Nvidia reveals what's next for GPU computing

newsmaker Nvidia is no longer just a graphics card company. Its advances in graphics processing unit--or GPU--computing with the Cuda parallel architecture in its Tesla and Fermi-based GeForce graphics cards have made massively parallel computing mainstream, using everyday hardware rather than research workstations.

Slightly disappointing second-quarter results and a continuing legal battle with Intel have not daunted chief executive Huang Jen-Hsun, who boasts of leading the list of Top500 supercomputers worldwide with the Nvidia-based Nebulae.

When the company announced its Cuda roadmap at the recent GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, ZDnet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK sat down with Huang to find out why parallel computing is proving so popular now and where he believes Nvidia can make a difference.

Q: We've had parallel GPU computing for several years, but why is it really taking off now?
A: It showed up at a time when performance was having a very difficult time scaling because of power and architectural challenges for processors that were designed for instruction-level parallelisation.

Read more of "Nvidia reveals what's next for GPU computing" at ZDNet UK.