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Nvidia chief
executive Jen-Hsun Huang told analysts today just how important cloud
graphics will be to the world. The company announced last week that its
recently announced Kepler-based graphics chips are capable of cloud
graphics. That means they can process graphics for multiple users in a
data center and then dispatch the appropriate graphics as needed to the
displays of distant remote users.
That allows big new applications for cloud computing in the
enterprise. You can, for instance, use your own puny laptop to access
huge visual projects such as engineering designs. Your computer will tap
the graphics computing power in the cloud to render the images that
your laptop could never display in real-time. One graphics processing
unit (GPU) in the cloud can supply the graphics for at least four remote
users today, compared to just one for prior chips. That makes cloud
gaming and enterprise cloud graphics applications far more economical
than in the past.
“Now we have a GPU for the cloud, a virtual GPU,” Huang said at
Nvidia’s analyst day in Santa Clara, Calif. “What that means is that a
whole bunch of users can see one GPU and use it as if it were their
own.”
Nvidia has created a lot of software that enables the virtualized
GPU, which can take graphics processing commands from a variety of users
and process them on the GPU without regard for where those commands are
coming from. No longer do the processing tasks have to come from just
one computer.
This allows the graphics chip to catch up to the central processing
unit, or CPU, which, when combined with hypervisor software originally
created by IBM for sharing mainframe computers among many users, can
serve many users from a single chip in a data center.
Huang said this cloud GPU will be valuable to the world’s 25 million
product designers around the world. These users now buy Quadro-based
graphics workstations in the millions each year. Power graphics users
then make use of those designs and then share them. Other enterprise
workers have to access high-end graphics, but in the enterprise, many of
them don’t have beefy computers.
Virtualization gets around that
problem, so you can run high-end graphics applications on a device as
simple as an iPad. Hundreds of millions of enterprise users could
benefit from cloud graphics, Huang said.
“That is completely empowering,” Huang said.
The Nvidia technology can handle virtualization quickly. It doesn’t
use a software layer, or emulation, because that approach is too slow.
The hardware has been tweaked for virtual GPU tasks.
“We wanted to put this in the cloud and for the first time, a GPU
needs to be aware that a display may not be directly connected to the
GPU,” he said. “It could be anywhere in the world. You just tell the GPU
an address, and the bits coming out of the chip are sent to that
address” to display the graphics on a distant computer.
Huang demonstrated an iPad running Windows and other demanding PC
graphics applications running on the cloud. The iPad was able to show a
high-end design program displaying a photorealistic image of a car. A
total of 1,536 Kepler cores were accessible to the iPad, so it could
handle the computing task easily.
As far games, Nvidia wants to use cloud graphics to make games
instantaneously convenient to play as TV shows. This taps a technology
dubbed the GeForce Grid. You no longer have to download a big game for
hours and have a powerful computer to play it. That’s similar to the
vision that OnLive and Gaikai have, and both are partners with Nvidia in
cloud graphics.
“This will do the same for video games what TV has done for video,” Huang said. “We think it could expand the market.”
Of course, high-end games that are played remotely could suffer from
lag, where the inputs that a gamer makes aren’t immediately translated
into actions in the game. So serious gamers are playing online games on
PCs, rather than consoles, since the delays on a high-end PC are about
65 milliseconds and they are 166 milliseconds on an online console.
With the GeForce Grid powered by Gaikai, Nvidia can reduce the lag of
the cloud graphics games to 161 milliseconds, or essentially just as
fast as a game console. That could enable large numbers of casual gamers
and non-gamers to play high-end games on relatively simple computing
devices, Huang said.
Huang showed a demo of Hawken, an upcoming high-end 3D downloadable game, working in a cloud-based environment.
“For the game developer, we can expand their reach,” he said. “Today,
you need to have the right hardware. But we can make it run on any
hardware.”
On top of that, cloud-based games are piracy free, Huang said.
Source |
venturebeat
