Displaying items by tag: GPGPU

The idea of GPU accelerated applications is one that has caught the attention of many developers over the years since we first heard about it. It is a great advancement in technology that allows you to use the parallel processing and faster memory of a GPU to perform complex tasks much faster than most CPUs can. This is great for software that needs that extra boost like AI, video or photo editing and… Malware. Yes it is also possible to develop malware that uses OpenCL and Cuda (NVIDIA’s flavor of GPU programing language.

In their new media release, Nvidia presented 12 GB Quadro K6000 graphics card as the fastest and best ever made for a professional graphics market, claiming that it delivers twice the performance compared to its predecessor, the Quadro 6000 BC. In the announcement, Nvidia says that video card has 12 gigabytes of the fastest and largest DDR5 graphic memory in the world.

The Titan, a supercomputer that was created by adding nVidia's Tesla GPUs to existing AMD Opterons in the Jaguar supercomputer, has become officially the fastest supercomputer in the world. The Titan system installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S. came out on top as expected, with amazing performance of 17.52 petaflops. U.S Secretary of Energy Steven Chu  indicated that “The nation that leads the world in high-performance computing will have an enormous competitive advantage across a broad range of sectors, including national defense, science and medicine, energy production, transmission and distribution, storm weather and climate prediction, finance, commercial product development, and manufacturing“, and without a doubt Titan will bring that.

nVidia is moving to create their own cloud-based gaming solution using Kepler as their base. After what we saw with Lucid and even at the nVidia press conference at CES this year we are not surprised at all. Gaming is one of nVidia’s biggest investments and it only stands to reason that they would want to capitalize on this in one way or another.

AMD is an interesting company; on the one hand they have some incredible ideas and can really bring some great features to life. Where they sometimes have an issue is bringing them to market and conclusion. One of the reasons for this is their lack of funds. If you do not have enough money to push your products (like Intel and nVidia usually do) then you have to rely on the community to adopt and support your goals. We have watched this happen multiple times with everything from GPU based Physics (the integration of Ageia PhysX onto the X19xx series GPUs) to OpenCL.  AMD shows off what is capable and then due to lack of support and money has to step back and watch as the “rich kids” run off with the toys.

Recently we talked to you about AMD and their reaction to the GTX 460 as well as a PR Spin e-mail that we received. At the time we were invited to speak with AMD about their newly gained market share. This was an offer that we took them up on. After all the e-mail was odd enough that is piqued our interest.  For the sake of coherence we are reprinting part of the e-mail here.