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!

GPU Technology Conference

The GPU Technology Conference is the most significant event in 2009 dedicated to application development on the GPU. Encompassing three simultaneous summits, this event will focus on the latest breakthroughs developers, engineers, and researchers are achieving through the use of the graphics processing unit (GPU) to solve the world’s most important computing challenges.

The GPU Technology Conference will empower developers, engineers, researchers, as well as senior business executives and venture capitalists. Attendees will

• Learn about the seismic shifts happening in computing
• Preview disruptive technologies to stay ahead of imminent trends
• Get tools and techniques to impact mission critical projects now
• Network with experts and peers from across a broad range of fields

GPU Powered Malware – Daniel Reynaud There is an increasing interest in Graphics Processing Units for general-purpose programming, due to their processing power and massively parallel design. Therefore, most consumer graphics hardware are now fully programmable using either Nvidia’s CUDA toolkit or AMD/ATI Stream SDK.

This presentation will give an analysis of how the GPU can be used by malware as an anti-reverse engineering platform, with examples using the CUDA technology. With CUDA, the GPU is fully programmable in C, but the resulting device program can’t be debugged because Nvidia’s GPUs do not support this feature natively. As a result, a malware analyst has to use static analysis against the device code in order to understand the malware. But this task is harder with GPU code than with traditional binaries since the source of a CUDA program is compiled to undocumented microcode (and therefore unsupported by standard disassemblers such as IDA Pro). Finally, this presentation will also assess the technical feasibility of an unpacker written fully in device code.

Bio: After a 4-years military training in Signals and Electronic Warfare, Daniel Reynaud is now a PhD student in Nancy (France), focusing on the analysis of malware and deobfuscation techniques. He has a background in reverse engineering and finding vulnerabilities in unconventional platforms, such as Java, mobile phones and Firefox extensions. Always looking for new challenges, he is now training to become a cage fighter.

RUXCON

Very interesting article.  It wasn’t clear if the problem is simply that there are no disassemblers available or that the hardware cannot support it.  Also, certainly possible to use the GPU on purpose, but it’s again not clear what sort of avenue malware might use to run code on infected machines using their GPUs… it seems harder for the malware programmer, at least currently, to know what possible hardware would be available to use when it infects a machine since right now GPUs that can run these codes aren’t ubiquitous or available (unless its being used like the example shown by the presentation as DOS attack.)  The presenter ofcourse didn’t imply a worm/virus of any sort, simply that it could be used for bad things.