nVidia News

The field of cloud computing and SAAS (software as a service) is becoming more and more interesting these days, as quite a lot of companies (especially smaller ones, who don't afford to setup their own computing grids) prefer to turn to such solutions.

And for this reason, NVIDIA and Amazon have joined forces to offer the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, that grants access to the supercomputing-class performance of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs.

This new offering extends the available options for on-demand high performance computing (HPC) within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Since a new video card has now left NVIDIA's nest, it is not unexpected to hear that a new driver version has been created as well, only the 260.89 Beta release does more than just add support for the new card, such as boosting performance in a variety of games.

As consumers may or may not know, NVIDIA just released the GeForce GT 430 graphics card, its low-end Fermi-based adapter powered by the GF108 GPU.

Along with it, the Santa Clara, California-based outfit also provided a new driver version, the GeForce/ION Driver Release version 260.89.

This driver, although still in Beta status, not only adds support for the new card, but also improves the gaming performance of the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 460.

The driver also upgrades the HD Audio driver to version 1.1.9.0 and either adds or enhances the SLI profiles for several games, like City of Heroes: Going Rogue and Dead Rising 2.

NVIDIA did say that its Fermi architecture will be at the base of all of its new video cards and, in tune with this plan, the company has now revealed the Quadro 2000 and Quadro 600 professional graphics solutions.

The Quadro series of graphics adapters is, as NVIDIA's customers well know, the Santa Clara, California-based company's product line for the professional market.

For a long time they have been used in various workstations, mobile or otherwise, created by such companies as Dell, HP and Lenovo. NVIDIA has now released the latest two Quadro models to make it out of its labs, the Quadro 2000 and 600, with 192 and 96 CUDA cores, respectively.

Details of Nvidia's replacement for the aging GT250 cards, the Fermi-based GT430 budget-range model, have leaked ahead of its official announcement thanks to some over-eager Best Buy employees.

The GT430 range isn't due for launch until the 10th of this month, but employees at Best Buy stores across the US apparently missed a memo - and have been sticking the cards on the shelf ready for sale.

Zorbas, a member of the EVGA Forums, was able to snap some detailed shots of the boxes, including images of the detailed specifications on the side.

Since it has, more or less, already seen to the needs of the consumer and professional markets, NVIDIA is now saying its piece on the HPC front as well, apparently even being set on powering supercomputers with performance levels of several PetaFLOPS.

As consumers probably know, NVIDIA has several lines of products based on graphics processing units, each aimed for a specific market segment.

The GeForce series is, of course, the one intended for consumers and, thus, the one most covered by the media.

One of the more nauseating facts that go with a computer hardware testlab is wires .. everywhere and anywhere. Good news on the monitor side though, NVIDIA apparently is working on new wireless technology that allows communication in-between the graphics cards and your display, the focus for this is in fact gamers.

Over at the GPU technology Conference last week scars information was disclosed. Of course it is not something new as Intel has been paving their way on this for a while now with Intel's Wireless Display technology (WiDi).

Eager to offer an alternative to Intel's Wireless Display Technology, NVIDIA is reportedly planning on developing its own solution that can wirelessly stream video to auxiliary display solutions.

Not long ago, during GTC (GPU technology Conference), the Santa Clara, California-based company revealed its roadmap for future GPUs, which included the Kepler and Maxwell.

This revelation grabbed most of the attention directed at the event, but is hardly the only on made over the past few days.

Those that keep track of the developments on the PC market may be aware of Intel's Wireless Display technology.

NVIDIA today announced CUDA support for OpenCV, the popular Computer Vision library used in developing advanced applications for the robotics, automotive, medical, consumer, security, manufacturing, and research fields.

With the addition of GPU acceleration to OpenCV, developers can run more accurate and sophisticated OpenCV algorithms in real-time on higher-resolution images while consuming less power. This will facilitate the development of scores of new, mainstream Computer Vision applications.

With thousands of developers and well over two million downloads to date, OpenCV is a popular Computer Vision library for the development of computational-intensive and powerful applications, many of which require robust real-time performance. For example, the new OpenCV depth calculation engine performs 5-10 times faster with GPU acceleration than with the equivalent CPU-only implementation.