Nvidia unveiled some interesting data about its progress on CUDA and GPGPU-enabled processors. During the Nvidia Editor's Day Spring 2008, the company’s CTO disclosed that more than 70 million CUDA-enabled graphics chips (beginning with the GeForce 8-series) have shipped to date. According to David Kirk, Nvidia sees 350.000 CUDA-enabled driver downloads every week, while more than 60.000 CUDA SDK downloads were reported.

Nvidia plans to double these numbers once the next generation of GeForce cards is released.

Also interesting to note was a statement from an unnamed Oil & Gas company, which claims that a their current prototype 128 node GPU cluster is expected to outperform their current 4000-CPU cluster system. We somewhat suspect that the quoted company was either Chevron, British Petrol (BP) or Royal Dutch Shell, since these three came have reported the most progress with GPU-accelerated simulation software.

At this point we are convinced that GPU acceleration will become a big part of our hardware future and we are looking forward to products surrounding GeForce, Tesla, Quadro, Radeon, FireGL, FireStream and Larrabee.

Publicity fodder...

May 23, 2008 13:00     

With the advances made by ATI lately, the press releases from nVidia have been poring out of every hole at nVidia these days. Most of it just re-hashes of last year's news. Nothing really new or noteworthy. Now that Intel is also looking to break into the discreet 3D chip market, nVidia must really be worried. Maybe their computer generated chip production format is starting to feel the burn? They do seem to be able to produce more bugs with that method than either Intel or ATI...

Narg report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -5

ATI is in its death throws

May 23, 2008 14:46     

No money for R&D = a dead chip company. nVidia has superior cards and just bought a Ray-tracing company. The future is nVidia vs. Intel, AMD/ATI is nothing but a foot-note now.
therooster report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

RE:Publicity fodder...

May 24, 2008 02:51     

hahah.. you are kidding, right? You can talk about the future all you want, but right now nVidia is the undisputed front-runner of GPU graphics tech. They have the best performing hardware, their GPGPU 'CUDA' project is light years ahead of ATI's "bare metal", and they have a GPU-accelerated professional 3D graphics rendering API (Gelato) and a GPU-accelerated Physics API.
sl report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

nVidia's ability is slowing down...

May 25, 2008 13:20     

nVidia is slowly but surely reaching the end of it's ability to design and create chips with no pre-fab. That routine has bought them the highest ranking on crash reports to Microsoft. They can't write a driver to save their life today. ATI may no be the fastest, but their quality is 100 times better in the long run.
Narg report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

Get a grip man @ Therooster

May 26, 2008 02:41     

You sound like some kind of religious nut. Every positive thing NVidia does is not going to kill AMD/ATI. Just like every time a bell rings it does not mean an angel is getting it's wings. The fact that there is two graphics companies is a good thing. One company expensive cards and no progress. Two companies - Cheap cards, lots of progress. You savvy?
Sq7 report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1