Looking Beyond Graphics - Nvidia.pdfVIP

Looking Beyond Graphics Analyst: Tom R. Halfhill thalfhill@ +1.408.425.6728 September 2009 Looking Beyond Graphics NVIDIA’s Next-Generation CUDA Compute and Graphics Architecture, Code-Named Fermi, Adds Muscle for Parallel Processing A typical PC has at least three cooling fans...and one case heater. That “heater” would be the graphics- processing unit (GPU) — usually a separate, highly specialized microprocessor chip dedicated to graphics. It does a brilliant job when the PC is running a graphics-intensive game or playing a video. At other times, it’s largely underutilized, radiating unused power as heat. In fact, a discrete GPU is the most underutilized component in a PC. Although it’s capable of amazing things, it spends much of its time performing routine chores, like scrolling the screen. Yet it has the potential to be the swiftest processing engine in the system — and it’s already there, just waiting for something to do. For four years, NVIDIA has waged a campaign to redefine the role of GPUs. Not that graphics aren’t important. Pushing pixels has been good business for NVIDIA, the world’s leading graphics-processor company. Since the early 1990s, NVIDIA’s GPUs have offloaded most of the graphics processing from CPUs in hundreds of millions of personal computers and videogame machines. NVIDIA continues to design its GPUs for superb graphics performance. But since 2005, NVIDIA has cultivated another fast- growing market — GPUs for computing applicati