Tegra K1 puts a Xbox 360 and a PS3 in your pocket

Just the other day some friends and I were talking about how much longer we would have to wait to have Xbox 360/PS3 quality games and graphics on a mobile device. And little did we know that Nvidia was about to answer that question far sooner than we anticipated. The new Tegra K1 has 192 CUDA cores and takes the same Kepler architecture we find in their desktop GPUs to the mobile world.

The performance improvements are quite significant:

The K1 is not only more powerful than a Xbox 360 and a PS3... it's almost as powerful as both of them combined! (And it offers additional benefits, such as DX11 and OpenGL 4.4 support.)

Even more impressive, it can do this while using just 5W - compared to the 100W used by each of these game consoles. Nvidia has also scored a nice partner, showing Unreal Engine 4 running on the K1 as well as some games, like Trine and Serious Sam 3.

Though there's still room for improvement (as always), it's incredible that we will have access to this kind of graphic power in mobile devices this year. And best of all, in the second half of the year a new K1 version will pop up, with a dual core 64 bits "Denver" CPU (the current version uses a 32bit quad-core "plus 1" CPU).

... So... how long will we have to wait till the same thing happens to the newer PS4 and Xbox One? Four years? Less? What's your take on that?

Tegra 6 to be 100x Faster than Tegra 2

The CPUs and GPUs used in mobile devices have been evolving at an incredible rate. Suffice to say, the new Galaxy S4 is twice as fast as the previous S3, and to really put things into perspective Nvidia has reveled its roadmap, and announcing a 100x performance improvement when it "Parker" (Tegra 6) comes out in 2015.

Yes, Nvidia keeps using super-hero code names for their Tegra models: Tegra 3 was known as "Kal-El" (Superman), Tegra 4 as "Wayne" (Batman), and the upcoming Tegras are "Logan" (Wolverine) arriving later this year and "Parker" (Spider man) in 2015. This means in 2015 we'll have mobile devices with 100x more power than the ones we had in 2011 - it's simply... incredible!

But even before that, the upcoming "Logan" should already be quite impressive, as it will add a Kepler GPU to the mix (Kepler is the existing GPU technology you can find on "big computer" graphics' cards with Nvidia GPUs).

And talking about GPUs, those will also keep up doubling performance every two years. Next year the Maxwell architecture will replace the current Kepler, with an unified virtual memory that will simplify developers' lives by allowing both the CPU and GPU to access any memory content without having to worry if it's on the CPU side or the GPU side. And later on... the Volta GPUs, that will feature a stacked memory design that will finally take care of the "starving" memory bandwidth of current GPU architectures. Nvidia says it will have enough bandwidth to go through an entire bluray movie in a fraction of a second.

Can't wait to see all that power put into good use!

[via cnet]

Mobile Graphics to Surpass Xbox 360 Quality by 2014

Anyone can attest just how fast the mobile devices evolution has been in the past couple of years. From modest single-core CPUs to powerful quad-core CPUs, and from low-resolution screens to tablets that have higher resolution than most desktop high-definition monitors.

Nvidia decided to put that into perspective, by showings us a graph of graphic evolution in PC, consoles and mobiles... and where we can see that by 2014, mobile GPUs should surpass the graphic power of the current generation of consoles.

Sure, by then we'll most likely be already playing on the next generation of game consoles by Microsoft and Sony, with even more powerful graphic capabilities... But give the evolution rate, within a few more years, they're likely to catch up again.

[via anandtech]

Octane Render - GPU Powered 3D Rendering

We all know GPUs might not be adequate for "generic" computer operations, but excel at specific mathematical tasks.
So, how about putting it all to good use... in something like... high quality 3D rendereing?

Thanks to this Octane Render from Refractive Software you'll no longer have to wait for your computer to slowly redraw your 3D models in high-quailty detail:



And to better understand the kind of power the GPUs hold, just look at the following chart, where you can see how a "powerful" i7 920 CPU fares in comparison.

Nvidia Optimus GPU Dynamic Switching

Nvidia is once again pushing mixed GPU interaction to the limits.

For a long time computer manufacturers have been trying to find the right balance between performance and power efficiency, especially where it matters the most: battery powered laptops.

While stuffing two graphic cards in laptops is nothing new: a power hungry one offering maximum performance, and a less powerful one offering maxium power savings; it was up to the user to select which one to use according to special power schemes or by toggling a button.
Often, this also meant the user had to log off and on again... which wasn't very user friendly.


With this Nvidia Optimus the principle is the same, but the toggling is made based on the current needs, without any user interaction and without even flickering the screen.

Asus is scheduled to have this system in their laptops (UL50Vf, N61Jv, N71Jv, N82Jv, e U30Jc) soon.

Check the following video (the jerkiness of the video is due to the capture software, in real life it looks as smooth as you'd expect it to be.)

NVIDIA Optimus Technology - GPU Switching 2 - PC Perspective from Ryan Shrout on Vimeo.

Windows 7 to Offer GPU Acceleration?

It looks like Microsoft doesn't want to be left behind when it comes to "general purpose" GPU processing.

This makes even more sense when you consider Apple's next OS X (a.k.a. Snow Leopard) to also have such capabilities.
One of the topics for the upcoming PDC 2008 is:

• Windows 7: Unlocking the GPU with Direct3D (Direct3D-based GPU acceleration of Win32 applications).

It seems the next generation of operating systems will be able to not only use multi-core CPU, but also use different (and highly specialized) CPUs - as the ones you have in your computer's graphic card.

This will allow for far better task scheduleing, using your GPU to speed up operations that would take far longer if done on a general-purpose CPU.


Along with multitouch, and faster booting times, it seems they're on the right track - we'll just have to wait and see if they actually deliver.