GTC 04 Features New Technology and New Partnerships for Nvidia

Nvidia's GTC is the conference CUDA built.

Nvidia has used it to promote GP GPU, its growing presence in HPC (high-performance computing), and also new applications for big data, and now mobile. Long ago, Nvidia tired of the tit for tat competition with Intel, AMD, and several companies that have since disappeared. The company's strategy has always been to change the game, write new rules, and buy the playing field. Thus, as software companies struggled to transition to the new age of multi-core/multi-chip, Nvidia developed CUDA, a slight fork in the code road to make it easier to develop applications that could take advantage of Nvidia multi-core GPUs and heterogeneous computing. As mobile grew big enough to tempt us to write requiems for the PC, Nvidia introduced its Tegra line of mobile products.

Jen Hsun Huang set the tone in his keynote by talking about where the bottlenecks are and how Nvidia intends to overcome them. Nvidia has been talking about a unified memory plan for the CPU and GPU, but Huang surprised attendees with the announcement of the upcoming Pascal for 2015, to follow Maxwell, which succeeds Kepler. Nvidia has done some re-arranging of the road map. In previous road map presentations, Huang had talked about Volta, that chip has now been pushed up the road map.

Surprise: Here is Pascal. Nvidia did a little shuffling of its road map to make room for Pascal. (Source: JPR)

Pascal addresses the bottleneck between the CPU and GPU with unified memory, the new NVLink. It also features 3D memory and stacked DRAM chips. The NKLink is a serial interconnected-like PCIe, and it will be used for GPU-to-CPU and GPU-to-GPU communication. It will enable much faster bandwidth, five to 12 times faster, to 80GB/sec. The Pascal GPU will also include 3D Stacked DRAM with through-silicon-vias (TSVs) that enable more density for memory with no additional room taken up on the PCB.

Although Huang said the GTC Conference is about everything but gaming, it's inconceivable that an Nvidia event could happen without a big clanging transformer video of the latest graphics board. This one required earplugs. Nvidia showed off the upcoming GeForce GTC Titan Z, which is based on two GK110 GPUs, each with 6GB of frame buffer memory. Each GPU has 2,880 CUDA cores for a total of 5,760, with 12GB of frame buffer memory.

But really cars

In the second half of 2013, with the arrival of the Nvidia's K1 chip in January, Nvidia announced that its Kepler architecture had been extended to the Tegra line of low-power processors for mobile, bringing with it CUDA support and the ability to accelerate apps for automotive, the Internet of Things (IoT), robots, tablets, phones, and whatever magical thing comes along. The K1 includes 2GB memory support for USB 3.0, HDMI 1.4 Gigabit Ethernet, audio, SATA, miniPCIe, and an SD card slot.

At GTC, Nvidia officially announced the TK1 Developer Kit, codenamed Jetson. The company has actually had Jetson out there for some time, but now Nvidia is seeking to make it widely available to encourage tinkerers to start tinkering. The Developer Kit comes with a C/C++ toolkit for CUDA and Nvidia's VisionWorks toolkit with support for cameras and sensors. In addition to CUDA, the SDK supports OpenGL 4.4. It's available now to the public for pre-order for $192 from Nvidia, Microscenter, and Newegg. It can also be ordered through Avionic Design, SECO, and Zotac in Europe.

Nvidia has been showing off its UI Composer Studio for some time now. It's an application that enables car designers to design, prototype, evaluate, and deploy digital instrument clusters and in-vehicle infotainment systems. Even if the manufacturers do not use the tool in their actual production, it makes a nifty demo to show off the promise of digital technology in the car.

Nvidias UI Composer Studio is a 3D content creation application for car dashboards. The company has been working with automotive companies to push the evolution for digital dashboards, and Tesla has put it into production with its spectacular center module. (Source: Nvidia)

Audi and Tesla are pretty far along in their work with Nvidia's chips for automotive, and BMW is another customer. First, the applications are for infotainment systems, which is low-hanging fruit for the companies building mobile application processors. The application isn't so different from tablets and, in fact, Nvidia showed back-seat tablet companions for automotive infotainment, which could be used to control music, video, and other content from the back seat.

Next up comes assisted driving, and Nvidia is talking about the work it is doing with Audi. Jen Hsung Huang said, The car of the future is going to be your smartest robot. Andreas Reich, head of Audi pre-development, arrived on stage with a self-driving Audi. The first features we'll see are traffic assist so when you're stuck in a horrible traffic jam, the car can take over the stop-and-go and maybe stave off insanity. Also, self-parking is on the way with systems that can process 120 millions of pixels per second.

Baby you can park my car: Audi's computer vision can survey the surroundings for spaces in which the car can fit. There is no doubt the machine can probably do a better job of getting into tight spaces than a harried human.

Jen Hsun Huang is enthusiastic about the automotive industry. He said, people ask, why do you want to be in the automotive industry? It's not a very big industry, and it moves slowly. Huang challenges the idea that the automotive industry of the future will be small, pointing out that subsystems in cars, including computer vision, infotainment, and digital dashboards, will use multiple processors, and some of them are going to be Nvidia's.

Were the only semiconductor company that serves all three markets,

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