The Hindu Business Line : Visual computing era is here: nVidia chief

From here to there: nVidia CEO Mr Jen-Hsun Huang suggests the breadth of tomorrow’s visual technology from chips for mobile phones to huge 3-D displays in his opening keynote at the nVision conference in San Jose. -

Anand Parthasarathy

San Jose (California), Aug. 27 It was in a sense the first big global gathering of the display and computer graphics business. So no one was very surprised when nVidia’s co-founder and Chief Executive, Mr Jen-Hsun Huang, opened the NVision conference with an Olympian call: “Let the era of visual computing begin!”", even as the other Olympics was just closing on the other side of the world.

Two decades after personal computer users began beefing up their machines with dedicated ‘graphics cards’ to improve visual performance, the graphics tail was well and truly wagging the processing dog: the ‘GPU’ - graphical processing unit - had become so powerful, that it seemed poised to swamp the CPU or central processing unit that lay at the heart of every PC till now.

“No”, said Mr Huang, “There will always be room for both - but visual computing is poised for a huge jump as 3-D becomes mainstream and dramatically improves our ability to absorb (and enjoy) information”.

At its first ever visual computing summit that ended here on Wednesday, the leader in this particular computing niche, put on display (no pun intended!) the breadth and reach of the digital graphics and visual medium - by letting its partners speak on its behalf:

The French Dassault Systems showcased its frontline 3-D product design tools for the aviation and auto industry including 3DVia a community Web resource opened to lay users and designers.

Microsoft, unveiled for the first time a new tool called PhotoSynth, which takes multiple still images of an object or scene, submitted by a user and stitches them together into a three dimensional panorama.

Mr Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel, a key figure in the development of the touch screen, demonstrated futuristic technology where “the mouse is an impediment to creativity with a computer” and where gestures with one finger control all functions.

Its bread and butter coming from ‘gaming’ freaks, the conference has been a mind boggling showcase of XTreme gaming. Hardcore practitioners competed round the clock, using machines fuelled by nVidia’s fastest products such as the GTX 280 graphics cards, pouring liquid oxygen on to the circuit boards to cool them and squeeze every additional megahertz of clock speed over the rated value.

At the other end of the display scale, the event served to showcase how high definition movies can be loaded on to hand held devices such as mobile phones, using chips like Tegra which cut power consumption hundred-fold to about a watt.

The combination of formidable software skills and a rich visual heritage made India an important geography for nVidia, Mr Huang told Businessline. The company has a fifth of its global development force spread across Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore.