Nvidia has confirmed that the company has essentially placed its Nforce chipset line on hiatus, given the legal wrangling between itself and Intel.According to Robert Sherbin, the lead corporate communications spokesman for Nvidia, Nvidia will “postpone further chipset investments”.Sherbin also dismissed a report that Nvidia was pulling out of the mid-range and high-end GPU market as “patently untrue”. But Nvidia’s recent chip introductions do imply a shift in graphics companys traditional stance is underway.

Nvidia Halting Chipset Development – Reviews by PC Magazine

I was at GTC and I have to tell you, while Fermi wasn’t meant for gaming display, it is meant for a helluva lot more than scientific development.  Coupled with another GPU, Fermi does the heavy duty work and lets another card ’simply’ handle the display.  With lots and lots of tech companies demanding faster computers, game developers, animators, imaging applications will forever be changed by this change in focus from NVIDIA.

Finally, really fast calculations can be done under your desk… this + CUDA absolutely changes the game plan… including gamers.  Trust me when I say that this market is not small…NVIDIA isn’t stupid, I’m sure they’ve done the math…probably on their own GPUs!  Gamers (me included) need to get over it, for the world GPU market does not revolve around them!

The six-core Istanbul processor has begun shipping, and variants focusing on differing levels of power and performance – the HE, SE, and EE versions – will begin shipping by the third quarter…

The Istanbul, uses HyperTransport links to connect the microprocessor cores to eliminate processing bottlenecks. Another technology, called “HT Assist,” uses part of the level-3 cache as a type of look-up table, eliminating the need to poll each microprocessor when making a cache request for a particular piece of data. Instead, the core only needs to poll one other to find the data’s location.

AMD Ships Six-Core ‘Istanbul’ Server Chip – News and Analysis by PC Magazine

It uses DDR2 still while Intel’s chip uses the faster (costlier) DDR3.

NEBULA is a Cloud Computing environment developed at NASA Ames Research Center, integrating a set of open-source components into a seamless, self-service platform. It provides high-capacity computing, storage and network connectivity, and uses a virtualized, scalable approach to achieve cost and energy efficiencies.

NASA NEBULA | About NEBULA

Nebula

It uses an Amazon Web Services clone called Eucalyptus developed by UCSB.  You can read their paper here or visit their website for more info.  So it appears to be an alternative to AWS for those in academia.  It’s still in Beta and there is no information about whether this will be a pay-for-use service like that at AWS.  I welcome anyone using this to let us know their experience.

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