CES 2013: Tegra 4, the Vision of Windows RT?

Subject: General Tech, Graphics Cards, Mobile, Shows and Expos | January 7, 2013 - 12:42 PM | Scott Michaud
Tagged: CES, ces 2013, nvidia, windows rt

It is the day after the NVIDIA keynote and the Tegra 4 floodgates are open. Sure, the rumors were fairly accurate, but I guess speculation waits for a solid basis to be believable.

The Tegra 4 marries 72 of the expected GPU cores with four… “plus one” as the bonus core is present although 4+1 branding does not seem to be… ARM Cortex-A15 cores. This push to an A15-based design provides a significant performance increase over Tegra 3. Another interesting feature is the ability to transmit 4K video should you have a suitable source or the rendered application can support 4K at a suitable framerate. You can then add in Icera’s LTE modem which is interesting in its own right to see a compelling product.

Jen-Hsun spent about as much time justifying the need for speed as he did hyping its performance. Photographers, particularly those who wish to dabble with HDR, are able to use the Tegra 4 to vastly increase the speed of image processing at the time of taking the shot. Tonal mapping for an HDR image will take just 200ms of processing which allows HDR to be used along with burst mode and a flash.

Paul Thurrott over at the Supersite for Windows ponders whether this was Microsoft’s vision for Windows RT. He wonders whether Microsoft will try to take a mulligan on the first generation similar to Windows Phone 7-based devices led us to Windows Phone 8. At the same point, the weight which the Surface was designed to bare is pretty immense if it was just designed to buckle to Tegra 4. I would not put it past Microsoft although the Surface does not strike me as a product designed to have a doughy half-baked middle -- despite what actually shipped.

PC World also notes how Qualcomm continues to improve their products and have just recently transitioned to a 28nm process for the Snapdragon S4. Qualcomm is a giant and even then there is also Samsung to contend with in the ARM space -- then you consider x86 brings at least Intel to the game with its massive advantage in legacy software that are usually not abstracted by a platform-independent runtime layer.

PC Perspective's CES 2013 coverage is sponsored by AMD.

Follow all of our coverage of the show at http://pcper.com/ces!

CES 2013: NVIDIA Grid to Fight Gaikai and OnLive?

Subject: Editorial, General Tech, Graphics Cards, Systems, Mobile, Shows and Expos | January 7, 2013 - 01:07 AM | Scott Michaud
Tagged: CES, ces 2013, nvidia

The second act of the NVIDIA keynote speech re-announced their Grid cloud-based gaming product first mentioned back in May during GTC. You have probably heard of its competitors, Gaikai and OnLive. The mission of these services is to have all of the gaming computation done in a server somewhere and allow the gamer to log in and just play.

The NVIDIA Grid is their product top-to-bottom. Even the interface was created by NVIDIA and, as they laud, rendered server-side using the Grid. It was demonstrated to stream to an LG smart TV directly or Android tablets. A rack will contain 20 servers with 240 GPUs with a total of 200 Teraflops of computational power. Each server will initially be able to support 24 players, which is interesting, given the last year of NVIDIA announcements.

Last year, during the GK110 announcement, Kepler was announced to support hundreds of clients to access a single server for professional applications. It seems only natural that Grid would benefit from that advancement: but it apparently does not. With a limit of 24 players per box, equating to a maximum of two players per GPU, it seems odd that a limit would be in place. The benefit of stacking multiple players per GPU is that you can achieve better-than-linear scaling in the long-tail of games.

Then again, all they need to do is solve the scaling problem before they have a problem with scaling their service.

PC Perspective's CES 2013 coverage is sponsored by AMD.

Follow all of our coverage of the show at http://pcper.com/ces!

Brace Yourself: The PC Perspective CES 2013 Coverage is Coming!

Subject: Graphics Cards, Networking, Motherboards, Cases and Cooling, Processors, Systems, Storage, Mobile, Shows and Expos | January 5, 2013 - 10:47 AM | Ryan Shrout
Tagged: CES, ces 2013, pcper

It's that time of year - the staff at PC Perspective is loaded up and either already here in Las Vegas, on their way to Las Vegas or studiously sitting at their desk at home - for the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show!  I know you are on our site looking for all the latest computer hardware news from the show and we will have it.  The best place to keep checking is our CES landing page at http://pcper.com/ces.  The home page will work too. 

We'll have stories covering companies like, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, Zotac, Sapphire, Galaxy, EVGA, Lucid, OCZ, Western Digital, Corsair and many many more that I don't feel like listing here.  It all starts Sunday with CES Unveiled and then the NVIDIA Press Conference where they will announce...something.

Also, don't forget to subscribe to the PC Perspective Podcast as we will be bringing you daily podcasts wrapping up each day.  We are also going to try to LIVE stream them on our PC Perspective Live! page but times and bandwidth will vary.

PC Perspective's CES 2013 coverage is sponsored by AMD.

Follow all of our coverage of the show at http://pcper.com/ces!

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 SE Information Comes Out

Subject: Graphics Cards | January 4, 2013 - 09:10 PM | Ryan Shrout
Tagged: nvidia, kepler, gk106, gtx 660 se

Are you ready for another entry to the confusing graphics market?  NVIDIA has you covered with the upcoming GeForce GTX 660 SE that will target the $180-200 market and hit the AMD Radeon HD 7870 1GB square in the jaw.  With the current lineup of GeForce cards that is the one area where NVIDIA is at an obvious disadvantage with the gap between the GTX 650 Ti and the GTX 660. 

As is usually the case, when a new graphics card is ready to hit the market, leaks occur in all directions.  Already we are seeing screenshots of specifications and benchmarks from PCEVA.  If the rumors are right you'll see the GTX 660 SE released in Q1 of 2013 with 768 CUDA cores, 24 ROPs and a 192-bit memory bus.  Interestingly, the GTX 660 SE will be based on GK106 and has the same core count as the GTX 650 Ti...the performance differences will be seen going from the 128-bit memory bus to 192-bit.  

Current GPU-Z screenshots are showing a clock speed of 928 MHz with a Boost clock of 1006 MHz, running just about the same clock rates as the GTX 650 Ti (though the 650 series does not have GPU Boost technology enabled).  It also looks like the GTX 660 SE will use GDDR5 memory running 5.6 GHz and a 2GB capacity. 

With CES just around the corner (we are leaving in the morning!) we will ask around and see if anyone has more information about a solid price point and time frame for release!

AMD Has Lots to DisplayPort at CES 2013

Subject: General Tech, Graphics Cards, Displays | January 3, 2013 - 07:32 PM | Scott Michaud
Tagged: ces 2013, CES, DisplayPort, amd

It has been several months since we first heard about AMD’s multi-stream transport hub -- its friends call it MST hub -- announced with the FirePro W600 last June. Since then news has been pretty quiet about the 1-to-4 DisplayPort device.

It turns out that AMD wants to roll the dice in Vegas along with several other demonstrations.

Image from Rage3D Forums

The cute feature for the MST is its ability to split a 4K image into four 2K monitors. The reason why this is cute is because the hub enables the user to plug four-times as many monitors as they have DisplayPort 1.2 sockets on their GPU. The W600, for instance, contains 6 DisplayPort 1.2 plugs which enable it to drive 24 separate monitors from a single-slot card.

Image from Rage3D Forums

Unfortunately, another feature of DisplayPort 1.2 is the ability to route sound uniquely to each display. The hub, as announced in June, is incapable of providing audio from its one input to its four displays.

A last goodie is the capacity to mix landscape and portrait monitors together in an Eyefinity setup. Stay tuned for our impending CES 2013 coverage for more details on these demos.

PC Perspective's CES 2013 coverage is sponsored by AMD.

Follow all of our coverage of the show at http://pcper.com/ces!

Meet Tahiti LE, the new 7870 MYST Edition

Subject: Graphics Cards | January 2, 2013 - 04:08 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: powercolor, 7870 LE, MYST edition, tahiti LE, amd

The 7870 Limited Edition is a bit of an odd duck when you compare it to a stock 7870GHz Edition; it has 1536 stream processors as opposed to 1280 on the stock card, the base clock of 925MHz (975MHz Boost Clock) is slower than the 1GHz but the RAM is clocked even higher than a 7950 at 6GHz.  [H]ard|OCP wanted to see just how these tweaks effected the performance of the card, both at stock speeds and at their highest stable overclock of 1.2GHz GPU and 6.2GHz VRAM.  Check out the performance results to see if this card can approach the HD7950's power.

"PowerColor has released a new graphics card based on the new AMD "Tahiti" 7870 LE core. We will investigate whether it is a worthy Limited Edition or simply a Lame Edition by comparing it to a Radeon HD 7870 GHz edition and a GTX 660 Ti with comparisons also to an HD 7950. Will this card be a deal, or a dud? You may be surprised."

Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:

Graphics Cards

• AMD Radeon HD 8790M Video Card Preview @ Legit Reviews
• PowerColor PCS+ Radeon HD 7870 (Tahiti LE) 2GB Myst @ Tweaktown
• HIS Radeon HD 7850 IceQ Turbo 2GB Review @ Custom PC Review
• HIS Radeon HD 7950 3GB IceQ X2 Overclocked @ Tweaktown
• VTX3D HD7990 @ Kitguru
• ASUS HD 7970 DirectCU II Review @ OCC
• HIS Radeon HD 7850 2GB IceQ Turbo Video Cards in CrossFire @ Tweaktown
• Graphics cards in Windows 8 and DirectX 11.1: more efficient with better performance @ Hardware.info
• Arctic Cooling Accelero Hybrid VGA Cooler Review: Not For the Faint of Heart @ AnandTech
• Water and Air for a Graphics Card: ARCTIC Accelero Hybrid Cooling System @ X-bit Labs
• Nouveau NVIDIA Driver Can Be Faster With Linux 3.8 @ Phoronix

Phoronix on OpenCL Driver Optimization, NVIDIA vs. AMD

Subject: Editorial, General Tech, Graphics Cards | December 28, 2012 - 02:43 AM | Scott Michaud
Tagged: opencl, nvidia, amd

The GPU is slowly becoming the parallel processing complement to your branching logic-adept CPU. Developers have been slow to adopt this new technology but that does not hinder the hardware manufacturers from putting on a kettle of tea for when guests arrive.

While the transition to GPGPU is slower than I am sure many would like, developers are rarely quick on the uptake of new technologies. The Xbox 360 was one of the first platforms where unified shaders became mandatory and early developers avoided them by offloading vertex code to the CPU. On that note: how much software still gets released without multicore support?

Phoronix, practically the arbiter of all Linux news, decided to put several GPU drivers and their manufacturers to the test. AMD was up first and their results showed a pretty sizeable jump in performance at around October of this year through most of their tests. The article on NVIDIA arrived two days later and saw performance trended basically nowhere since February with the 295.20 release.

A key piece of information is that both benchmarks were performed with last generation GPUs: the GTX 460 on the NVIDIA side, with the 6950 holding AMD’s flag. You might note that 295.20 was the last tested driver to be released prior to the launch of Kepler.

These results seem to suggest that upon the launch of Kepler, NVIDIA did practically zero optimizations to their older "Fermi" architecture at least as far as these Linux OpenCL benchmarks are concerned. On the AMD side, it seems as though they are more willing to go back and advance the performance of their prior generation as they release new driver versions.

There are very few instances where AMD beats out NVIDIA in terms of driver support -- it is often a selling point for the jolly green giant -- but this appears to be a definite win for AMD.