NVIDIA's CUDA turns GPUs into high-powered CPUs
Posted May 25th 2007 5:57AM by Nilay Patel
NVIDIA's been dancing around the general-purpose processor market for a while now -- we've heard reports that the company is developing an x86 chip, and it bought PortalPlayer last year for $357 million. Well, at this year's Microprocessor Forum the company took another small step by announcing that the final release of CUDA, its framework for utilizing high-end NVIDIA GPUs as CPUs, which will be available to developers in the second half of the year. While the idea of using a GPU as a secondary high-performance processor isn't a new one -- Folding@Home already runs on NVIDIA and ATI chips, and the Peakstream system already leverages GPUs -- CUDA should make it easier for developers to tap into high-performance graphics devices whenever they're available, without having to specifically tailor their apps to do so. CUDA, which stands for "compute unifed device architecture," currently only supports the GeForce 8800 and 8600 and Quadro FX 4600 and 5600, so it's of limited appeal right now, but here's hoping the next gen of NVIDIA chips supports CUDA from the get-go -- the Engadget Folding@Home team is looking for a few new recruits.
Lucky rich dudes and successful cinema houses are soon going to have one thing in common, they are all going to upgrade to the Sony CineAlta 4K SRX-R220 projector. The profound size of this new projector can give a vertically challenged person a huge complex. This mammoth projector can display 8.850.000 pixels of super high definition recordings in movie theaters and elite homes alike. It is the latest edition to Sony's SXRD (Silicon X-tal Reflective Display) line. Similar to the SRX-R1xx series it still can't reach 10 megapixels, but it features LMT-100 media processor, LMS-100 screen management system, RAID storage and built-in nonstop power supply. The projector boasts of 4096 x 2160 pixels resolution with a 2000:1 contrast and 14 foot Lambert brightness (apparently 47,964 cd/m2, as per Sony's site). the SRX-R220 can comfortably cover a 20 meter screen (65.6 feet) with its 4.2W xenon lamp. The R110 goes up to 17 meters with a 3.0W and 14 meters with a 2.0W lamp. The LMT-100 Media Block displays the pixels onscreen, peps the lowers resolution originals, decrypts the contents, process the multi-channel audio and place subtitles using XML or PNG files. The BNC connector lets you connect your various video gears to it, but you can hook up the computer, PlayStation 3 or AppleTV using a DVI port.
Posts
