Posted 09/30/09 at 05:07:56 PM by Will Smith

I'm sitting here at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference, and will liveblog Jen-Hsun Huang's keynote. I'd expect we'll hear lots about GPU-based computing applications, as well as some new hardware focused on GPU-based computing. Hit the jump to see the liveblog.

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Posted 05/07/09 at 04:27:48 PM by Andy Salisbury

To those looking for another venue to get their very own supercomputer, you’re in luck! Nvidia has recently announced that their CUDA-based Tesla C1060 GPU is available in Dell’s Precision R5400, T5500 and T7500 workstations effective immediately.

If you’re worried that just one of these GPUs isn’t enough to handle your hardcore needs, worry not – just one C1060 has enough power to control the main system of the European Extremely Large Telescope project (reportedly the world’s largest). According to Jeff Meisel with National Instruments, a workstation “equipped with a single Tesla C1060 can achieve near real-time control of the mirror simulation and controller, which before wouldn't be possible in a single machine without the computational density offered by GPUs."

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Posted 04/08/09 at 08:21:12 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Taiwanese VGA card manufacturer Sparkle has introduced what it claims is the world’s most powerful single-GPU graphics card. According to Sparkle, its GeForce GTX 285 is the only single-GPU graphics card to feature up to 2GB GDDR3 memory. However, on closer inspection of its claim, we found another company with a similar offering.

Palit Microsystems began offering a custom-built GTX 285 with 2GB memory in February. From the face of it, Sparkle’s entire staff was probably marooned on a remote island – or away on an intergalactic excursion, and therefore had no idea what was going around.

The GTX 285 runs at a core clock frequency of 648MHz. Sparkle has also promised its card will deliver “30% faster performance than competing single GPU graphic card solutions.” But the company is mum on pricing.

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Posted 01/12/09 at 02:22:02 PM by Will Smith

Nvidia stands at a crossroads, with two closed, proprietary APIs that have mainstream potential: the general-purpose computing CUDA API, and the PhysX physics-acceleration API, which sits on top of CUDA. These are both promising technologies, but only owners of Nvidia hardware can harness their power. Meanwhile, there are two emerging open standards that mirror what Nvidia is doing with its proprietary development. One is OpenCL 1.0, and the other is a general-purpose GPU computing API, which Microsoft will include in DirectX 11. There are a relatively small number of consumer applications that use CUDA, PhysX, or OpenCL right now, but the possible applications for the tech are endless—grossly simplified, these APIs let graphics chips perform CPU-like functions.

The question Nvidia needs to be asking is simple: Will developers write their general-purpose GPU computing apps using a proprietary API that works on only a subset of PCs—those stuffed with Nvidia hardware—or will they use an open API that will work on every PC on the market?

More after the break. 

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Posted 12/12/08 at 12:52:08 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

This week, we recorded a mostly zombie-free edition of the No BS podcast. While there was a little undead chat, we also talked about CUDA vs. OpenCL vs. DirectX 11 and using iTunes the Gordon Mah Ung way. This week, we're pretty certain that we even managed to post the right pocast (if you missed last week's, just redownload it. It's linking to the right one now). Join the podcast gang as we answer your tech questions, take a trip to the Lab, and get a chock-full-o'-rage edition of Gordon Mah Ung's Rant of the Week!

Do you have a tech question? A comment? A tale of technological triumph? Just need to get something off your chest? A secret to share? Email us at maximumpcpodcast@gmail.com or call our 24-hour No BS Podcast hotline at 877.404.1337 x1337--operators are standing by. For the love of all that's holy people, if you guys don't start asking tech questions, we're going to change the name to the Nothing But Undead podcast... 

Subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/maximumpc/1337

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Posted 10/10/08 at 06:46:20 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Elcomsoft, a Russian firm, has devised an ingenious method of breaching WiFi’s WPA and WPA 2 encryption systems, according to a report at SC Magazine.

The technique leverages the parallel processing power of Nvidia’s latest graphics cards to speed up the “password recovery” process by 10,000 per cent. Global Security Systems (GSS) has advised enterprises to deploy VPNs for safeguarding their WiFi networks.

We, too, can only advise you to secure your office WiFi network using VPN encryption before professional industrial sleuths start waging brute forcing blitzkriegs using ordinary graphics cards.

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Posted 09/10/08 at 11:01:00 AM by Will Smith

Earlier this summer, both Nvidia and ATI hosted press events to unveil their new hardware—and the excitement about GPU-based encoding was palpable. We were promised that our videocards would make Photoshop faster and better and our GPUs would encode video 10 times faster than our CPUs. In fact, someone lacking tech savvy would have left these presentations thinking, "Wow, these GPU things can make common computing tasks run insanely fast, and there are a couple of games that work with them too." Of course, as is typical, the truly big promises (like 10x faster video encodes) were off in the future, when the software was "ready."



Well, the software's nearly ready. Elemental's Badaboom uses Nvidia's CUDA interface to do lots of the grunt work of DVD ripping by using the GPU instead of your musty old CPU. I've been in the Lab for the last few days putting this app through the ringer. Our test bed for this challenge is an Intel Q6600 quad core, running at a stock 2.4GHz, with 4GB of memory and a GeForce GTX 280 reference board.



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Posted 08/15/08 at 09:42:05 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Two years ago, Nvidia unveiled its Quadro Plex range of visual computing systems at SIGGRAPH 2006. Now, at this year’s SIGGRPAH, it has announced desk-mounted visual supercomputers in the Quadro Plex range. The D series of Quadro Plex visual computer systems is claimed to have leapfrogged previous versions by over a 100% in terms of performance. The NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2200 D2 VCS has two Quadro FX 5800 GPUs, 4 dual-link DVI channels, and 8 GB of frame buffer memory. Whereas its sibling the NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2100 D4 VCS has four GPUs, 8 dual-link DVI channels and a 4 GB frame buffer.

The D series visual supercomputers are ideal for highly taxing 3D models, engineering designs and other scientific visualizations. The hundred of Nvidia CUDA Parallel Processing Cores pack copious parallel computing capabilities and the visual supercomputers can be easily hooked to workstations or servers using PCI Express adapter cards. The D series is due in September with prices starting at $10,750.

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