Nvidia to Apple: thanks for the backhanded compliment
Nvidia got some free publicity from Apple today. Well, sort of.
On Wednesday, its crosstown peer flashed a slide at the new iPad’s unveiling, briefly claiming that Apple’s A5X processor packed four times the graphics punch of Nvidia’s own next-generation Tegra 3. Nvidia product spokesman Ken Brown’s phone has been ringing off the hook since.
“People noticed. When Apple calls out your processor as the one to beat, it gets attention. We’ve gotten some questions about it,” he said.
“It almost looks like it’s a two-horse race between Apple and Tegra,” he added, deftly framing things in the best possible light for Nvidia.
The A5X chip boasts quad-core graphics and is twice as fast as the IPad 2, Apple claims.
For a company whose core business is not chips, Apple’s processors so far have more than held their own against processors used in other tablets. But precisely how it matches up against Nvidia or othe competing silicon has yet to be empirically and independently tested.
Chip companies are famous for picking and choosing benchmark tests that cast features of their own semiconductors in the most flattering light possible.
Tech wrap: EBay acts on Hunch
EBay said it acquired the data analysis firm Hunch to help it develop more recommendation technology for its online marketplace. Hunch analyzes data from social networks like Facebook and from questionnaires to make personal recommendations. EBay said Hunch will help it suggest relevant products for shoppers on its online marketplace. Chris Dixon, Tom Pinckney and Matt Gattis, who founded Hunch in 2009, will stay on at eBay and remain based in New York. The purchase price was not disclosed, although tech blog Uncrunched pegged it at around $80 million.
Hewlett-Packard reported quarterly revenue slightly better than Wall Street estimates, after the bell. The world’s largest technology company by sales said non-GAAP net revenue in the fiscal fourth quarter inched up 1 percent to $32.3 billion. Analysts had predicted revenue of $32.05 billion on average, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Retailers are saving some of their deepest discounts on Black Friday for video game products, with large chains Wal-Mart and Best Buy putting some rock-bottom prices tags on hot games to lure shoppers into stores. To accommodate pressured buyers, retailers are heavily discounting top games, from Electronic Arts’ “Battlefield 3,” to Warner Brothers’ “Batman: Arkham City,” and Microsoft’s “Gears of War 3.”
Olympus said that a third-party panel appointed by the company to look into an accounting scandal has, so far, found no evidence that funds from its M&A deals went to organized crime syndicates or that “yakuza” gangsters were involved. A unit from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s organized crime division has joined the investigation, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday. But the source added it was premature to say if gangsters were involved.
Hard drive maker Western Digital said it was asked to pay $525 million in an arbitration brought by competitor Seagate. The award involves claims brought against Western Digital and one employee — who was earlier with Seagate — alleging misappropriation of confidential information and trade secrets, Western Digital said in a statement.
Nvidia will again be the supplier of graphic processor units to Apple after rival AMD botched efforts to create a GPU for Apple’s MacBook Air laptop, tech blog SemiAccurate writes. The decision was made about three years after Apple replaced Nvidia GPUs with by those made by ATI/AMD and two years after the first ATI/AMD Macs in recent memory hit the shelves.
Nvidia’s power-efficient chips picked for supercomputer
In the latest challenge to Intel’s dominance of the PC and server industry, smaller chipmaker Nvidia is teaming up with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to develop a supercomputer that will run on energy efficient ARM processors.
With the massive data centers that power the Internet consuming an ever increasing amount of electricity, energy efficiency is becoming a priority, and many companies are looking toward the technology behind our smartphones and tablets to do the job.
ARM Holdings’ chip architecture has come to dominate the mobile industry because its energy efficiency allows smartphone batteries to remain charged longer than Intel’s mobile processors, which are based on designs originally meant for powerful PCs.
The BSC hopes the supercomputer it is building with Nvidia’s new Tegra 3 chips, which are due to appear in upcoming tablets and phones over the next few months, will use two to five times less electricity than current systems.
The BSC’s supercomputer will also pack Nvidia’s high-performance CUDA graphics processors, which are being adopted in other supercomputers.
While traditional central processors found in computers are designed to make huge calculations very quickly one after another, graphics processors or GPUs, can carry out several small calculations at the same time, which makes them handy for specific kinds of tasks.
Nvidia chips in with world’s most powerful computer
Nvidia, which got its start making processors for computer game enthusiasts, has won another victory for parrallel computing with the inclusion of its graphics chips in what is expected to be the world’s fastest supercomputer.
The Titan computer being built for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn should boast a record 20 petaflops of peak performance — that’s about 20 million billion math operations per second.
By the time it is complete in 2013, the computer will be driven by 18,000 Nvidia graphic processor units, or GPUs, along with an equivalent number of central processors made by rival Advanced Micro Devices.
Keenly aware of explosive growth in tablets, smartphones and cloud computings, Nvidia is looking beyond its core business of designing chips that make games and videos look better on PCs.
As well as making sleek chips for smartphones, Nvidia is promoting its graphics technology to be used for for new purposes, including supercomputers running simulations in astrophysics and other math-heavy tasks.
While traditional central processors found in computers are designed to make huge calculations very quickly, one after another, graphics processors, or GPUs, excel at carrying out several small calculations at the same time, which makes them handy for specific kinds of tasks.
As microchips being built with more and more transistors consume growing amounts of electricity, engineers are turning to GPUs, which are giving them more bang for their buck, Steve Scott, Chief Technology Officer of Nvidia’s Tesla business, told Reuters.
Tech wrap: Blame game at HP
What is responsible for Hewlett-Packard’s bleak profit outlook? Ask CEO Leo Apotheker and he’ll blame it on “missed opportunities” in a troubled division under his predecessor Mark Hurd.
Apotheker, who took over in September, plans to spend heavily to revamp the beleaguered unit to focus on consulting, cloud computing and higher-margin businesses.
Dell reported profits that blew past Wall Street estimates and raised its fiscal 2012 outlook for operating income for fiscal 2012, sending shares in the No.2 PC maker up in after-hours trading.
Social networking site LinkedIn boosted its IPO price range by 30 percent, a jump that could value the company at more than $4 billion. That’s 17 times the nine-year old company’s 2010 revenue. While the jump in value is a sign of the strength of investor appetite for social networking companies, some investors said they felt it had climbed too high.
Tablets have sparked much discussion at the Reuters Global Technology Summit this week. Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang thinks tablets using Google’s Android platform – and powered by his firm’s processors – could overtake Apple’s iPad in under three years as better versions and more applications hit the market.
Apple, meanwhile, has proposed a standardized SIM card smaller than the ones it currently uses in the iPad that could allow the company to produce a thinner version of the device, an Orange executive told Reuters at the summit.
CES: Nvidia’s Huang and the wireless curse
Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia’s plain-talking chief executive, may want to hit the blackjack tables while he’s in Las Vegas.
That’s because he’s already had his share of bad luck in Sin City while on stage for a presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show.
About halfway through his presentation unveiling the company’s new Tegra 2 chip, Huang hit a snag when attempting to wirelessly connect to the Web to demonstrate the chip’s multimedia prowess. Huang pleaded with the audience to “spare” him some bandwidth according to media reports.
The crowd of attendees apparently having ignored his entreaty to relinquish their wireless connections, Huang told the audience that they “suck.”
The irony of the technology failings at a conference designed to showcase the wonders of the world of Internet-connected gadgets is hard to miss. But of course, Huang is only the latest of a long line of victims whose presentations have been foiled by wireless woes, including Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Give Huang credit for adding some entertainment to the age of technology glitches.
CES: HP demos Android smartbook
The nascent smartbook market got a big nudge forward on Friday, courtesy of Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest personal computer maker.
Todd Bradley, executive vice president of HP’s PC division, turned up on stage at the Consumer Electronics Show during a keynote address by Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs to demo a device based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip and running Google’s mobile Android software.
There was no formal product unveiling, but HP showed off a smartbook with multitouch capability, and Bradley spoke with apparent interest on the category, which is just beginning to build steam.
“We’re not going to make any announcement today but you know how interested and focused and frankly committed we are to this space,” Bradley said.
Smartbooks run on low-power ARM-based processors like Snapdragon or Nvidia’s Tegra, as opposed to netbooks, which run on Intel’s x86-based Atom platform.
There was certainly some buzz around smartbooks at CES, following the unveiling of Lenovo’s innovative Skylight device, and its IdeaPad U1 (which also run on Snapdragon.) Nvidia showed off a number of prototype mobile computing devices, but made no formal announcements about any products, as some had anticipated.
Intel likely isn’t sweating just yet; its dominance of the traditional PC CPU market isn’t under imminent threat. It remains to be seen how consumers will react to the smartbook phenomenon. The battery-friendly devices offer less processing power than Atom, but plenty of juice to do things most folks want to do, like surf the Web and watch movies.
ARM Holdings is a rising star in the field of Micro Processors to power the Mobile Internet Device. ARM have an advantage over it competitors such as AMD and Intel. ARM only design it the processors and the license the technologies to host of other vendors, such as ST Micro Electronics, Toshiba, Nokia, Apple, Nvida and to many, many more companies. The list can really go on and on.
Source:
http://www.contract-mobile-phones.org
A racier side to Nvidia CEO Huang
Nvidia’s top executive isn’t your typical geek. He likes fast computers, but he loves fast cars.
Jen-Hsun Huang , proud owner of no less than three barely street-legal supercars - red and grey Ferraris and a jet black Koenigsegg CCX — was on the brink of adding yet more horsepower to his stable after watching RTT demonstrate a Ferrari-customization program — running off Nvidia’s graphic chips, of course — onstage on Wednesday.
The unabashed racing car-lover joked that he had been enthralled by a Ferrari 458 Italia that popped up on screen during a demonstration by RTT chief executive Ludwig Fuchs. Fuchs, sharing the stage with Huang, demonstrated how Nvidia chips power his company’s customization platform, which allows would-be racers to configure a Ferrari to taste – color, interior, tires, the works – right on the showroom floor.
“Black with red stripes, please,” Huang quipped as the demo flipped between red, yellow and grey Ferraris.
Huang later said he would have ordered the newest V8 Maranello monster on the spot if Fuchs had been taking orders.
“If they were willing to take an order, I would have taken it,” he said. “Oh yeah, I’ve got to get the 458. Isn’t that a beautiful car? It’s exquisite. It’s got to be awesome.”
One of the markets Nvidia is targeting for high-end graphics rendering is car makers, who rely on graphics hardware and software to create images of their vehicles during development and advertising.
Upon first glance, I initially perceived the “racier” bit of the title to indicate that Jensen was coming off as a racist. Other than that mixup, great story my friend. We need an occasional display of interests outside of the IT industry from its executive faculty once in a while.
Netbook grows up, learns to play games
Slowly but surely, the netbook is growing up.
At first these sub-notebook machines were seen as weaklings. Now Nvidia Corp, which makes computer graphics cards, has teamed up with Lenovo to offer its second “ion” Netbook, following an announcement last month with Acer. Nvidia’s suggestion for computer makers is to soup up the low-powered Intel Atom chips which run netbooks by combining them with Nvidia graphics cards.
The new product, the Lenovo IdeaPad S12, is touted by the companies as having the long life of Netbooks, but the quick graphics performance of Nvidia chips. It has a 12-inch screen and a keyboard, which puts it closer in size to the average laptop than to the average netbook. Of course, the machine is priced closer to a low-powered laptop than it is to a traditional netbook, at $499 (if netbooks, being of such recent vintage, can be characterized as traditional).
The machine is said to run video games and other applications that usually can only limp along on a normal netbook. It runs all recent versions of Windows and will show high-definition Blue-ray movies.
Do not, however, try to buy one yet. It won’t be around until “later this summer” a press release says.
AMD’s ATI breaks 1Ghz barrier — for real?
In the highly demanding (and some say shrinking) world of PC gaming, only two graphics powers really count: reigning popular champ Nvidia and AMD’s ATI division. Now it looks like ATI’s Radeon may have got a bit of a lead on its arch-foe.
ATI, once considered a perennial also-ran to Nvidia’s cutting-edge graphics chips, has become the first to crack what it called the 1 Gigahertz barrier on standard air-cooling. Pounding its chest, the company trumpeted on Wednesday the milestone and talked about “amazing gaming experiences” for the likes of Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. and Electronic Arts’ Battleforge.
It would be interesting to see how Nvidia — whose logo still appears more often alongside cutting-edge games such as medieval third-person actioner Assassin’s Creed to blockbuster first-person shooter Crysis — will respond in their never-ending arms race.
Another interesting point some blogsites bring up: gamers routinely “overclock” their cards, or run their graphics processors at a faster than factory-based speed, meaning the 1Ghz barrier was probably broken some time back. AMD touts the new ATI Radeon HD 4890 as “factory-overclocked”.
AMD forgot to say how much it would actually cost, retail.
And it’s no long-term fix for choppy cut-scenes and jittery screen-scrolling either. As PC gamers well know, the GPU or graphics card is fundamental to the gaming experience. Unlike console gamers who rarely fret much about compatibility issues and hardware requirements, Windows gamers have to worry about everything from DirectX 10.1 to which card is optimized for what game. ATI’s supersonic new card merely represents a short-term solution to the ever-increasing demands that today’s games put on hardware.
(Photo: Crysis screenshot provided by Electronic Arts)
Wow, someone over here at reuters really doesn’t like ati/amd.
Being the first on the market to officially release 1ghz+ processors is exactly what ati said. Last I checked, they didn’t have a parade or anything for it, so why all the ati bashing? Its a respectable company which is trying to push the envelope every bit as much as nVidia, however has to put up with journalists cheapening their success with bitter skepticism rather than congratulations. I agree that their card is no “long term fix,” but that is the same as every other card released since.. well .. ever. The rule of thumb is, buy the card that is the best bang for your buck (whether or not it happens to be nVidia, Eddie) and pray that it lasts long enough to play the games you want for a few years. Have you heard of Moore’s Law? It applies to nVidia every bit as much as ati.
It will be interesting to see how NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 (4xPrimary CPU cores, 1xLowPower CPU, 12xGPUs) performs against the apple A5X (2xCPUs, 4xGPUs) when someone does side by side testing of both a variety of benchmarks and applications.
I’m sure Apple could do one benchmark that does not make good use of multiple processors and get better results. How about a benchmark or application that makes good use of all processors (2 or 4)? For example, there are applications designed just for the Tegra processor (Tegra Zone) to make use of all that computing power.
A graphic intensive application such as a game or video/photo processing optimized for the Tegra 3 will likely kick ass over an application optimized for the A5X.