Archive for category Nvidia

Claims Nvidia CEO
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO and one of the leaders of the computer graphics market, made a very good case that every computer can benefit from a GPU.

During the last financial conference call, he told investors that a lot of people are doing video editing of their family videos that they want to send to their parents. Some cutting and editing, and especially rendering and transcoding of edited HD videos can take hours.

If you have a Cuda based application, or in the future a DirectX compute API enabled application in Windows 7, you should be able to do the video editing up to 5 or more times faster than with a CPU alone.

This is a big difference and Nvidia hopes that a lot of people will realize this. This is what makes Intel angry as the computer of today can really benefit a GPU for something other than just playing. Let’s just hope that Nvidia can pull this one off.

Nvidia says

Nvidia’s product manager for Tesla producs, Sumit Gupta, recently said how new programming environments will utilize GPUs to accelerate software in OS X Snow Leopard and Windows 7 operating systems. Nvidia seems to be keen on proving the world that graphics cards are not solely for gaming, and thus the GPGPU acronym (General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units).

OpenCL, a framework for writing programs which execute across platform containing CPUs, GPUs and potentially other processors, would enable users to more effectively utilize the potential that GPUs obviously pack, and even Apple on its website says that OpenCL will make it possible for developers to „efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit.“

In a nutshell, this means that graphics do so much more in the future, as having a CPU and a GPU in your system will mean there’re two workhorses to rely on, where both processing units will work together and divide the tasks among themselves. An example was cited as running Google’s Picasa on the CPU, but as soon as you choose an image and apply a filter, the GPU would take over.

Since interfaces in our OSs are obviously visual, it would make more sense for the GPU to handle it than the CPU Mr. Gupta also said. However, this doesn’t in any way mean that CPUs are not needed as he also added how „If you’re running an unpredictable task, the CPU is the jack of all trades“.

More here.

RF frequencies apparently right on par

Of all the GPU horror stories we’ve witnessed over the years, they have been very few and far from the one spotted today. According to Skydive from the EVGA Forums, his brand new GTX 295 Quad-SLI setup is emitting just the right frequencies in the RF spectrum to interfere with his garage door openers.

He claims that the problem resolves itself when he shuts off his system and notes that the problem never occurred in the past with any other GPUs, all while using the same power supply unit. He also mentioned that the system, located in his office room, is on another circuit from the garage’s power, so the problem is certainly not likely to be an outside variable.

The observation at hand begs the question of just how valid the FCC’s safety and electromagnetic interference rating approvals might be. We know that EM fields can do strange things, but as Skydive states, “[the card] has to be pushing acceptable levels by the FCC if it can jam your garage door remotes.”

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