It's getting way too graphic!

Mainline entertainment and news media is usually abuzz with info about movies that raked it in every weekend. But, did you know that blockbuster games consistently outsell the biggest Hollywood films? Sales of “Call of Duty: Ghosts” released last November touched $1 billion within the first 24 hours!

Unlike movie-goers, gamers are driven by the desire to be both entertained and challenged by new technology. But, what do you think is the reason behind the extraordinary success of some of these gaming franchises? Among others, the magic of visual effects made possible by the matchless graphics card called GeForce from NVIDIA. Based in Silicon Valley, California, NVIDIA now calls itself a specialist in the art and science of computer graphics, having invented the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in 1999. It has since successfully extended its applications to video games, movie production, product design, medical diagnosis and scientific research.

Staying true to its core strengths, NVIDIA has been reinventing itself over the last few. Last month the company made a flurry of announcements during the GTC 2014 held in San Jose. In a bid to up the ante against tech and business rivals - Intel, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) and Qualcomm, NVIDIA’s new initiatives has industry going gaga with the potential applications of some this new tech.

Intel has a R&D budget of $2.5 billion, Qualcomm’s is $1.2 billion, but NVIDIA’s is only about $ 327million. Yet, NVIDIA’s co-founder CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, with characteristic Silicon Valley chutzpah, came close to declaring the company as the ultimate in visual computing. As he delivered his verdict at the conference, the encore was the dramatic entry of a driver-less Audi on the stage, aided by NVIDIA’s computing prowess.

Apart from this, there was this NVLink, a GPU interconnect developed with IBM that enables GPUs and CPUs to share data as high as 12 times the rate they can now. In lay terms, this will be akin to increasing the diameter of the connecting pipe between two tanks, say A and B, with water flowing from A to B, so that the final outflow from B will not be impeded by the smaller diameter of the interconnection.

The next notable product was Pascal, named after the great 17th century French mathematician, physicist and inventor. It features stacked memory, a technology that takes multiple layers of memory components and integrates them vertically — in a stack — on the same package as the GPU. This reduces, even in micro miniature environment, the distances for the to and fro movement of data between memory and the processor, increasing the total throughput speed. “The result: several times greater bandwidth, more than twice the memory capacity and quadrupled energy efficiency,” says Sumit Gupta General Manager of NVIDIA.

Also unveiled was the Jetson TK1 Developer Kit, an embedded platform designed to give techies the hardware tools to create applications on smartphones, gaming consoles, putting super computing capabilities to low-power devices.

Suddenly, there was an amazing display of a solid block swinging from an elastic with smoke particles moving around it. This was the effect of combining mathematically intensive computation based on laws of physics with stunning graphics — the handiwork of the new version of Nvidia's high-end Titan graphics card, its top of the line offering for die-hard PC gamers.

Next in line was the IRAY VCA (visual computing appliance) costing $50,000 with the capability to work alone or with multiple IRAYs to interactively designed with extraordinary visual fidelity noise-free clarity, bringing the realism of physically-based global illumination. It helps doing away with costly build of physical products, as designers can now examine and interact with those virtual models as if they are real objects. With an array of 19 IRAYs working together, a full resolution of a model of Honda was built up on the screen on stage at an impressive speed.

Not to be left behind in the race for cloud computing, NVIDIA announced, in partnership with VMware, measures to bring graphic-rich technology for cloud computing. It gives for the first time multi-tenant desktop-as-a-service platform for service providers to deliver graphics-rich desktops and applications to customers requiring visual computing, such as engineering firms, automakers, movie studios and retail designers.

Adobe, Baidu, Netflix, Yandex – some of the biggest names in social media and cloud computing use NVIDIA GPU accelerators to provide seemingly magical search, intelligent image analysis and personalised movie recommendations, based on a technology called advanced machine learning.

Machine learning is just what it sounds like: training computers to teach themselves by sifting through data — for example, learning to identify a fox by analysing lots of images of dogs, ferrets, jackals, raccoons and other animals, including foxes. This is exactly how people learn in real life. Tech analysts believe that NVIDIA did not give such a big nudge to its next generation graphics processor as expected.

Business analysts feel that the company will face headwinds in its main line of business of graphics processors because of stagnant PC markets.

(The writer was in San Jose at the invite of NVIDIA.)

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