At the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) announced a developer kit for its self-driving car platform, dubbed Drive PX.

One of the key features of the platform is its hardware, which is powered  by two Tegra X1 chips and comes with the ability to process video simultaneously from 12 different HD cameras placed around a vehicle that feed information about the environment back to the system, thereby allowing Drive PX to facilitate surround view, collision avoidance, pedestrian detection, mirror-less operation, cross-traffic monitoring and driver-state monitoring.

Nvidia is billing deep learning as the integral differentiator for the Drive PX platform, with CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stating that the system is far more advanced than conventional Advanced Driver Assistance Systems available today, most of which center around lane guidance and collision prevention. Drive PX will be able to train itself to react to different situations, and there’s the added feature that any actions learned in one vehicle are shared with the platform as a whole.

Enabling the learning experience is a deep neural network software development kit called Digits that allows the Drive PX system to understand objects in the real world and react to ever-changing scenarios. The system will be available in May to select automakers, automotive suppliers and research institutions, with the developer kit priced at $10,000.

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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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Nvidia’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has posted an open letter on his company’s blog addressing concerns over the GTX 970.

Nvidia and its add-in-board partners have faced a rough month because of the GTX 970 and its lack of advertised memory. Initially, in late January, Nvidia denied any problems with the card, however a few days later the company issued another press statement acknowledging it didn’t communicate specifications correctly and offered a driver update.

“We invented a new memory architecture in Maxwell. This new capability was created so that reduced-configurations of Maxwell can have a larger framebuffer – i.e., so that GTX 970 is not limited to 3GB, and can have an additional 1GB. GTX 970 is a 4GB card,” Huang wrote. “However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth. This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512MB segment.”

Huang blamed a lack of proper communication with the press and reviewers for the confusion.

“Instead of being excited that we invented a way to increase memory of the GTX 970 from 3GB to 4GB, some were disappointed that we didn’t better describe the segmented nature of the architecture for that last 1GB of memory,” he wrote.

“This new feature of Maxwell should have been clearly detailed from the beginning.”

The post Nvidia CEO Comes Clean on GTX 970: ‘We’ll Do A Better Job Next Time’ appeared first on VR World.

Francisc Kurko, Romania – PALIT GeForce GTX280 graphics card, signed by Jen-Hsun Huang

Winners of 3DMarkVantage retail licenses are:

Radu Neagu, Romania

Boris Romac, Croatia

Jonathan Worrel (Furious Fandango), United States of America

Ivan Faj, Croatia

Nikola Peruncic (McPingvin), Croatia

Chad Hudson (Dragoon1101), United States of America

Nenad Miodrag (nmiodrag), Croatia

Goran Gjura (spikeygoran), Croatia

Eyvind Niklasson, Sweden

Joza Habijan, Croatia

In the end, I wish to congratulate each and every one for competing in PALIT Folding Challenge 2008. I am pleasantly surprised at the effort placed by all members of this small team. Also, bear in mind that the new giveaway is already planned, and this time I will focus on giving as much prizes as possible, with several tweaks in the contest rules. Rest assured, everything that I do will be global, so no exclusions. Everybody is welcome in the group, and as the new site starts to grow, you can be sure there are plenty more surprises. For starters, we’ll make sure that we have a dedicated place for all folders on the site, in the form of site section and forum section.

All winners need to contact me at FoldingChallenge@gmail.com with their shipping address, so that I could organize shipping of prizes.

The post ANNOUNCEMENT: Winners of PALIT Folding Challenge 2008 appeared first on VR World.

PALIT Multimedia Folding@Home Challenge 2008

(Yes, I know it’s a long name, sorry ;))

I’ve set up a page on this blog that has all the details about the challenge, and I invite you to join in.
The awards are (hopefully) tempting – Palit GeForce GTX280 board signed by no other than Jen-Hsun Huang, triple-C of nVIDIA Corporation (Co-founder, Chairman, CEO) and 10 licenses of 3DMarkVantage Advanced Edition. There are no territorial limits, so you can join in from anywhere

I want to express my gratitude to David Makin from PALIT Multimedia North America, Oliver Baltuch, President of Futuremark Corporation and Andrew Humber from nVIDIA Corporation. More details about the contest are available on the link above – or just click here.

UPDATE: No, I am not competing for the board. I was asked this in couple of e-mails, and to make matters clear I’ve updated the rules as well.

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