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NVIDIA Plans to Adapt Graphics Processors for Virtual Reality, AI, Driverless Cars
Blowout conferences hosted by tech companies sometimes turn out to be just jazzed up new product releases. But at NVIDIA Corp.’s GPU Technology Conference for developers last month, the Silicon Valley developer of graphics processors focused on the possible power of its existing hardware.
NVIDIA used the March 26-29 event in Silicon Valley to explain how it plans to expand beyond graphics chips for everyday electronic devices into newer technology without giving up any old clients. NVIDIA is known for chips such as the GeForce processor introduced in 1999.
Taiwanese-born founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a March 26 keynote speech that one of his firm’s best decisions was to make computing general purpose, meaning a single type of well-designed graphics processor can service different sub-fields of high technology.
NVIDIA processors can now accommodate gaming, animation, self-driving cars, robots and devices that utilize artificial intelligence, Huang said.
A clear focus for the firm this year is self-driving cars and related technology ranging from processors to the software that enable safe driving.
The company says graphics processing unit technology, which performs one dedicated function on multiple cores inside a device at the same time, works better for these sub-fields than CPUs that typically manage many tasks at a time.
Demand across the tech sector for more computing power is good news for NVIDIA. The firm is now building computing stations to process AI deep learning, graphic workstations for motion pictures and chips for self-driving vehicles.
NVIDIA says it’s as eager to create processors for new clients such as the automaker Tesla as to service older partners such as Microsoft’s Xbox. Tesla is now a client.
Virtual reality is one area where a flexible, cross-discipline graphics processor might work. “Creating virtual reality is one of the most daunting tasks we know,” Huang said in the speech. “On the other hand, it is an enormous industry, as we want to visualize in all kinds of markets.”
The “holy grail” is to cut processing time for photo-realistic images from one frame per hour to many frames per minute, an advance that’s nearly here, he said.
Mastering such a task could be profitable as Huang says 400 games are made every year and the film industry releases 500 productions per year, Huang said.
Despite expanding into new fields, graphics rendering is still NVIDIA’s bread and butter and the main applications for its graphics processors. Graphics rendering refers to the resource-intensive, automated process of creating photorealistic images via a computer program.
NVIDIA isn’t just pursuing faster processor speeds to manage this task but also looking to “ambient occlusion,” which means drawing from previous frames to cut back on the amount of new ones that must be rendered.
Artificial intelligence also gives NVIDIA another new source to better its processors.
“Huge progress in AI, which is changing just about every service that’s delivered,” Huang said. “We are all in on AI. The computation is growing exponentially. Deep learning models are growing in effectiveness – more data, more computing.”
News source is from Business Next.
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