Just as Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich opens the regular staff meetings before a dramatically reduced IDF2015 Shenzhen conference, it is a good time to review how government and enterprises don’t see eye to eye when it comes to strategic business.

China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer is world’s fastest supercomputer, at 33 PFLOPS demonstrated and 55 PFLOPS theoretical performance.

Remember the Tianhe-2 machine at Guangzhou Supercomputer Center, the current World’s number one according to Top 500 Supercomputer list? Unlike some other China supercomputers – Tianhe-2 is fully Intel based machine,  the world’s largest assembly of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators.

Even after Intel ‘opened the kimono’ and gave a nearly 70%  discount on its processors and accelerators, it has given Intel, and therefore US technology sector a major foothold in China and Asian region as such. Over the course of past two years, we were involved in a lot of discussions with Intel staff who were not privy to see the financial impact of the deal — and even argued our undoubtedly solid information. We’re not here to report how things should be, or are in marketing and investor presentations to its numerous staff, but how things really are.

During 2015, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer was supposed to be doubled in its size, up to 110 PFLOPs peak, again using the very same Intel processors and accelerators. Since now these are mature products with lower real manufacturing cost for Intel, they could finally make some real money.

Well, it was not to be: our tweety bird from the window chirped to us that Uncle Sam has put this supercomputer centre, together with National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, the system’s creators, and Tianjin centre, among others, on so a so-called “Denial List”, which prevents any high technology from the USA to be sold to these sites. Our sources used even harsher words.

Knowing that these several sites alone are expected to order some 250+ PFLOPS of compute in the next few years (around 500,000 top-end Broadwell-EP Xeon E5v4 processors, or  approximately $1 billion high margin list price) and they were THE Intel friendly ones, this is quite a loss to Intel, thanks to Uncle Sam.

But, what’s worse strategic loss in time is that, based on this decision as an excuse, indigenous China high end processor architectures can now push the government to gradually remove any dependence on US. This means just one thing: an AMD or Intel x86 processor technology is increasingly becoming errata non grata. Should the Chinese government react in force, it will give the Chinese vendors the blank check support to go all the way a developing their Alpha, POWER and MIPS processors for both the government and the mainstream commercial use.

You may think they are not up to the mark, but remember how fast British ARM architecture became the dominant processing architecture in the world. And this group doesn’t need to worry about the antiquated x86 ISA, worry about satisfying the dumbed down shareholder masses, or overpaying their marketing and sales staff, as well as the fat check, golden parachute-protected CxOs.

They have taken the best that the USA has developed (some of key Alpha, GPGPU and MIPS architects left US over the course of past four years, a lot of them due to non-renewed visas) and discarded due to corporate shenanigans, and the continued developing it much farther than anyone expected both on hardware and software side.

Five years ago, ShenWei showed a CPU that performed faster than the fastest GPUs of the time. Now, fifth generation is approaching, slotting between Tesla and FirePro GPGPUs and next-gen Xeon Phi accelerators. However, this is not an accelerator or a GPGPU – this is a CPU.

So, thanks to Uncle Sam, China might not have a 110 PFLOPS Intel based supercomputer but it definitely will launch a 100 PFLOPS system based on upcoming 64-core, TFLOPS-class ShenWei Alpha, with true blue CPUs possibly faster per socket then even the next generation Xeon Phi or Volta/Pascal-based Teslas.  Next, of course 100 PFLOPS Chinese POWER8 or 9 — (thank you IBM) and then possibly even Loongson MIPS – -it may come back into the high end field with renewed government support because of this Uncle Sam move. All are clean, elegant, scalable high end RISC architectures.

So who are the winners and losers from this?

NUDT and Tianhe may be the losers for now, but only short term. They will simply speed up their HPC ARM plan.

Intel comes out the big loser from this and a lot: who will want to do a phased deployment large x86 machine in China now, and worry about future phases? Then comes Uncle Sam himself: they lost even that little bit of influence on the high end China HPC. How is that for “cutting your nose to spite your face?”.

VR WORLD’s  Analysis: US government moves accelerate the Chinese CPU roadmap while curtailing juiciest sales for Intel and other US vendors.

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After launching the Titan X earlier this month, it looks like Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) is set to unveil a second video card based on the GM200 silicon, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. The card is rumored to offer significant increase in better performance when compared to the GM204-based GTX 980, which is why Nvidia may decide to call the card the GTX 990.

Based on the latest leak, the GTX 980 Ti is said to offer the full complement of 3,072 CUDA cores available in the GM200, while reducing the video memory to 6GB GDDR5, down from the 12GB featured on the Titan X. Memory bus will remain the same at 384-bit, and with the GTX 980 Ti, Nvidia will allow its partners to offer custom variations of the reference design that include custom cooling solutions and factory unlocked models.

Doing so has the potential for the GTX 980 Ti to be faster than the Titan X, which is only offered in a reference design with the stock cooler. There’s no confirmation as to when we’ll see the card, with the rumor only suggesting that Nvidia is targeting its launch to coincide with that of AMD’s (NASDAQ:AMD) Radeon R9 390X. The Radeon R9 300 series will make its debut at Computex, so it is possible that we may see the GTX 980 Ti at around the same time.

The post Nvidia May Already Be Working On A GTX 980 Ti appeared first on VR World.

EVGA has launched the first GeForce GTX 980 with an all-in-one liquid and air cooler, with the card dubbed the GTX 980 Hybrid. The custom cooling option is claimed to reduce temperatures by a full 25 degrees Celsius when compared to a reference GTX 980, allowing EVGA to substantially overclock the card out of the gate.

The GTX 980 Hybrid features a base clock of 1291MHz and a boost clock of 1393MHz, with the vendor stating that there will be plenty headroom left for further overclocking. The card comes with 4GB GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit interface and a bandwidth of 7010MHz. The liquid-cooled portion directs heat away from the GPU, while the included air cooler is used to cool the memory and VRM sections of the video card.

This isn’t the first AIO liquid-cooled video card, as that distinction goes to AMD’s Radeon R9 295X2, but this is the first time we’re seeing this system used on the GTX 980. Based on Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) new Maxwell architecture, the GTX 980 features the GM2014 GPU with 2048 CUDA cores.

The GTX 980 is listed on EVGA’s website for US $649.99/€779,00. If you’re interested in just getting the cooler, EVGA is offering it for $99.99.

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Nvidia’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) CEO Jen Hsun Huang gave the world another look at the GPU successor to Maxwell at its GPU Technology Conference Conference (GTC 2015) in San Jose Tuesday.

Pascal was first announced as a mystery GPU between Maxwell and Volta at last year’s GTC. Tuesday’s announcement gives us the first concrete details of Pascal.

Huang said that Pascal, which is set to arrive in 2016, would have a ten-fold overall average improvement over Maxwell, and a four times boost in mixed-precision workloads. As far as performance per watt, it will offer a two-fold performance over Maxwell. However he later cautioned this was “CEO Math” and actual performance may vary.

Pascal will use a suite of new technologies, including 3D-stacked memory and NVLink (Huang says it will offer a five-fold improvement over PCI-E). It will be built on TSMC (TPE: 2330) 16nm FF+ (FinFet plus — the follow-up to FinFET)  process node. It will also use High Bandwidth Memory, allowing a three-fold improvement of bandwidth for its 32 GB of RAM.

Cards with Pascal will likely be marketed towards CUDA workstations, or perhaps as some sort of competitor to Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) Xeon Phi co-processors. Game developers have a tough time pushing the limits of current generation cards as it is.

Pricing and availability of Pascal-based cards will be available later this year or early next year.

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