gpu

Intel will launch its next-generation Sandy Bridge chip line on January 5 at the Consumer Electronics Show, the chipmaker confirmed today.

The launch will take place at Venetion Hotel in Las Vegas. Mooly Eden, Intel vice president and general manager for PC Client Group, along with "surprise guests, will showcase the world's fastest processor with many new technologies Intel has built into our chips to enhance the 'visual life,'" Intel said in a statement.

Sandy Bridge will--for the first time in mainstream laptops--put Intel graphics technology directly onto the central processing unit (CPU).

With Intel's current … Read more

Reflecting a growing trend in the tech industry, Amazon Web Services has added a new computing style that uses computers' graphics chips.

AWS' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) lets people pay to use different varieties of online computing resources, paying as they go. EC2 began with a conventional business server setup, but Amazon has been adding different instance types tuned to particular computing needs.

The new Cluster GPU Instance is a server with two quad-core Intel Nehalem-series Xeon X5570 processors, two Nvidia Fermi-series Tesla M2050 graphics chips, 22GB of memory, 1.7TB of storage, and a 10 gigabit per second Ethernet … Read more

Nvidia chips are powering a Chinese supercomputer that the graphics chip supplier claims has achieved the fastest speeds to date. The "Tianhe-1A" has hit 2.507 petaflops, beating a system at Tennessee-based Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

The new system would top another Chinese supercomputer also using Nvidia chips called Nebulae, rated at 1.271 petaflops (one petaflop is one thousand trillion operations per second). Both the Nebulae and Tianhe-1A performance ratings are based on the Linpack benchmark, the most widely used performance yardstick for supercomputers. Nebulae is currently rated No. 2 in the world based on the Top500 June list. The Oak Ridge system is rated the fastest at 1.75 petaflops, according to the Top500 June list. Tianhe-1A will top the supercomputer list at a Chinese conference that starts tomorrow.

Tianhe-1A combines 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 graphics processing units (GPUs) with 14,336 Intel Xeon central processing units (CPUs). Nvidia is not only claiming the performance crown but a greener supercomputer, as well. The machine consumes only 4.04 megawatts, making it three times more power efficient than a CPU-only system, Nvidia said in a statement.

High-end GPUs typically contain hundreds of processing cores, allowing them to accelerate certain types of computational tasks more efficiently and thereby much faster than CPUs.

The machine, which is already fully operational, was designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and is housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin… Read more

Companies ranging from Microsoft, Apple, AMD, and Nvidia have all worked for years to tap into graphics cards for certain kinds of non-gaming processing tasks, an approach typically referred to as GPU computing. Growing ever more prevalent, GPU computing has made its way to Web browsers, Photoshop, as well as both recent versions of Apple's and Microsoft's operating systems. That's why we were so surprised by ConceivablyTech's report today that Microsoft has been awarded a patent for GPU-Accelerated video encoding.

The abstract of the patent reads as follows:

A video encoding system uses both a central … Read more

Dozens of potentially defective laptop models from Apple, Dell, and HP appear in an Nvidia legal settlement, the first time that defendant Nvidia has publicly recognized a comprehensive list of models potentially affected by a bad graphics chip.

As CNET has reported, the case dates back to 2007, but the recent settlement of a class action suit against Nvidia documents a lengthy list of laptop models from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple. To date, these lists have been issued separately by vendors.

Laptop product lines potentially affected, as listed beginning on page 4 of the settlement (PDF), include the Dell Insprion, Dell Vostro, Dell Latitude, Dell Precision, HP Pavilion, Compaq Presario, 15-inch MacBook Pro, and 17-inch MacBook Pro. The list contains more than 50 models from Dell, HP, and Apple combined. The settlement also states that affected laptops will be repaired "free of charge."

To recap, Nvidia has already taken charges--starting in July 2008--totaling over $450 million to cover the costs associated with the warranty, repair, return, and replacement of laptops affected by a "weak die/packaging material set" in certain graphics processing unit (GPU) products. Weak die and packaging refers to the chip itself and the chip's packaging, respectively.

In July 2008, Dell described the problem as "multiple images, random characters on the screen, lines on the screen, no video," among other symptoms.

In response to the settlement dated August 12, 2010, Nvidia issued this statement today.… Read more

A number of owners of the 2007 and 2008 MacBook Pro systems found that there were some graphics problems that showed either scrambled video output or sometimes black screens. Many people suspected this was because of faulty graphics processors, and had to get their systems serviced to fix the problem.

Recently a settlement was achieved in a class-action lawsuit against Nvidia over faults in the GeForce 8600M graphics processors included in a variety of notebook models primarily from Dell and HP, but also in Apple's 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro systems.

People who have MacBook Pro systems manufactured between … Read more

Firefox for Mac OS X hadn't been Mozilla's top priority in the feverish race to give a hardware boost to the task of drawing Web pages on a screen, but it looks as if the technology will arrive in time for Firefox 4.

Windows not only is more widely used than Mac OS X but also is where Microsoft has been touting its hardware-accelerated IE9 work. So it wasn't a great surprise that Mozilla's first work for hardware acceleration arrived there. But yesterday, the organization decided to try to squeeze in some Mac acceleration just before a critical Firefox 4 deadline.

The next Firefox beta, the seventh, is set to be the last for the addition of new features. This feature-freeze stage is essential to give enough debugging time to meet the planned 2010 release of Firefox 4.

It's not certain the acceleration for the Mac will make it. Mozilla programmers decided to build it into the developer versions of Firefox released nightly for more testing then reconvene later this week to decide how to proceed.

Firefox's Windows version includes some hardware acceleration using Microsoft's Direct3D 9 graphics interface, with Direct3D 10 support on the way. The Mac version uses a competing interface, OpenGL, that's not as well-supported on Windows. … Read more

AMD is shedding the ATI Technologies name from the remaining graphics products that it picked up after it bought the company in 2006.

The chip company grabbed ATI four years ago for $5.4 billion as a way to gain traction in the graphics card and chipset market. Although AMD renamed its new acquisition AMD Graphics Product Group, the ATI name stuck as one popular among gamers and video aficionados.

But based on market research and an eye toward promoting upcoming new products, AMD felt that consumers would be familiar enough with the AMD name on its own. The company … Read more

Chrome programmers have begun experimental work to endow Google's browser with a full-screen tab-management interface similar to the Panorama feature Mozilla is adding to Firefox.

As browsers have expanded to accommodate ever larger amounts of computing tasks, separating different tasks into different tabs across the top of the browser window, managing them has become more onerous. A list of five or six tabs isn't so bad, but when there are 20 or 40, it's a different story. Mozilla's Panorama, nee Tab Candy, provides a full-screen view of all a browser window's tabs, grouped how the … Read more