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
Intel in Trouble? Cancels Intel Developer Forum After 20 Years
Intel Developer Forum i.e. IDF traditionally was an event that ends the summer break and opens new opportunities to do business. However, over the past couple of years we’ve heard numerous stories that the company is charging too much for the exhibit space, and does not know where the focus is. At the same time, its public arms – Public Relations (PR) and Investor Relations (IR) departments started to retreat into themselves, becoming more and more unavailable to the members of media, new media channels as well as industry analysts. Today, the biggest confirmation of “building a Wall around the company” came true, as Intel Developer
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 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 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 Shield Update Adds 4K60, HDR Support – VR Next?
Nvidia SHIELD Android TV console is perhaps the best Android TV device on the market. Ever since its launch a year ago, this Tegra X1-based device gained over 10 upgrades with improvement in specifications and features. With the Google I/O 2016 conference taking place at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA, Nvidia wanted to make sure their announcements reflect on the strength of Android ecosystem and its capabilities. The Software Upgrade 3.2 brings the support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) TV devices, which are coming to the market later this year. It also now supports YouTube 4K at 60 fps / Hz, which was not the case in the
Nvidia Credits AMD for Unifying Game Development
During the Nvidia’s “Power of 10” event, Jen-Hsun Huang, Co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Corporation talked about the positive shift in mentality for game developers. Game development in the past segmented resources between consoles and PCs, often resulting in sub-par experiences on the more powerful hardware. PC-focused eSports today have an audience of over 300 million viewers, easily rivaling or even beating more established ‘real’ sports. In 2013, the situation for PC gaming was rather grim. The arrival of new, AMD powered consoles brought the x86 architecture back to Microsoft (Intel x86, IBM PowerPC, AMD x86), and marked the third architectural change for Sony (SGI MIPS, IBM PowerPC,
Nvidia Pascal: The Secret of Hidden Directory
In just a few days, Nvidia will unveil their mainstream products based on the Pascal architecture. Under the codename GP104 and GP106, Nvidia is preparing the arrival of approximately five different products. GP104 is the more high-end part of the two (i.e. the first derivative of GP100, the big Pascal chip from Tesla P100), scheduled to power GeForce GTX 1060 Ti (6GB GDDR5), 1070 (8GB GDDR5) and 1080 (8GB GDDR5X). GP106 silicon will power the GeForce GTX 1050 (2GB GDDR5) and 1060 (4GB GDDR5). Just like any GeForce GTX launch, Nvidia’s marketing team loves a good riddle. Good portion of the surprise was out last week, when
16nm MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Leak Ahead of Computex Taipei 2016
Given that we won’t be seeing any high end GPU hardware until the first quarter 2017 (HBM2-powered AMD Vega 10, Nvidia Pascal GP100), the focus for 2016 will be on the mainstream cards. The shift from 28nm to 16nm (Nvidia) and 14nm (AMD) forced the companies to adopt a conservative approach and focus on entry-level and mainstream silicon, rather than the “highest of all ends”. While Nvidia did launch its 15 billion transistor silicon named GP100 i.e. Tesla P100 at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference, Jen-Hsun Huang did state that real volume shipments will only start in the first quarter of 2017, roughly the same time
Nvidia Live Keynote Blog
11:13 AM PDT: That’s all folks. Stay tuned to VR World for more updates from 2016 GPU Technology Conference. 11:03 AM PDT: Baidu introduces Self-driving Car Computer, based on Nvidia DRIVE PX 2 hardware platform. 10:58 AM PDT: Nvidia DRIVE PX AI Car Computer is designed to run between DRIVE PX 2, DGX-1 supercomputer and the actual vehicle, using partners such as Caffe, CNTK, KALDI, TensorFlow, Theano and Torch. Nvidia’s DRIVEKIT achieved #1 accuracy score, with the remaining 8 out of 9 systems all being GPU accelerated. 10:52 AM PDT: DGX-1 system is sold out, at a price of $129,000. Nvidia claims it can replace “250
Virtual Reality is hot for 2016 Emerging Companies Summit
Ever since its inception during what was a dark hour of world economy, Emerging Companies Summit became an integral part of NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference, bringing interesting startups into the limelight. Companies such as Elemental Technologies (acquired by Amazon for $296 million), Dave Perry’s GAIKAI (acquired by SONY for $380 million), Natural Motion (acquired by Zynga for $527 million), Oculus (acquired by Facebook for $2 billion) as well as automotive UI pioneer Rightware – all presented at this side event. 2016 Edition will be held on April 6 and last for 12 hours, from 9AM to 9PM (and probably well into the night at the Awards Ceremony). For this year, Emerging
Valve VR Test: AMD Wins Against NVIDIA?
Update March 17th, 2016 16:52 GMT – The AMD R9 Nano x2 was the performance achieved by Radeon Pro Duo. We have discussed the SteamVR benchmark with Valve and they are working on expanding the benchmark score to incorporate more frames. The Fidelity test will stay just that (“Crank it up to 11”), but the benchmark will be enhanced to factor in the developments of graphics hardware. We will follow up as more developments around SteamVR happen. Original Article: Over the past three weeks, we saw two VR vendors releasing their tests to check can your machine deliver an optimal VR experience or not. As it goes, one vendor (Oculus) did
NVIDIA Announces Record Revenue Numbers
It seems that NVIDIA Corporation is going from strength to strength as it presented final numbers for the fiscal fourth quarter, and fiscal financial year. Just like Apple, NVIDIA does not use Calendar Year (CY) for its earnings, unlike AMD, Intel, Qualcomm and the like. Their year ends with January 1st, and starts with February 1st. For the fourth fiscal quarter 2016, the company reported $1.40 billion, 12% more than the year before (YoY). Fiscal 2016 also marks the first time NVIDIA broke into the $5 billion club, with $5.01 billion in revenue. Revenue drive was not driven by buying the market share as the company reported healthy
AMD Launches its Virtual GPU
Several years after NVIDIA launched its GRID vGPU architecture, AMD is entering the graphics virtualization market with its FirePro S7150 and S7150 x2 graphics processors. This is probably the last product AMD is launching utilizing its Tonga GPU architecture, also known as ‘Volcanic Islands’ or ‘GCN 1.2’ family of products. FirePro S7150 packs a single Tonga GPU and 8GB of ECC GDDR5 memory, while as the name says, FirePro S7150 x2 (why the small ‘x’?) is a dual-GPU with two Tonga GPUs and 16GB of ECC GDDR5 memory. Hardware capabilities are quite impressive – the products in question can support up to 16 users per GPU. By taking a GPGPU
NVIDIA Light Field Stereoscopy VR Explained
At the recently held VRLA Expo, NVIDIA grabbed a lot of attention by demonstrating a research prototype of its ‘Light Field Display’ project. Originally demonstrated at the last year’s Siggraph, the project explores another angle at tackling the problem of motion sickness and depth perception. We contacted NVIDIA’s PR representative, Mr. Brian Burke who followed up with the following statement: “What we showed at VRLA is a research prototype built in collaboration with Stanford University to explore how future lightfield technologies can improve the VR experience. NVIDIA regularly conducts research on future technologies to help the industry find solutions to tough visual computing challenges. The prototype was first
NVIDIA Unveils Pascal GPU: 16GB of memory, 1TB/s Bandwidth
At the Japanese edition of NVIDIA GTC (GPU Technology Conference), NVIDIA finally revealed details behind its 2016 graphics architecture, codenamed Pascal. The architecture was launched at the main GTC event, which took place in San Jose on March 17th, 2015 (watch Jen-Hsun Huang’s GTC keynote here). GTC Japan was hosted by Marc Hamilton. As always, the Pascal GPU will be manufactured in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), using the brand new 16nm FinFET process. This process is much more than a simple number, since it marks the shift from planar, 2D transistors to the FinFET i.e. 3D transistors. This shift required that the engineers make lot of changes in the
Which Computer Should You Buy?
Buying a computer is more complicated than it needs to be. If you are a gamer or a computer enthusiast, this post is not for you. Stop now and move along to your next article. I wrote this article to help those who think buying a computer is challenging because of all the choices, options, and hardware to consider. One reason I believe Apple has done so well over recent years is by bringing a simplicity to the buying process that just isn’t there for traditional Windows-based PCs. Most people I know buy and use these traditional Windows-based PCs, and I hope this article can help take
Report: AMD Cuts 500 Jobs To Save Costs
Advanced Micro Devices, a chip designer headquartered in Sunnyvale, California (and Austin, Texas), is cutting 500 jobs to cut costs (5% of its global workforce). The move is expected to bring the headcount down to under 9,000 employees, right in about the same number of employees as one of its competitors, NVIDIA Corporation. For anyone familiar with the processor market, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The company has been struggling to make competitive products over the past couple of years, with even highly innovative products often not being in stock due to low availability. The chip maker is struggling to keep up with its main competitors, with Intel currently
Google Takes On Surface And iPad Pro With 10.2-inch Android-Powered Pixel C
Since its introduction in 2012, Google’s reference Nexus tablet grew in (screen) size and features. 2012-2013 saw 7″ and 10″ models, Nexus 9 debuted in late 2014 and now, we are seeing Google reserving the ‘Nexus’ brand for smartphones only. The new reference tablet from Google is named Pixel C; a 10.2 inch, high-resolution (308 pixels-per-inch) tablet runs the Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system. Just like Microsoft and Apple before, Pixel C comes in a tablet + keyboard layout, which is the new industry standard for ‘productivity tablets’. This combination should makes typing and daily work easier, faster and more task oriented, but also enhance the
AMD Radeon Fury X: Potential Supercomputing Monster?
When AMD launched its Fiji-based graphics cards, all eyes were focused on its performance in consumer applications such as computer games. And while the first results forced Nvidia to launch “Titan Lite” in the form of GeForce GTX 980 Ti, DirectX 12 benchmarks are starting to show different, brighter outlook for AMD, starting with Ashes of the Singularity. The focus of this article however, is its potential and usage in applications where Fiji GPU will be branded as Fire Pro, and Fire Pro S (Server) – where AMD can take an ASIC and upsell it to commercial clients, with full-speed enabled for Double Precision floating point