Tesla Motors has posted its first profitable quarter since the company was founded a decade ago. The Palo Alto-based company reported first-quarter revenues of $562 million, marking an 83 percent jump over the previous quarter, while managing to turn a net profit of $15 million, according to a LeftLane report.
NVIDIA championed a milestone for supercomputers Wednesday with the launch of a new supercomputer cluster that focuses on eco-friendly power. Tsubame 2.0, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, uses a mix of traditional processors with Tesla cards to dramatically step up the potential maximum performance without having to ramp up the energy it uses. Although it can calculate at up to 1.19 petaflops, it uses a comparatively modest 1.2MW of power, making it 3.4 times more efficient at getting work done than Los Alamos National Laboratory's processor-only Cielo Cray.
NVIDIA has posted results for its third quarter of 2012 that it credited to the rise of smartphones and tablets using the Tegra 2. Revenue for the quarter was $1.07 billion, up 4.9 percent from the prior quarter, and grew 26.3 percent over $843.9 million recorded in the same period last year. The Consumer Products group, which includes the Tegra 2 chips, saw its revenue grow 14 percent over just the spring alone.
Chinese researchers have used a supercomputer based on NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to simulate the H1N1 virus, also known as the swine flu. Researchers at the Institute of Process Engineering of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS-IPE) have used the Mole 8.5 GPU as a "computational microscope" to peer into the atomic structure of the virus. In doing so, the researchers hope to better understand the virus and then create the anti-viral drugs which can control epidemics.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory will use the parallel processing capability of the NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPU in a new supercomputer, a Cray XK6 nicknamed "Titan." The new supercomputer could deliver over 20 petaflops, making it more than twice as fast as the most powerful supercomputer today, the Fujitsu K supercomputer. Titan will also be three times more energy efficient.
NVIDIA is represented at the currently ongoing Microsoft Build conference, and it has announced the launch of a developer program for tablets running on Windows 8 and with NVIDIA's Kal-El quad-core, next-generation Tegra processor. The company's GeForce, Quadro and Tesla cards will also be covered under the program. Developers will have the tools to create for x86- and ARM-based tablets and PCs as well.
University of Leeds scientists have created a lithium jelly battery that could both shrink notebooks, phones, and cars, but also make them safer. The new technique sheds liquid or solids in favor of mixing a polymer with a liquid electrolyte that fits between electrodes. As developed, it should have the high conductivity and longer battery lives of liquid lithium-ion packs but the safety of a polymer-only lithium pack, avoiding fire incidents.
At the currently ongoing International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam, NVIDIA showed off its new GPUDirect for Video technology that will let app developers create more realistic on-air graphics. It allows industry-standard video I/O devices to communicate directly with the company's pro-oriented Quadro and Tesla GPUs with very low lag. The solution, as NVIDIA sees it, will not only speed up real-time processing of video streams in broadcast and production work but also in manufacturing, healthcare and government agencies.
NVIDIA on Tuesday set out to lure more mid-range gamers and professionals by introducing both the regular, non-Ti version of the GeForce GTX 560 as well as a new Tesla card. The new card trips down just enough to drop the price down to $199 with 336 stream (visual effects) processors, 56 texture address units, and at least an 810MHz core clock speed, 1.62GHz effects shader clocks and 1GHz GDDR5 memory. While its core and texture unit counts are similar to the outgoing GTX 460, the newer design and higher clock speeds should make it noticeably faster.
Tesla chief Elon Musk at the Cleantech Forum on Wednesday said the Tesla Model S would get third-party app support. He hoped developers would write car-specific apps for the 17-inch, Tegra-powered touchscreen system in the electric sedan. Text-to-speech was cited as a major example at the San Francisco meet as it would help cut down on driver distraction from reading text during a drive.
Both BMW and Tesla Motors today both said they would use NVIDIA's Tegra chips for their in-car systems. The faster ARM processor gives them support for much higher resolution screens, up to the large 17-inch display in the Tesla Model S, while still providing 3D visuals and responsive touchscreen input on the Tesla car. Roots in the mobile world also make it well suited to GPS navigation, including real-time traffic.
A new Chinese supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A was revealed today at HPC 2010 in China has set a new performance benchmark, at 2.507 petaflops. In doing so, it has become the fastest supercomputer in the world, taking the title from the US-based Cray XT5, which managed a performance of 1.756 petaflops. The Tianhe-1A uses 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 CPUs, which combined lets it calculate much more in parallel.
Tesla Motors scored a coup for its dealerships on Thursday as it hired George Blankenship to head up its dealership strategy. The executive is best known for creating Apple's core retail strategy in its early years and was just recently contracted by Microsoft for its own retail stores. Tesla hopes to "revolutionize" how cars are sold and hired Blankenship because he has a reputation for being "on time and on budget," the electric automaker's CEO Elon Musk said.
NVIDIA has quietly scaled back the ambitions of its Fermi-based hardware, a document (PDF) on its own site may have revealed. A specs sheet for the Tesla 20 now shows even the faster hardware using 448 visual processing cores versus the publicly promised 512. It has also ramped down the internal clock for these individual cores to at most 1.4GHz, slightly lower than the current generation.
NVIDIA today provided details of the first official hardware to use its upcoming Fermi architecture. The Tesla 20 series is even more optimized for general-purpose computing standards like OpenCL or NVIDIA's own CUDA and handles complex math that previously hasn't been as practical, such as ISO standard double-precision math and C++ code processing. Unlike past models, though, the card model also has a video output and works as a video card rather than just as a companion device.
NVIDIA chief Jen-Hsun Huang has denied rekindled talk of his company making x86 processors. Speaking after a conference call, the CEO claims that his focus is still "very, very clear" and that the focus is on graphics processors and closely related parallel computing cards like the Tesla line. The only full processors that NVIDIA is making are mobile chips like the ARM-based Tegra series for handhelds, Huang tells CNET.
A new development by partly government-backed Fluidic Energy could potentially extend the battery life of notebooks, cars and other devices well beyond existing lithium-ion cells. Known as Metal-Air Ionic Liquid (MAIL), it would improve energy storage beyond relatively efficient zinc-air batteries by using an ionic liquid salt to conduct electricity that is much more stable and isn't prone to drying out either by accident or by eventual decay. The move would let battery makers use metals denser than zinc and therefore hold a much larger charge in a given volume.
NVIDIA this evening provided an early look at the next generation of its graphics processors. Nicknamed Fermi, the architecture for future GeForce, Quadro and Tesla chipsets will jump from 240 cores to a much larger 512 and should be much faster in each core courtesy of some industry-first techniques. Fermi chips will be the first GPUs to have a real cache hierarchy, with Level 1 caches to keep specific information on hand and a single, shared Level 2 cache for larger tasks; they will also have a new GigaThread engine that can transfer data in both directions at once and handle "thousands" of tasks at once.
NVIDIA on Tuesday announced the availability of its GPU-based Tesla architecture Personal Supercomputer, which, the company promises, has as much as 250 times the computing performance of a PC thanks to NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture and up to 960 parallel processing cores. Along with its partners, buyers can now opt for desktop PCs with the sort of computing power previously reserved for supercomputing clusters.
NVIDIA today formally released the finished version of CUDA 2.0. The second generation of the company's general-purpose programming language for its video chipsets supports 64-bit versions of Mac OS X and Windows Vista and adds support for instructions that can help offload more specific tasks from the main processor to the video card, such as 3D textures and hardware-accelerated interpolation of information.
Microsoft's next version of DirectX will have its own alternative to the OpenCL standard proposed by Apple, the company revealed yesterday at its GamesFest conference. DirectX 11 will have support for "compute shader technology" that allows modern, more generalized video cards' effects processors to perform tasks other than rendering video, including physics calculations and other chores that would normally be handled by the main system processor.
The Khronos Group late yesterday established a new alliance between vendors that could see standards for high performance computing such as OpenCL gain a foothold across many operating systems and hardware platforms. Called the Computer Working Group, the team includes graphics rivals 3DLabs, AMD, and NVIDIA, processor makers such as ARM, Freescale, Intel, and Qualcomm, and end product manufacturers such as Motorola and Nokia, all of whom hope to create and maintain genuinely open and royalty-free standards for using newer graphics hardware to process very demanding compute tasks.
NVIDIA on Monday used the occasion of its GTX 200 introduction to quietly update its Tesla line of workstation processor cards. The T10P chipset added to the cards is virtually identical to the 240-core GTX but is her spun entirely towards accelerating high performance computing tasks such as medical research and very high-level math. The very specialized nature of the chip lets it calculate as much as 900 gigaflops by itself, or 73 percent more than the earlier card it replaces.
