Charlie Foxtrot

Posts Tagged ‘nVidia’

Alienware made a splash at CES with the Alienware M11x, a CNET Best of CES 2010 winner.  It is a tiny laptop full of GPU horsepower.  They took a sub 12-inch laptop and equipped it with a powerful GeForce GT 335.  Mad gaming.  Good battery life.  Only $799.  15-inch power in 11.6-inch package.

“In terms of performance and form factor alone, the M11x is an amazing machine, but when you pair that with its alluring starting price of just $799, it is tough to beat.”

I’ve seen it billed as the world’s smallest gaming rig and world’s most powerful sub 12-inch laptop.  Another world’s first, made possible by NVIDIA technology. Check it out in this video for the scoop or take a tour with Laptop Magazine.

GPU Computing is the use of the massively parallel architecture of the graphics processing unit (GPU) as a computational engine that can be programmed with high level languages and APIs. Fact is, More and more processing is being moved from the CPU to the GPU.  We already have a great roster of applications that run on the NVIDIA CUDA architecture that consumers love. Video has been the killer application for the GPU, and a number of new video applications are able to tap into the computing power of the GPU.  Adobe has added support for GPU computing to their popular CS4 Suite, Flash 10.1 and their Mercury Playback Engine. Now Microsoft is adding Office 2010 to the list.

“Microsoft has published the hardware requirements for the upcoming Office 2010 Suite, and people noticed one surprising addition: A DirectX compatible Video Processor.  Over at the TechNet blog, Microsoft explains why:

If your computer has a GPU, it lets us perform graphics rendering tasks (like drawing charts in Excel, or transitions in PowerPoint) in the GPU instead of in the CPU, which parallelizes work and speeds up performance. This is particularly relevant for users of PowerPoint 2010, which will introduce some awesome new graphics and video integration features (more info at the PowerPoint team blog).”

CPUs are an important component of the PC. However, too often PCs ship with insufficient graphics processing power and the result is an unbalanced PC that can’t run the applications you want. For the best experience, you should buy a PC with the right balance of CPU/GPU horsepower.

The new AMD Radeon HD 5670, the first graphics card to bring DirectX 11 support to the sub-$100 market and offer next-generation features to almost any budget. The Redwood part (as it was codenamed) is nearly 3.5x smaller in die size than the first DX11 GPUs from AMD while still offering support for DirectCompute 5.0, Eyefinity multi-monitor gaming and of course DX11 features (like tessellation) in upcoming Windows gaming titles. Unfortunately, performance on the card is not revolutionary even for the $99 graphics market, though power consumption has been noticeably lowered while keeping the card well cooled in a single-slot design.