Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says the graphics chip supplier is not working on an Intel-compatible chip, reports C/Net. A recurring rumor is that Nvidia is developing an x86-compatible chip that would be able to run PC software.
“No,” he said when asked if there was any truth to the rumor. “Nvidia’s strategy is very, very clear. I’m very straightforward about it. Right now, more than ever, we have to focus on visual and parallel computing.”
Huang went on to describe where the chip supplier sees its best opportunities for growth. “Our strategy is to proliferate the GPU (graphics processing unit) into all kinds of platforms for growth,” he said. “GPUs in servers for parallel computing, for supercomputing–and cloud computing with our GPU is a fabulous growth opportunity–and streaming video.”
“And also getting our GPUs into the lowest power platforms we can imagine and driving mobile computing with it,” Huang added, referring to its Tegra chip, which, for example, powers Microsoft’s Zune HD media player.
NVIDIA’s Tegra is a system-on-a-chip with an ARM processor developed for mobile devices such as smartphones, PDAs and MIDs.
CUDA is NVIDIA’s computing architecture that enables its GPUs to be programmed using industry standard programming languages and APIs, opening up their massive parallel processing power to a broad range of applications beyond graphics. Nvidia claims their next generation CUDA architecture, code named Fermi, will deliver supercomputing features and performance at 1/10th the cost and 1/20th the power.
EM Photonics has NVIDIA GPU-accelerated versions of many linear algebra routines. Appro’s Cluster combines NVIDIA’s Tesla with Intel’s Xeon.
