NVIDIA

Last month, LucidLogix Technologies announced Hydra, a new take on multi-GPU implementation for desktops and notebooks. Monday, I got a chance to see a live demo of the technology, and get some clarity on what exactly this thing is expected to do.

Before we get into the demo, allow me to provide some context in case the previous link did not do its job (very likely, as looking back on it, it's kinda thin; anyway...). The Hydra 100 is a Silicon on Chip (SoC) solution to scaling 3D graphics. Basically, it allows you to, for example, insert up to four graphics cards from any one vendor (ATI or Nvidia) and receive linear performance from each card. That's the promise at least.

Now you may be asking, "Doesn't this already exist?" Well kinda. Each graphics card vendor has its own solution that allows you to place multiple GPUs into one system to achieve increased performance--ATI with Crossfire and Nvidia with SLI. What separates the Lucid method is the techniques involved in achieving this. … Read more

Last month Nvidia disclosed that due to a manufacturing flaw, some of their laptop computer graphics processors and chipsets are overheating and failing. This is a brief summary of the story for those that missed it.

All of the flawed processors and chipsets are not failing but the frequency of failure is unclear. Nvidia put it this way:

"Certain notebook configurations with GPUs and MCPs manufactured with a certain die/packaging material set are failing in the field at higher than normal rates. To date, abnormal failure rates with systems other than certain notebook systems have not been seen.&… Read more

We've been waiting for August 14 to roll around so we could tell you about Gateway's new budget-minded gaming rig, the P-7811FX.

After all, we're big fans of the high-power, low-price 17-inch laptops Gateway's been putting out this year as Best Buy exclusives, offering Nvidia's powerful GeForce 8800 GPU for a mere $1,350 (or less, depending on retail discounts). Even though new products like this usually leak beforehand, it was a surprise to see the new system posted on Best Buy's Web site today, a day early.

It's a good thing, too, … Read more

With a new graphics driver and a series of free, "Power Pack" downloads, Nvidia has finally switched on the GPU computing capabilities of its 8000, 9000, and 200 series GeForce cards. Among the things to try are three games (one full, one demo, one Unreal Tournament 3 map), a demo of a fashion-oriented social-networking program called Nurien, a video-encoding application, and a GPU-accelerated Folding@Home client.

All of these programs rely on Nvidia's CUDA software to target your GeForce card, and as such, they require special coding on the part of their programmers. As it's Nvidia-specific code, these programs won't work if you have an integrated Intel graphics chip or an ATI graphics card (at least, technically).

According to Jon Peddie Research, Nvidia currently owns 31.4 percent of the graphics market for desktops and laptops. Even if we incorrectly assume that all of those chips are CUDA-capable, that leaves at least two-thirds of the computer market that can't use this special software. Nvidia might be able to provide some financial incentives to developers to offset the limited user base, but it certainly can't afford to subsidize the majority.

But perhaps there's a killer application in one of these Nvidia downloads. We'll forget that ATI's Radeon cards can also accommodate GPU processing and that the next version of Adobe's Creative Suite will support platform-agnostic GPU acceleration. Maybe the Nurien demo will ignite a tween girl fan following of Hannah Montana-size proportions. Even if it does, we would still be surprised if we saw an industry-wide embrace of CUDA-based software for consumers. The reason is Microsoft.… Read more

Update at 10:40 a.m. with background about why Nvidia licensed Transmeta's technology

Transmeta has licensed its LongRun and low-power chip technologies to graphics chip giant Nvidia for a one-time fee of $25 million. Nvidia is hoping tackle power consumption issues that dog its high-performance chips.

Transmeta, an erstwhile chip vendor turned intellectual property supplier, said Nvidia was granted a nonexclusive license to Transmeta's Long Run and LongRun2 technologies "and other intellectual property for use in connection with Nvidia products."

The agreement grants to Nvidia a license to all of Transmeta's patents and patent … Read more

Intel announced on Monday that it will be presenting a paper at Siggraph 2008 about its "many-core" Larrabee architecture, which will be the basis of future Intel graphics processors.

The paper itself, however, has already been published, and I was able to get a copy of it. (Unfortunately, as you'll see at that link, the paper is normally available only to members of the Association for Computing Machinery.)

The paper is a pretty thorough summary of Intel's motives for developing Larrabee and the major features of the new architecture. Basically, Larrabee is about using many simple x86 cores--more than you'd see in the central processor (CPU) of the system--to implement a graphics processor (GPU). This concept has received a lot of attention since Intel first started talking about it last year.

… Read more

Intel's future Larrabee graphics chip is still just a PowerPoint presentation. But one worth noting because it's likely one of the most important projects inside the world's largest chip manufacturer.

That doesn't mean Larrabee will be a slam dunk. Intel has a checkered past in the discrete graphics chip market and this 10-year-old CNET article about Intel's 740 graphics processor reads eerily like some of the chatter about Intel's Larrabee today.

But Intel is older and presumably wiser now. (Though of course that remains to be seen.) Here's a quick look at how Intel depicts the future Larrabee architecture graphically. … Read more

Intel has disclosed details on a chip that will compete directly with Nvidia and ATI and may take it into unchartered technological and market-segment waters.

Larrabee will be a stand-alone chip, meaning it will be very different than the low-end--but widely used--integrated graphics that Intel now offers as part of the silicon that accompanies its processors. And Larrabee will be based on the universal Intel x86 architecture.

The first Larrabee product will be "targeted at the personal computer market," according to Intel. This means the PC gaming market--putting Nvidia and AMD-ATI directly into Intel's sights. Nvidia and AMD-ATI currently dominate the market for "discrete" or stand-alone graphics processing units.

As Intel sees it, Larrabee combines the best attributes of a central processing unit (CPU) with a graphics processor. "The thing we need is an architecture that combines the full programmability of the CPU with the kinds of parallelism and other special capabilities of graphics processors. And that architecture is Larrabee," Larry Seiler, a senior principal engineer in Intel's Visual Computing Group, said at a briefing on Larrabee in San Francisco last week.

"It is not a GPU as many have mistakenly described it, but it can do most graphics functions," Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research, said in an article he posted Friday about Larrabee.

"It looks like a GPU and acts like a GPU but actually what it's doing is introducing a large number of x86 cores into your PC," said Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer, alluding to the myriad ways Larrabee could be used beyond just graphics processing. In addition to the PC, high-performance computing and workstations are two potential markets that were also mentioned.

Intel describes it in a statement as "the industry's first many-core x86 Intel architecture." The chipmaker currently offers quad-core processors and will offer eight-core processors based on its Nehalem architecture, but Larrabee is expected to have dozens of cores and, later, possibly hundreds.

The number of cores in each Larrabee chip may vary, according to market segment. Intel showed a slide with core counts ranging from 8 to 48, claiming performance scales almost linearly as more cores are added: that is, 16 cores will offer twice the performance of eight cores.

The individual cores in Larrabee are derived from the Intel Pentium processor and "then we added 64-bit instructions and multi-threading," Seiler said. Each core has 256 kilobytes of level-2 cache allowing the size of the cache to scale with the total number of cores, according to Seiler. And application programming interfaces (APIs) such as Microsoft's DirectX and Apple's Open CL can be tapped. "Larrabee does not require a special API. Larrabee will excel on standard graphics APIs," he said. "So existing games will be able to run on Larrabee products."

So, what is Larrabee's market potential? Today, the graphics chip market is approaching 400 million units a year and has consolidated into a handful of suppliers. "And of that population, two suppliers, ATI and Nvidia, own 98 percent of the discrete GPU business." according to Peddie.

"And the trend line indicates a flattening to decline in the business...However, Intel is no light-weight start up, and to enter the market today a company has to have a major infrastructure, deep IP (intellectual property), and marketing prowess--Intel has all that and more," Peddie said. … Read more

Hey, remember when Nvidia issued that business update saying it was expecting to lose money repairing or replacing flawed graphics cards, but then declined to state which cards were affected and which manufacturers bought them?

Well, this week, both Dell and HP finally came out with a list of laptops that included the defective cards. Check your laptops, people, or you too may be treated to "multiple images, random characters on the screen, lines on the screen, no video" or even a "notebook (that) does not start."

Moving on, analyst group Gartner says the $100 laptop is a pipe dream, but the $200-$500 laptop is going strong. This week saw Intel's Classmate PC primed for a third-generation release; the MSI Wind started shipping with a 6-cell battery (though that bumps the price to $550); and Asus reportedly prepared an Eee PC 701 powered by Intel Atom chips.

That last item is apparently part of Asus' plan to cook up a total of 23 varieties of Eee PC over the coming months (or years, the timeline isn't clear). It's enough to make me wonder if Asus will continue to manufacture any non-Eee PC computers in the next few years. Or will we soon be receiving a press release announcing that Asus is changing the company name to Eee?

Meanwhile, memory maker Buffalo gets our carpe diem award for recognizing the market opportunity in DIY solid-state drives for the Eee PC. First runner-up is Samsung, which finally recognized business users as a prime market for the UMPC and added a few enterprise features to its Q1 Ultra. … Read more