Nvidia

Nvidia, trying to move its graphics chips into the supercomputing market, has found a niche helping engineers build brain-like systems called neural networks.

For years, the company has advocated the idea of offloading processing tasks from general-purposes central processing units (CPUs) to its own graphics processing units (GPUs). That approach has won over some researchers and companies involved with neural networks, which reproduce some of the electrical behavior of real-world nerve cells inside a computer.

Neurons in the real world work by sending electrical signals around the brain, but much of the actual functioning of the brain remains a mystery. … Read more

Performing more than 33 quadrillion calculations per second, a new Chinese supercomputer called Tianhe-2 arrived two years earlier than expected to claim the top spot in a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The Top500 list, updated twice a year at the International Supercomputing Conference, measures performance for mammoth systems typically used for jobs like modeling nuclear weapons explosions and forecasting global climate changes. And the Chinese machine, at the National University of Defense Technology, is more mammoth than most.

The Tianhe-2 has 32,000 Xeon processors boosted by 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator processors for … Read more

With one small feature, iOS 7 might introduce the biggest change in iOS gaming since the App Store.

There's something I've wished for on both the iPhone and iPad for years: a true, universal, dedicated game controller. iOS 7 has granted my wish: indeed, one of the small but very significant additions to the next mobile OS announced at WWDC allows for third-party controllers. It's funny this happened to be announced during E3, because it just might be the trigger to change the mobile gaming industry.

Why it's big Third-party accessory-makers have tried making game controllers … Read more

Nvidia doesn't seem happy with news that Advanced Micro Devices has all but won this generation's console cycle.

The company pointed out Wednesday in an interview with The Verge that, while the next-generation consoles are notably more powerful on the graphics side, they still can't compete with the chips Nvidia is producing on the PC side.

"I'm glad the new consoles are here," Nvidia Senior Vice President Tony Tamasi told The Verge. "If for no other reason than to raise the bar." He also pointed out to The Verge that his company'… Read more

While most eyes at E3 2013 are on the new Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One consoles, it was only one year ago that PC gaming took center stage. It was at E3 2012 that the current Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles were looking more than tired, and many of the best games on display, from XCOM to Metro: Last Light, presented themselves best on high-powered PC hardware.

In 2013, despite the massive marketing and engineering effort that is going to the new living room consoles, no one expects even the PS4 or XB1 to be able to match … Read more

TAIPEI -- There have been plenty of Haswell laptops unveiled at Computex here this year, but so far only one model comes with a 3K screen.

At 2,880x1,620 pixels, the MSI GT60 3K Edition's 15.5-inch display boasts a high 213 pixel-per-inch (ppi) density. This makes it almost neck-and-neck with the Google Chromebook Pixel and Apple MacBook Pro with its Retina display.

A laptop with such high-resolution display will naturally need some serious processing power to drive it. That's probably why the Taiwanese company paired the GT60 3K with an Nvidia GeForce GTX780M discrete GPU (4GB … Read more

After an aborted launch last Halloween, the WikiPad Android gaming tablet looks ready to finally hit the market. So says WikiPad Inc., anyway, who this morning declared that its unique gaming device will finally hit shelves this coming Tuesday, June 11 (aka the first official day of E3).

This new WikiPad, you may recall, is a shrunken edition of the 10-inch behemoth (itself an update of the original 8-inch version) the company was showing off last year.

This new model, which came to light this past February, has the same core features as the 10-inch model -- removable standalone Android … Read more

TAIPEI -- In a demo showing Nvidia's vision for multiscreen technology at Computex, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off its first final production model of the Nvidia Shield. This Android gaming device was unveiled at CES 2013, and will be available to U.S. customers at the end of June. Preorders started two weeks ago.

While the form factor of the production model is largely similar to that of the prototype shown at CES, there have been tweaks since. According to Huang, the Nvidia team concentrated on refining the feel of the buttons, directional controllers and triggers.

Changes have also … Read more

TAIPEI -- Are you someone who loves drawing on a smartphone but bemoans the fact that you need a Galaxy Note 2 to get the precise strokes required for your masterpiece?

Well, the good news is that during a demonstration at the Computex electronics show in Taiwan, Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off a software-based pressure sensitive display powered by the company's Tegra 4 chipset, and he was using a normal nondigitizer stylus to draw on it.

The trick behind the tech lies in Nvidia's Prism display, introduced with the Tegra 3. Prism basically reads the screen … Read more