Sometimes it’s easy to forget companies that aren’t Apple and Samsung and Sony. But chipmakers deserve your love too, which is why you should sit back and relax while you check out this webcast of Nvidia’s live press conference at the CES 2012 International show in Las Vegas.

We have no idea what we’ll see here but chances are it’ll make a big difference in the way we use our gadgetry over the next year. I’ve got my fingers crossed for more efficient processing (read: longer battery life), since we’ve already seen Nvidia’s quad-core chip, the Tegra 3.

Update: Webcast no longer live.

Forget that specs do not matter for a minute. The first bit of competitive benchmarks of the Nvidia Tegra 3 are just now hitting thanks to the Asus Transformer Prime. Nvidia’s quad-core mobile platform will likely be the de facto chipset to power Ice Cream Sandwich tablets; it will be everywhere next year. Nvidia has long touted the Tegra 3′s processing power, stating that the platform will absolutely trounce all competitors including the aging dual-core Apple A5. That doesn’t seem to be the case though. Early benchmarks are stating the A5 keeps up just fine.

Hot Hardware and AnandTech both got their hands on a Transformer Prime tablet and ran it through their exhaustive tests including a number of benchmarks. In most tests the Tegra 3-powered Transformer bests the iPad 2, but only just slightly. Most of the benchmarks used test real world activities such as web browsing and JavaScript. However, graphic rendering was tested also tested and only when using GLBenchmark 2.1 does the Transformer Prime completely destroy the iPad 2. The A5 in the iPad 2 actually outpaces the Tegra 3 in BaseMark ES 2.0′s frame per second OpenGL test.

The tests do show that the Tegra 3 is a big improvement over the Tegra 2.

Of course these early benchmarks could be skewed in a number of ways. The benchmark mark software might not yet be optimized for the quad-core Tegra 3. GLBenchmark’s Android app was last updated in September. Also, there isn’t a benchmark yet available on both platforms that tests CPU performance. The Tegra 3′s quad-core setup will likely clobber the A5 when directly compared.

The Tegra 3′s rendering and OpenGL performance is just one part of the chip’s appeal. The quad-core chip actually features a fifth so-called companion core for low-level and background processing that will ultimately improve battery life. The Tegra 3 also offers developers a much more robust system, which will hopefully improve the overall Android ecosystem.

Once again, specs (and benchmarks) are becoming less meaningful. The average consumer doesn’t care about companion cores or Javascript performance. Simply stating that a tablet is powered by a powerful processor that’s easy on the battery should satisfy most. But the iPad once again wins if that same consumer is told Apple’s tablet features a just slightly less-power chip but ten times the amount of available apps. Content is still king.

We are entering into a new era, ladies and gentlemen. Well, “era” may not be the right word considering how quickly things change in these here mobile parts, but the fact remains the same: Quad-core mobile processors are here. And the ones that aren’t quite here yet are coming.

While many of our brilliantly geeky readers need no tutorial on the advantages of four processing cores, some of you may be thinking “Uh… OK, why do I care?” So I took it upon myself to place a few calls and get some of the big guns — Qualcomm, Nvidia, and TI — to explain why exactly you should care (or shouldn’t), and what kind of differences technology like this can make in the average user’s daily phone usage.

Right off the bat, there are a few myths we need to squash, the most prominent being the misguided belief that doubling cores automatically doubles processing performance. That’s not so true. According to Qualcomm vice president of product management Alex Katouzian, upgrading from a single-core CPU to a dual-core processor yields 50 percent better performance, while upgrading from dual-core to quad-core increases performance by just 25 percent. The second commonly held but utterly untrue belief is that all mobile processors are created equally. These companies actually work extra hard to differentiate themselves, which is difficult when the end-user has little say over which processors get stuck in which devices.

Generally speaking (as in, with no particular brand or model in mind), a quad-core CPU should most noticeably do two things. The first is to improve performance during multi-tasking or use of multi-threaded applications. Web browsing, for example, is a multi-threaded process, as are many advanced gaming applications. Android is also natively multi-threaded. The second noticeable improvement quad-core should yield is an increase in battery life. Now, your average CPU usually only consumes about 15 percent of your battery life during regularly daily usage, so the improvements won’t usually be that staggering. Still, battery life is a big problem right now in mobile and any improvement is a worthwhile one.

Nvidia has been the first to bring quad-core processing to mobile, in the form of its Tegra 3 Kal-El SoC. Aside from the general benefits afforded by four cores, Nvidia specifically differentiates itself with what it calls a Companion core. The Companion core is a patented fifth core that maxes out at speeds of 500MHz. It uses patented technology known as variable symmetry multiprocessing (vSMP), which allows the processor to power cores on and off based on the device’s workload.

The Companion core handles just about everything during low performance tasks and in stand-by mode, like email and monitoring the network for incoming calls. When you start on something more performance-intensive, like web browsing, facial recognition or photo stitching, other cores are powered on to handle the task. This is Nvidia’s way of improving performance while saving battery life, while others have found different ways to make quad-core stand out.

Qualcomm, for example, is about to release its APQ8064 SoC, which has a special trick. Most multicore processors clock up and down at the same time. Qualcomm’s processor, on the other hand, is able to clock one core at the max while clocking the second needed core only to the speed it needs to complete the task.

In other words, since Qualcomm’s processor cores can be clocked individually, a task that overflows on the first core may only need the second core spinning at 60 percent of its max speed. So just like Nvidia’s Companion core hooks you up on the battery life front, so will Qualcomm’s individual clocking technology.

Texas Instruments, however, has yet to outline plans for their quad-core offerings and seems to be sticking with dual-core OMAP SoCs for the time being. That said, TI maintains that its OMAP 5 SoC equipped with a dual-core Cortex A15 processor (and two Cortex M4 cores) is a mature system that is more efficient at handling instructions. Some even refer to it as a quad-core system, though TI itself still calls this a dual-core SoC. And they believe it’ll compete. The company went so far as to say that its smart multi-core architecture actually takes 50 percent more instructions than the Cortex-A9 MPCore’s four processing cores as seen in Nvidia’s Tegra 3.

The truth is this is just the beginning when it comes to the migration toward four cores, and there’ll be plenty more to learn in the coming months.

There has been a lot of whispering about Nvidia’s next-generation Tegra chip, code-named Kal-El (Superman’s Kryptonian name, for the uninitiated), since it was first detailed on a roadmap back in Februrary. But it hasn’t shown up quite yet in any actual handsets or tablets, though we’re told it has been adopted by the majors and will have its debut soon.

Nvidia today released some new information about the SoC that confirms Tegra’s status as the brand to beat in the mobile computing world. Turns out it’s not quad-core, it’s penta-core. And the “companion core” is designed to take over while all the others go to sleep.

As you have probably suspected, load balancing and optimizing processor use is important to the battery life of many devices. The screen is usually a bigger draw, but with demand for CPU- and GPU-intensive content rising, the portion of a battery used for that processing is as well. But when you’re not playing games or watching HD movies on your phone, those high-power cores don’t operate as efficiently as one designed for low-power, low-priority tasks. So Nvidia put another one on the die, a low-power optimized core, that takes over for mundane things like notification monitoring while the phone is inactive, low-bandwidth stuff like e-reading, and so on.

Nvidia explains it all in this handy diagram, though be on the watch for self-congratulatory jargon (“console-class gaming” isn’t an industry standard term):

It’s a bit like having a city car and a hot rod in your garage. You don’t want to drive your Aston Martin in bumper-to-bumper traffic. That’s why you have a Civic too, or perhaps a Leaf. Same here. Why use ten times the CPU power necessary to perform a simple task?

You can read the rest in Nvidia’s whitepaper (PDF), but take it with a grain of salt, because TI might have some tricks up its sleeve, and even Intel might be creeping up.

If the meek capitulation in the headline sounds uncharacteristic of Nvidia’s infamously outspoken CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, it’s probably because he’s bitter. Though the GPU-focused company announced way back in 2008 that it was going to “open a can of whoop-ass” on Intel, very little has happened, at least on the consumer side. Intel and Nvidia have had some major differences, and remain fierce competitors, but it’s been made clear that Intel won’t tolerate anyone making a grab at its x86 treasure hoard.

But Nvidia isn’t going quietly. Or rather, they’re going quietly just so they can sneak around the back. While Intel is cracking its whip at anyone who wants a piece of x86, Nvidia and ARM, among others, are performing a flanking maneuver in the mobile sector.

Intel itself has expressed contrition regarding its mobile and tablet efforts. When you’re shipping a couple hundred million processors every year, things like the iPad get lost in the shuffle, apparently. But the power level of tablets and mobiles is growing, and Intel has not provided that growth. They promised an x86 handset in 2012, but at this point they’re playing catch-up. Only an tiny fraction of tablets and phones sold use Intel hardware — mainly the Windows-running ones. Meanwhile Nvidia is getting lean and focusing on blowing up their graphics and mobile divisions.

The next couple years might see some interesting partnerships, however. The ARM-Nvidia alliance might go up against something like an Intel-Microsoft-Nokia conglomerate, while team Apple watches from the sidelines. It’ll be a hell of a battle, but the winner will really be the consumer, whom every company will be going out of their way to please. Faster, smaller, and cheaper chips and phones. Sounds like a good deal to me.

If you have a 3D gaming rig, the biggest problem you have is showing it off. You can either run the game wear the glasses and then say “I swear, it’s 3D!” or you give your friend the glasses and show him or her what to do and then you can’t share in the joy. This either ends in violence or sobbing. Your choice.

Now, however, your friend can wear these super cheap $99 glasses with a USB cable. All you have to do is plug them in and you can both watch things in 3D at the same time. Bang. No sobbing. You do still require a full 3D Vision set-up including IR dongle.

The glasses are available in June.

Product Page

Coming soon to an Nvidia-powered computer near you: 3D Web video! Cheers all around, half-slices for everyone. Nvidia made the announcement at NAB 2011, the same place where Apple announced Final Cut Pro X. The 3D video will be delivered via a plugin for the Microsoft Media Platform, aka Silverlight.

Nvidia will provide the 3D tools for free. Naturally you’ll need an Nvidia 3D Vision-compatible monitor and the appropriate glasses to partake, but think of the possibilities. Maybe 3D sports highlights? 3D movie trailers? 3D unboxing videos!

Digital Storm has bumped up its top-of-the-line gaming desktop PC to include the just-released Nvidia GTX 590. The absolute top-of-the-line PC is hilariously overpowered, with two GTX 590s in SLI that effectively deliver the power of four GPUs in one PC. Madness!

I’m sure there’s more than a few of you out there who’ll ask “what do you need that kind of power for?” I mean, Crysis 2 flies on my (now) lowly Radeon 5970; I can’t even imagine having two of those beasts churning away inside my case. One reason would have to be bragging rights—check out these 3DMark Vantage numbers! There’s a certain satisfaction in knowing you have the best GPU (this GTX 590 or the Radeon 6990 in this case) out there, even if you know you’ll be playing Crysis 2 or Metro 2033 at 200 frames per second.

Other specs in the absolute top-of-the-line machine: Intel Core i7 970, 12GB DDR3 memory @ 1600MHz, 160GB Intel SSD, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

That will set you back a cool $4,883.

Again, hardware enthusiasm isn’t for everyone, but it’s certainly fun if you can swing it.

And how about that GTX 590, seen here in perhaps the fanciest product shot ever? Reviews seem fairly positive, but again: you’re paying top-dollar for complete über-power.

The latest bit of gossip puts the Nvidia GTX 590 release date at March 22. Does that date sound familiar? It should, because that’s when Crysis 2 will be released.

The GTX 590 is Nvidia’s newest dual-GPU graphics card. In layman’s terms that means “two graphics cards in one.” They’re useful if your motherboard only supports one graphics card at full speed, as you get the benefits of “dual GPUs” with only one card. (That’s why I bought an AMD Radeon 5970 last year, because my motherboard only has one full speed PCIe slot.)

They’re also useful if you’re absolutely insane and want to have two, dual-GPUs linked together for a dual SLI or dual CrossFireX setup.

Not that any game released in the past few years needs that kind of power, but there’s still a ton of people out there who like to post their super-high 3DMark Vantage scores on this or that message board.

In related news, AMD released its newest dual-GPU card, the Radeon HD 6990, a few days ago. TomsHardware wasn’t too impressed, noting that it was as loud as a truck and not really any better than a pair of 6970s Crossfire’d together (physical space inside your case permitting)

But again, until we see games actually developed to take advantage of the PC—the only two that come to mind that will be released this year are Shogun 2: Total War and Battlefield 3—, buying these gargantuan cards borders on the “I have money to burn” side of things.

The three other data points on their roadmap are Wayne (Batman), Logan (Wolverine), and Stark (Iron Man). The logic of the order escapes me, since although Stark is the most technological of the bunch, Batman relies quite a bit on gadgets and Wolverine is the result of high-tech experimentation in the Weapon Plus program. I’m sure quite a lot of debate could be had about the present order, but this isn’t really the venue for that.

Interestingly, the characters are from both DC and Marvel, so I’m guessing Nvidia just decided to pick a few recognizable names but not actually license the characters, because… why would they? I wouldn’t be surprised if a lawsuit gets filed, though it’s also arguable that these characters’ basic personae have entered the public domain.

Either way, good job, Nvidia. You’ve made a lot of nerds very happy, for several reasons.

Harsh. I wonder if this guy reads my articles?

Huang feels, like me, that the current crop of non-iPad tablets are pretty much useless one and all. The iPad works for a “beginner” tablet, and the next generation of tablets will bring new capabilities, new hardware, new tools, and so on. Nvidia thinks they’re going to be a part of that, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t be, except that the Tegra 2 hasn’t really made many waves. The new one is on its way, though (and the new new one) so we may see that change.

[via CNET]

“It’s definitely a game-changer in the high performance market,” said Mark Seager, chief technology officer for computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “This is a phase transition, representative of the shift of economic competitiveness from the West to the East.”

Strong words, Mark, but truer ones never spoken. Considering kids these days want to get famous on YouTube more than they want to increase the petaflops in a mainframe, I’d be surprised if our next official supercomputer was a store-bought Dell with a nice graphics card and speed stripes on the side.

Very little was actually said about the chip, and no partners were announced. As for the announcement that they would come out with a new one every year, well, that’s a bit of abracadabra that any company can do. Package up what you’ve got and call it the next version. Hopefully NVIDIA will do a bit more than that, though.

We’ll probably hear more about Tegra towards the end of the year, when we’ll hear more about the makeup of all the upcoming tablets from HTC, HP, and so on.

ATI, we hardly knew ye. Word on the street is that AMD, which bought ATI for a cool $5.4 billion some four years ago, will phase out the ATI name later this year. Apparently AMD’s research indicates that people prefer the AMD name to the ATI name, but that, above that, the name that really sells is Radeon. Goodbye ATI Radeon Pro, hello AMD Radeon Pro.

Is this a big deal? Eh, kinda. I honestly could give a toss what AMD calls the GPUs so long as they perform admirably. (And I’m writing this post on a PC with a Radeon Pro 5970 on board that I shelled out quite a bit of money for!) I guess it’s more of a nostalgia thing. “Oh man, they’re phasing out the ATI name? Bummer.”

Perhaps AMD will use this as an opportunity to create drivers that don’t cause the community to meltdown!

Now, why is this happening? AMD’s research shows that, well, the ATI name doesn’t mean a whole bunch these days. Side-by-side, people have more confidence in AMD GPUs when referred to as “AMD” rather than “ATI.”

I’d like to meet the person who’s willing to buy an AMD Radeon but not an ATI Radeon. But apparently these people exist.

AMD has also found that the, truth be told, it’s really the Radeon brand name that means anything, particularly when compared to the name Nvidia.

Wall of text to explain this: beginning with the next batch of GPUs, which should be released later this year, you’ll be looking at benchmarks of the AMD Radeon XXXX and not the ATI Radeon.

Perhaps a sad day for all the ATI fans in the crowd, but at the end of the day, so long as the cards work well AMD could call them the Super-Duper AMD Graphics Processing Unit for all I care.

How long did Blizzard spend developing StarCraft II? Since 2003, give or take some time here and there when the company needed all hands on deck for World of Warcraft. So you’d think that would be enough time to figure out how to implement anti-aliasing into the graphics engine, right? You see where I’m going with this.

Blizzard has come underunder fire from certain sections of the PC gaming crowd for the lack of in-game anti-aliasing. Does a game like StarCraft II really need AA? Eh… debatable. I mean, you absolutely want to see it in there, no question. It is 2010 after all. But will the lack of AA kill your enjoyment of the game? Probably not, no.

Nvidia’s latest software gives gamers the ability to force AA, but this comes at a performance hit.

ATI, on the other hand, offers no such option. At least not yet.

After evaluating our options, our engineering team opted not to provide AA support for StarCraft II within the Catalyst Control Center, even though the competition has included AA support in their driver at launch.

We are committed to making AA perform at an acceptable level before we release it to our customers. We will continue to work with Blizzard on this matter and hope to offer our customers an acceptable AA solution at a later date.

This was followed up, a few hours later, with a tweet from ATI that says a hotfix, one that would offer some sort of AA implementation, is on the way.

So there we have it. No AA from Blizzard, a brute force option offered by Nvidia, and ATI saying, “One moment, please…”

As the world turns, I suppose.

Visibility of the GPU’s role in the system is important, since power draw and GPU needs are increasing all the time, yet batteries aren’t getting much bigger.

[via PC Perspsective]

This is the world’s first Nvidia-certified full tower chassis. It’s the Thermaltake Element V, and it’s been specially certified to accommodate Nvidia’s two newest GPUs, the GTX 480 and the GTX 470. As you might imagine, a key feature of the chassis is thermal management. That’s to be expected given how hot those Fermi cards run.

Another key thing that blew my mind: 11 5.25-inch bays. Who needs 11 bays? Six 3.5-inch hard drives are supported, one 2.5-inch hard drive, and one SSD, so that leaves three slots open. Let’s say maybe you want a separate DVD burner and a Blu-ray drive—then what? What do you do with the final bay?

Seriously, let me know. I have no idea how you’d use up so many bays.

Nvidia and Thermaltake also worked together to come up with an “air duct” system that further cools the GPUs.

You know your GPUs are hot when you need to develop an air duct just to keep it from melting.

Of course, there’s enough room in there for up to four GPUs. Because who doesn’t have $2,000 to spend on video cards alone?

$219 for this bad boy. It may seem expensive, but it’s probably the last case you’ll ever need to buy for several years.

Interestingly, they chose a rather old GPU and a comparatively new CPU to compare: an Nvidia GTX280 and a Core i7 960. Maybe they chose on price parity? Whatever the case, they found that while indeed the GPU advantage was not as great as suggested, it was significant: 2.5 times faster on average and up to 14 times faster in certain situations.

Nvidia took the opening for all it was worth:

It’s a rare day in the world of technology when a company you compete with stands up at an important conference and declares that your technology is only up to 14 times faster than theirs.

To be fair: we can’t really expect unbiased judgment from either side, and the tests in the paper are too complex to be boiled down to a “oh it’s this much faster” talking point. I just think the drama is hilarious.

[via TG Daily]

Have you launched VLC today? If so then you’ll already know that it has been updated to version 1.1.0. The biggest feature in this version is the addition of GPU decoding for Windows (Vista and 7 only) and Linux users. That is, you can use that fancy GPU of yours to help decode that 1080p MKV you’ve got there, leaving your CPU with enough room to breathe, or whatever. Fair warning: if you’re on Windows, hope you’ve got an nVidia GPU…

That’s right: on Windows, the new feature only supports nVidia GPUs. The release notes say this is because ATI‘s Windows drivers don’t work properly.

NB: so far, on Windows, VideoLAN is quite sad to be forced to recommend nVidia GPU, until ATI fixes their drivers on Windows, and until VLC developer get access to some Intel hardware supporting GPU decoding.

You’ll also notice that clever little dig at Intel. How you can expect some rubbish Intel GPU to decode video, I don’t know, but there you go.

Mac users, of course, are totally left out in the cold vis-à-vis GPU-assisted decoding.

Remember back when anti-mac fanboys use to say that “the Mac doesn’t have gaming, it’s not 1337”. Then Apple entered the gaming world as a noob, and now look, OS X is running Steam.

It got off to a pretty good start, but recently Valve’s Rob Barris said that ATI, NVIDIA and Apple are working hard to increase performance even further. “Performance is going to improve as drivers are updated,” said Barris and he expects “modest improvements in short term and larger ones in longer term”. As far as when, he asserted, “No, I can’t put dates on them.”

It’s great to know that Apple’s gaming focus isn’t just into the iOS platform. I can’t wait for Counter Strike, Team Fortress and Portal to download.