With a record number of applicants, NVIDIA just announced the finalists for its VR Showcase at the upcoming festival of GTC 2017. From over 120 startups, 10 companies have been chosen to compete for a chance to win up to $30,000.00 in cash and prices. These companies have created new and novel ways to use VR/AR content to better the world. The finalists will have the opportunity to pitch their ideas and concepts on stage for 5 minutes with 3 minutes allotted for questions. All the finalists will have exclusive exposure for marketing, public relations, and venture capital. GTC 2017 will offer multiple sessions on
AMD’s Next Generation GPU to Feature 384-bit GDDR6 Memory?
Last year, Micron collaborated with NVIDIA and brought forward GDDR5X memory, with 2.5 GHz QDR clock i.e. “10Gbps per pin” achieving record bandwidth per pin. With GTX 1080 Ti and TITAN Xp, Micron and NVIDIA went 10% up and reached 11Gbps, with some lucky owners able to reach 3GHz QDR i.e. “12Gbps per pin”. That all is set to change with SK Hynix launching the GDDR6 memory. Debuting on AMD (and NVIDIA) graphics cards in about six-to-eight months from now, GDDR6 replaces GDDR5 and GDDR5X, bringing great times for improvments for GPUs and FPGAs. SK Hynix introduced the world’s fastest 8Gb (i.e. 1GB) Graphics DDR6 DRAM chip. Its operating
Top 10 Stories to Read on April 20th
Starting today, on April 20th we’re launching a new daily section covering the latest news from the world of technology. Every day we’ll try to bring Top 10 stories for you to read and eny. We hope you’ll enjoy them. Hold on, memory will be cheaper (soon?) http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20170418PD203.html “Major NAND flash suppliers including Samsung Electronics, Micron Technology and Toshiba have rolled out 64-layer 3D NAND flash products, said the sources. SK Hynix has even introduced what the company claims is the industry’s first 72-layer 3D NAND flash chips.” Microsoft explains why the company opted against combining Polaris GPU with RYZEN CPU architecture http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-the-scorpio-engine-in-depth “There are
Two New X86 CPU Vendors coming to Market in 2018, 2020
One of everlasting legacies from former President of The United States (POTUS) Mr. Barrack Obama will be the creation of Chinese semiconductor industry. Following the ban on completion of Tianhe-2 supercomputer in 2014, Chinese government did not double down, but decided to put semiconductor industry as one of top 3 national priorities, and started to infuse over a quarter of trillion U.S. dollars, i.e. 2 trillion RMB (Yuan) into the domestic semiconductor industry, creating not a train, but a “Hyperloop Express” that is changing the semiconductor industry landscape. First, we’re starting to see the power of homegrown computers with ShenWei 260-core CPU processors powering the
First NVIDIA TITAN Xp Reviews Come Online
Last week’s announcement of Titan Xp, with a fully unlocked GP102 core caught many by surprise. The news from Taiwan speak that the reason for the launch is the improvement in yields coming from TSMC. According to the sources we spoke with, both GP100 and GP102 are now bringing in yields above 60% range, meaning that NVIDIA no longer needs to sell every second die as a cut down. In what is bad news for owners of Titan X (Pascal) that launched last August, who paid $1200 for what is now an inferior product bearing almost the same name, NVIDIA decided to refresh the Titan with the best
NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference Officially Announced
With the conference being over a month away, NVIDIA sent out a press release announcing the conference. The conference starts on Monday, May 8th, and lasts until Thursday, May 11th. This year, NVIDIA reshuffled the conference format in a bid to ensure continuous coverage of the conference. What used to be opening keynote with Jensen Huang, co-founder and the CEO is now being shifted to the penultimate day. The expectations for the conference are quite big, with the focus on A.I. and deep learning, virtual reality and self driving vehicles. We will cover the conference extensively. NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA), a world leader in AI computing technology, will
MSI Custom 1080 Ti Boards are Hit and Miss
Several weeks ago, NVIDIA launched the “crown jewel” of the GeForce line, GTX 1080 Ti(tanium) in the “Founders Edition” variant. As promised, custom boards were to follow over the “next couple of weeks”. MSI, known Taiwanese vendor of graphics cards unveiled custom versions of the 1080 Ti, featuring not just a custom heatsink option, but a custom PCB as such. The line-up consists out of several cards, starting with the Aero card, which comes with a simpler heatsink and the PCB. The MSI 1080 Ti Aero card comes with a blower-style cooler to bring its price as close to MSRP as possible. Second one is
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and FCAT VR Are Coming
After several months of anticipation and speculation, NVIDIA finally unveiled the “Ti” version of GeForce GTX 1080. First used on a GeForce 2 Ti some 17 years ago, a monstrous new graphics card that outperforms even the much desired Titan X (Pascal). While the launch was not a surprise thanks to a heap of leaks, its release window and price caught many by surprise; “next week” and (only) $699. The “ultimate GeForce” GPU, as CEO Jen-Hsun Huang called it, will offer up to 1.6GHz boost clocks and an special “OC” clock of 2GHz, the company said during the launch event in San Francisco. The GeForce GTX
NVIDIA GTC 2017 Opens VR Showcase Contest
2016 will remain known as the year of the GPU. By looking into technology stocks, we can see that the growth of visualization, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning drove GPU to the new heights. Central conference for GPU technologies remains the one organized by NVIDIA, entering its ninth year. From May 8-11, 2017, NVIDIA is getting ready to unveil vast number of news and features coming from the company and its ecosystem. GTC 2017 brings a very interesting opportunity for a few companies or teams that are working on creating new products for Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality. Conference organizers announced a contest where
New NVIDIA Quadro Family Plans to Heavily Monetize Pascal GPUs
NVIDIA’s scenario about the GeForce / Quadro / Tesla line-up experienced a lot of turnover over the past couple of years. The sequence of “launch as GeForce, downclock as Tesla, optimize and launch as Quadro,” changed into “launch as Tesla, optimize as GeForce and be reliable as Quadro”. With Pascal, story turned to be almost the same. NVIDIA introduced GP100 as Tesla in April 2016, followed with GP102 chip as Titan X (no longer branded as GeForce), Quadro P6000 and Tesla P40. At the same time, the GP104/106/107 did not experience the same sequence, with only GP104 debuting as Quadro P5000 and Tesla P40. Second day of
Khronos Announces an Open VR Standard Initiative
The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, have just announced a call for participation in a new initiative to define a cross-vendor, royalty-free, open standard for access to modern virtual reality (VR) devices. “Virtual Reality’s success is dependent on a large thriving market of hardware where casual and professional consumers alike can take their pick without worry of fragmentation and incompatibility,” said Christopher Mitchell, OSVR business lead, Razer. “This has been OSVR’s vision from day one and we are thrilled to be a part of the Khronos Group in order to push standardization of interfaces across the industry.” The standards body
Futuremark Announced VRMark, The New VR Benchmark
Futuremark, a company best known for its 3DMark benchmark just announced the availability of their a new benchmark suite called VRMark. As the name implies, this benchmark is used for testing your system’s ability to run VR games and experiences, since the performance required to do so is much higher than normal gaming performance. As always, Futuremark did their best to use a custom game engine to drive the experiences to the levels which can make your systems slow to a crawl. With VR, the maneuvering space was limited, as reducing the framerate inside the VR experience could potentially get you in a bad shape.
What Do You need to Play Battlefield 1
In the eternal battle of Battlefield vs. Call of Duty, Electronic Arts once more pulled the trigger first and released Battlefield 1 on October 21th (to be followed by Call of Duty on November 4th). Following the first in-game experiences, we decided to do a review on game itself and on hardware needed to run this baby. There was much controversy surrounding Battlefield 1 and its return to World War I, also known as The Great War. Concerns about whether or not such delicate subject matter could ever be given the treatment it deserves, especially in a video game, are justified. This is unquestionably the
New Nintendo Switch Packs NVIDIA Tegra Processor
Today, Nintendo unveiled their next generation console, more known under the codename “NX”. The rumors of NVIDIA’s involvement turned very much true, as Tegra SoC was the only mobile processor deemed to have enough graphics horsepower to fulfill Nintendo’s mission of “gaming everywhere”. All we can say is watch the three-and-half minute video, enjoy in every second of it. In my personal view, Nintendo has done it again: This tablet-console-mobile gaming enables you to play high-resolution (even in Ultra HD quality thanks to upscaling) games on the TV, or on the go as a gaming ‘tablet’. Perhaps the key to Nintendo’s Switch is the logo, which symbolizes
Nvidia Releases Mods, Five New Games for VR Funhouse
Back in 1990s and 2000s, every graphics card launch was followed with an impressive demo that would start numerous threads on online boards, and be the reason why would you opt for one side or the other. That trend disappeared for the better part of 2010s, until Nvidia came out with VR Funhouse. Regardless of which technology vendor you support, no one can argue that VR Funhouse is not one of the best experiences on Steam VR and HTC’s Vive headset. This is one of first VR games that has that Nintendo Wii effect, targeting people of all ages. We saw the joy on faces of children as well
China Now Leads the Server Race: Meet the Phytium MARS Processor
Two decades ago, the US high end microprocessor industry was a lively, diverse market where about five various instruction set architectures battled it out across the workstation and server fields. You had choices like DEC’s Alpha – the speed leader; MIPS – the Silicon Graphics heart; SPARC from Sun Microsystems, IBM POWER, HP PA, the nascent X86, and a few custom architectures for MPP massive parallel processing, for instance. The rest of the world pretty much had nothing – British Transputer and German Hyperstone platforms died out due to lack of funding, while ARM was still keeping to the low end embedded arena after the end of the
Intel to Buy Imagination Technologies or AMD’s RTG?
This week started with a milestone announcement of Japanese SoftBank moving in to acquire ARM Holdings for a record $32 billion. Many analysts lamented that the takeover was a result of Brexit, even though everyone in their right minds should know that negotiations of this magnitude take years and typically are made in complete silence for 6-18 months (due dilligence and all that jazz). However, this might not be the only acquisition in the modest pool of British semiconductor players. As we reported on multiple occasions, Intel is reorganizing, i.e. restructuring the company. As a part of that reorganization, the company performed no less than three rounds
Not all GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 are VR Ready
When Nvidia launched the Pascal-based GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080, the company touted Virtual Reality as one of key pillars of the “Power of 10” line-up. As the time moves on, we’re starting to see more custom models that offer its potential buyers more bang for buck. Sadly, according to reports from Nvidia’s official forums, Reddit and our colleagues at Tom’s Hardware – it looks like prospective owners of GeForce GTX 1070/1080 might experience issues when connecting the card to HTC Vive. The GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 both come with identical display configuration – three DisplayPort 1.4, single HDMI 2.0b and DVI ports. If you use
Nvidia Pascal Based Titan 50% Faster than GeForce GTX 1080?
While Nvidia will pull out all the guns to fight the AMD Radeon RX 480, releasing GeForce GTX 1060 as early as July 7th – our focus is slowly turning towards the real big gun of Pascal-based GeForce line-up. If our sources are correct, GP100 and GP102 were essentially the same chips, with the difference being memory and bus interface on the GP102 and PCI Express for the GP100. Feature set on both chips is the same, and there are no surprises. We held the “Tesla P100 for PCI Express-based Servers” board in our hands just a few weeks ago, and just a few days ago, we managed
NVIDIA Tesla P100 Shows Future Quadro P6000, GeForce GTX Titan
At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), which takes place this week in Frankfurt, Nvidia finally unveiled the PCIe version of its largest chip, the GP100. This is not the rumored GP102 chip and confirms words spoken by Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Corporation – when he said that the company ‘taped out all the Pascals’: GP100, GP104 and GP106. The GP100-based Tesla P100 is a quite long dual-slot card, which rivals dual-GPU Tesla K80 in its length. The board features lower clock for both GPU and the HBM2 memory, meaning only the Nvidia NVLink-based daughterboards will feature GP100 chip in its full performance