| NVIDIA nTerresting News: 05 November 2010 |
| Written by NVIDIA - Brian Burke | |
| Friday, 05 November 2010 | |
NVIDIA nTerresting News: 05 November 2010In this Issue:
FASTEST. SUPERCOMPUTER. EVER Big news for GPU Computing, CUDA and Tesla. "The trend behind GPGPU i.e. General Purpose GPU computing is shaping up as an avalanche, rather than just an appearing trend." The Tianhe-1A supercomputer, housed at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops. As measured against the current Top500 list, that makes it the fastest in the world! "I don't know of another system that is going to be anywhere near the performance and the power of this machine" in China, said Jack Dongarra, a supercomputer expert on the Oak Ridge research staff who is a professor at the University of Tennessee and recently inspected the system in Tianjin last week. "It is quite impressive." Tianhe-1A epitomizes modern heterogeneous computing by coupling massively parallel GPUs with multi-core CPUs, enabling significant achievements in performance, size and power. The system uses 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 CPUs; it would require more than 50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance using CPUs alone. "The use of GPUs in high performance computing is on the rise. Once seen in PCs used largely for multimedia and gaming, GPU-based computing has become more popular among researchers for its ability to offer raw computing power. While CPU are critical to a PC for their ability to interact with the different computing elements such as memory and disk drives, GPUs can perform specialized tasks especially related to graphics and visual computations that working in tandem with CPUs can speed up computing." This is the Optimized PC concept, but bigger! "What may be the world's fastest computer, unveiled in China Thursday, is a little bit like your Mac. That's because it relies on two very different kinds of processors to get its work done: graphical processing units and central processing units." Besides being fast, GPU computing is also green. A 2.507 petaflop system built entirely with CPUs would consume more than 12 megawatts. Thanks to the use of GPUs in a heterogeneous computing environment, Tianhe-1A consumes only 4.04 megawatts, making it 3 times more power efficient -- the difference in power consumption is enough to provide electricity to over 5000 homes for a year. 3D Vision Is Much Better NVIDIA unveiled 3D Vision technology almost 2-years ago at CES 2009, the 3D Vision ecosystem has grown substantially. Now competitors are popping up everywhere. But when experts look at the competing technology it is clear that NVIDIA has a big lead in stereoscopic 3D. The latest entry is a passive solution from MSI that uses Intel integrated graphics. "... of 3D effect you will get from such a low-tech solution, passive glasses being well known for their limited 3D viewing angles. This is only part of the problem since the integrated Intel graphics solution, chosen by MSI, is like adding insult to injury, limiting your 3D experience to movies, 3D gaming not being possible with such low performance graphics."
Here is some good advice. "If you're really interested in 3D do yourself a favor and go with an active shutter glasses, discrete graphics packing notebook, the MSI FR600 3D being just a quick solution to capitalize on the whole 3D hype." But be forewarned, all active shutter solutions are not created equal. "Unfortunately after a few hours spent in making sure everything is right - reinstalling video drivers with the latest Catalyst 10.10c, the latest iZ3D Driver 1.12 build 4016, trying with different cables and cable adapters there was still not luck in making things work the way they should. The closest thing was kind of making them act as they should, but not exactly as you can see in the video above. I've managed to get the same results as with the TriDef Ignition software - the picture is there, you can see some depth of the objects on screen when wearing the glasses, but there is annoying flicker and artifacts all over the screen making it totally unusable in this state."
AMD wants you to think 3D Vision is bad, so they are calling their option an ‘open standard'. We believe that in this case ‘open' is just code for ‘we will let third parties do all the work, control all the quality, and support our customers with updates and profiles'. The result: Nobody fixes anything, everyone passes the buck. "So still no luck with the AMD HD3D technology in terms of support for my Panasonic 3D HDTV, and the problem is that I've only seen a lot of complaints from other people trying to make their 3D HDTVs work too. But since both iZ3D and DDD have the same issue I'm starting to think that they are not at fault here (although they can improve in a few areas too), but the actual problem lies within AMD's Catalyst driver that probably needs an urgent update or yet another hotfix to resolve the issue." And the user does not get any support, and is left to fend for themselves or get shuffled around as the third party companies point fingers at each other. "And I was not even sure if the iZ3D Driver actually does have support for working with 3D HDTVs using HDMI 1.4(a)'s frame packing through AMD's video driver. The reason for that is due to the fact that they don't clearly state that and the naming convention of their stereo 3D outputs in the driver is not helping for that at all. But after some discussion about it here and going through the iZ3D forums I saw people confirming that the driver has the support and should work, so back again to the testing..." In stark contrast, with 3D Vision, NVIDIA controls the introduction, the quality and we are responsible for the experience our customers have. The result: Here is what the same reviewer that panned AMD (above) said when testing the same TV with NVIDIA 3D Vision: "After finally managing to get the AMD HD3D Technology working with the Panasonic 3D HDTV I've moved to testing the 3DTV Play functionality from NVIDIA, which did not have any trouble working with the 3D TV and making it work was just a simple matter of plugging in the TV to the PC... hopefully AMD will work that out too in the near future to make things work as simple as that and resolve all the issues they have, including providing support for Crossfire configuration with multiple GPUs. And when minor issues appear, it is clear who will fix them and who will support the customer. "And since I did not have trouble making things work with 3DTV Play, I've moved to testing with games and as expected I've seen a few mostly minor issues that need to be fixed by NVIDIA in order for the 3D HDTV support to be further improved." A passive solution with an Intel GPU will not do the job for stereoscopic 3D. AMD has an active shutter solution, but the truth is their solution doesn't work very well. AMD's disarray in 3D may be the consequence of a lack of strategy or the result of having insufficient resources to develop the technology they need. If the later is the case, the problem may resurface in other areas and affect their ability to compete in the future. By working closely with the companies that provide 3D hardware and software, over 1,000 products are now part of the 3D Vision ecosystem, and we support 425 games.
StarCraft II is Awesome in 3D. "To say that stereoscopic 3D gaming merely makes things "pop-out" off the screen is a gross understatement. I have not seen anything that is remotely as impressive visually in terms of immersive game play. It is difficult to describe the feeling without having to show it first-hand. Truth be told, I have not been this excited moving little action figures around and staging battles since I was child and recreated the Battle of Hoth inside our freezer (much to my mother's dismay, leaving the fridge door open on a hot summer's day). I found myself zooming in more on the action (using the scroll mouse), something I have never done before in StarCraft II prior to playing in 3D Vision mode. I giggled like a school girl when a Marauder's severed forearm rolled down the hill or a Hellion's tires fly off to the sky as my Zealots razed a Terran base to the ground. More importantly, it was nice that the action did not slow down despite having all the eye candy turned up while in the heat of the action." How can I possibly follow "giggled like a school girl"? Dell XPS Notebooks Are Sweet When Dell decided to relaunch their XPS notebook line last month, they partnered with NVIDIA and put our technology - NVIDIA GeForce 400M GPUs, NVIDIA 3DTV Play and NVIDIA Optimus - front and center. "Just like we'd heard, the new 14-,15.6-, and 17-inch machines will be available across the board with NVIDIA GeForce 400M GPUs (with Optimus / 3D Play support) and Core i5 / i7 processor options, but there's more to these than just internal oomph -- it'll be one of the first laptops to ship with a Skype-certified HD webcam and they're also equipped with high-fidelity JBL speakers."
Reviews are coming in now. "The XPS 14 comes equipped with NVIDIA's Optimus technology, which means the notebook will intelligently switch between the discrete GeForce GPU and integrated Intel graphics depending on the task. Fire up a game, for example, and the GeForce chip will come into play. But while you're surfing the Web or hammering out an email, the XPS will help conserve battery life by tapping into the integrated graphics of the Intel chipset that is on board."
And NVIDIA is helping set these laptops apart. "All things considered though, the XPS 17 would make for a great desktop replacement notebook if a regular tower-style PC isn't your cup of tea - it can be used for just about any type of task." They offer a great mix of features and performance. "One of the best sounding notebooks ever is also one of the fastest you can buy for the money." GeForce 400 Series GPUs are DirectX 11 done right, with up to twice the DirectX11 performance of competing ATI GPUs. And only NVIDIA GPUs can offer NVIDIA Optimus technology, providing great performance and great battery life. In addition to this, only GeForce GPUs offer:
GTC 2010 Content Now Available Online GTC 2010 featured an astounding 280+ in-depth technical sessions on topics from black holes to face recognition. NVIDIA is now offering access to this valuable content in the form of streaming videos, video downloads and PDFs. Visit the download page at www.nvidia.com/gtc. Related Articles:
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Comments
The nterresting news thing was a nice touch though. A commentary about a product written by the manufacturer. Smart.