeForce GTX 460, which sits at just under 6%. There's only one AMD GPU in the top six: the Radeon HD 5770, which sits in third place at a little less than 5%.

Most shameful stat of them all? 11% of Steam users are stuck with Intel integrated graphics. n00bs.

Cloudy With a Chance of OUYA

A few weeks ago we told you about OUYA, the $99 console that got a boost on the Kickstarter project page. And now they have a delivery partner.

"Game streaming service OnLive has recently confirmed that they are partnering with the wildly successful Kickstarter project Ouya, the $99 console and the streaming service will be available at launch. The Ouya project has been attracting a huge amount of attention from the gaming world, and OnLive has now confirmed that it will be involved with Ouya.

At the heart of the OUYA console will be a NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM, along with 8GB of internal storage

Cool Science: Improving Ice Cream with a Supercomputer

If you thought ice cream was just a simple pleasure, think again.

It's actually so complicated that it takes a supercomputer to simulate the interactions between its many constituent substances.

That's why scientists at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, are using a supercomputer to research - at the molecular level - how to improve the quality of the world's favorite frozen concoction.

The team is using a 10-cabinet Cray XK6 supercomputer packed with 936 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and an equivalent number of x86 CPUs to crunch the data. Their research is applicable to a large number of soft materials, including motor oil, paint, mayonnaise, yogurt, and shampoo.