NVIDIA

NVIDIA Co-Founders Receive Leadership Award from City Year Silicon Valley

2013-05-24T20:29:16Z

NVIDIA co-founders Jen-Hsun Huang and Chris Malachowsky last night received the annual Citizen Leadership Award from City Year San Jose/Silicon Valley, in a gala charity dinner that raised nearly $400,000 for the education-focused nonprofit.

Decked out in their rarely-seen black tuxedos, Jen-Hsun, our CEO, and Chris, a senior vice president and NVIDIA Fellow, were honored for their and NVIDIA’s philanthropic leadership. They announced that their families, the company and a group of NVIDIA partners contributed $100,000 to fund City Year’s work with at-risk students at a local grade school.

Flanked by volunteers, Jen-Hsun (center) and Chris (right) were given commemorative jackets by City Year San Jose/Silicon Valley Executive Director Toni Burke (left).

City Year partners with public schools and teachers in under-served communities to help keep kids in school and on track to graduation. It draws on teams of “corps members”—young people dedicated to a year of full-time service—who provide individual support to at-risk students, focusing on their attendance, behavior and academic performance.

This year marks the fifth year that NVIDIA will partner with City Year for Project Inspire, and our third year of funding the A.J. Dorsa Elementary School, which supports the work of more than 10 corps members directly engaged in helping poor-performing students.

Inner Geek: Restoring My Father’s Meyers Aero Commander

2013-05-24T20:27:03Z

I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to the development of multibillion dollar GPUs in my various engineering and management roles at NVIDIA. Helping to bring these complex chips to market is incredibly rewarding. And seeing what scientists do with them is awe inspiring.

Yet, when I had the chance to work on a far smaller project – restoring a historic aircraft with which I had a personal history – I just couldn’t pass it up.

The Meyers/Aero Commander 200 is the kind of plane that delights seasoned aviation buffs. Only about 120 of the single-engine, prop-driven airplanes were built. Originally designed by pioneering aviator Al Meyers in the ‘60s, it was renowned for its clean lines and ability to match up against the fastest four-seat, single-engine planes of its day.

While it’s an amazing plane by any measure, this specific plane is special to me because it had been my father’s for more than 30 years.

On our yearly trips flying from New Mexico to Washington state to visit my grandparents, I would serve as both navigator and relief pilot. Long before I had my pilot’s license, I discovered the joy of flight sitting atop a phone book so I could see over the instrument panel. The last time I flew with my dad, nearly three decades ago, was in the Meyers.

Opening the Hangar

Built for speed, the plane was once owned by Indy 500-winning race car driver Johnny Rutherford III — the plane’s number, N111JR, reflects his ownership. My father, a former Air Force pilot who’d flown F-105 fighter jets during the Vietnam War, purchased it in the mid-1970s and tuned it for even more performance. He was winning air races in the plane until medical issues forced him to mothball it in 1997.

After my father passed away in 2010, I traveled back to New Mexico to help my sister organize his estate. When visiting the airport to sort out what had become of the plane, I had no idea what to expect.

The Meyers sees its first daylight in years.

Opening the hangar, we found the plane covered by a thick layer of dust, surrounded by half a lifetime’s worth of my father’s projects. The plane looked pretty good, though closer inspection revealed the effect of years spent languishing in the darkness.

Some of the restoration challenges were obvious: rubber in the hydraulic system hoses and vacuum-based autopilot was dried and cracked, the vinyl interior was brittle and the radios were conspicuously missing. Even the jacks the plane was resting on had failed, damaging a component of the landing gear.

Other problems were hidden, although not entirely unexpected. Airplanes need to be flown regularly to keep the engine well lubricated. With the Meyers sitting for more than a decade, rust had formed inside the engine, which would need to be completely rebuilt or replaced.

The Restoration

Planes are trickier than tinkering with cars, where there are few regulations to consider. Strict U.S. Federal Aviation Administration regulations apply to almost all changes. Guidelines have to be followed and documentation recorded before a mothballed plane is allowed to fly again.

Early on, I’d asked my mechanics if it would be possible to observe some of the restoration. “If you’re here, we’ll put a wrench in one hand and a rag in the other,” they replied. Admittedly, the “wrench” was sometimes a shop broom, but they understood my enthusiasm and let me participate in some of the work while under their supervision.

The first stage involved removing all inspection plates and panels, the interior and the engine. Because the plane is rare, and documentation sparse, the work was akin to archaeology. Every component was photographed before being removed to streamline reassembly. All cables, wires and hoses were tagged with descriptive labels. It was an amazing education that allowed me to deepen my understanding of every inch of the plane.

Rebuild or Replace?

One major decision was whether to rebuild or replace the engine. Flying with a brand new engine was attractive, though more expensive. Rebuilding would save some money and reuse some components that were now “seasoned” by previous heat cycling in the engine. In the end, I decided for the rebuild, and only later discovered that several major components could not be overhauled and would require replacement, overwhelming the price of a new engine.

This costly decision points to a paradox of restoration: sometimes there is no way to discern the most efficient way forward before actually making the decision. Any regret I have is tempered by knowing that rebuilding the engine was truer to the spirit of the project.

Despite setbacks and surprises, the work made great progress over the months. The engine was reinstalled, the entire hydraulic system, autopilot and control cables were replaced, and the landing gear was completely overhauled.

Ready for Takeoff

Whenever I’ve been asked when the plane would fly again, my answer has always been the same: “When it’s ready.” Each week brought the plane closer to the flight testing that would sign it off for the trip to California. But some weeks I wondered if it’s easier to schedule chip programs than an aircraft restoration.

The 200 in the air over Arizona.

Someone once asked me if I could have simply bought another plane that had already been restored for less time, effort and money than it is taking to restore the Meyers. The answer – absolutely, positively, without a doubt – is yes.

However, my goal wasn’t just to own a plane. My goal was to restore my father’s Meyers and a piece of aviation history. It’s about having the passion and commitment to bring a classic airplane, and a piece of my own personal history, back to life.

On April 11, 2013, over the high desert of New Mexico, the Meyers again took to the skies.

Simpler, Faster, Better: GeForce Experience Out of Beta, With Millions of Users

2013-05-23T19:50:28Z

GeForce Experience is moving out of beta and into its first production release.

Download GeForce Experience here. Or, install it as part of our latest GeForce 320.18 Game Ready driver, also released today. GeForce experience arrives just in time for the release of our flagship GPU, GeForce GTX 780.

We designed GeForce Experience to help you maximize your PC’s performance in your favorite games so that they look and play better. GeForce Experience delivers on this promise by always keeping you up to date with the latest GeForce Game Ready drivers and by delivering optimal game settings tuned to your PC, instantly and automatically, so that you can spend more time playing games.

Since January’s beta release, GeForce Experience has been embraced by the gaming community. PC Gamer called it “…an incredible bit of software and important for PC gaming moving forward.” In beta, GeForce Experience has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times. More than 30,000 feedback submissions were received from around the world.

Coming to a PC Near You: ShadowPlay
Much of this feedback is incorporated in today’s release, and we now support optimized settings for over 80 games. Plus we have much more planned for GeForce Experience in upcoming releases.

For example, a very cool new feature called ShadowPlay is coming this summer. It lets you capture and share all your greatest gaming moments with friends. ShadowPlay takes advantage of dedicated hardware in Kepler-based GPUs to enable ‘always on’ game capture, shadowing your gameplay without the significant performance impact and large file sizes of today’s capture methods. If you pull off an outrageous mid-air maneuver in “Battlefield 3,” you simply hit a hotkey and your moment of glory is instantly saved and ready to share with your friends.

Your feedback has been enormously valuable in helping us to deliver a great experience. Enjoy GeForce Experience and keep the feedback coming.

How NVIDIA and Citrix Are Driving the Future of Virtualized Visual Computing

2013-05-23T17:14:29Z

To understand the future of virtualization, check out what Citrix and NVIDIA are up to.

Huang and Templeton announce NVIDIA GRID vGPU on Citrix XenDesktop 7 at Citrix Synergy.

Unveiled this morning by NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Citrix CEO Mark Templeton in a keynote address at Citrix Synergy, Citrix XenDesktop 7 can remotely access physical GPU resources using NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology.

They told the more than 6,000 conference attendees that tens of millions of knowledge workers can now benefit from graphics acceleration on any platform (Windows, Mac or Android), using any device (desktops, laptops, tablets, even phones), on any application (OpenGL, Direct X, GPGPU or others).

Whether it’s a photo-editing application or one for medical imaging or architectural design, as long as the device has a display and a Citrix receiver, “it now just works,” said Huang, thanks to the NVIDIA GRID vGPU.

In the video below, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Citrix CEO Mark Templeton demonstrate the incredible high interactivity and low latency of working with virtual applications using NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology integrated into XenDesktop 7.

While the technology combination won’t be generally available until later this year, interest is already sharp among an alphabet soup of OEMs, ISVs and VARs, as well as a slew of customers.

But businesses don’t need to wait to take advantage of GPU sharing. The launch of XenDesktop 7 enables a new class of rich graphics for hosted-shared environments with NVIDIA GRID technology. Offering unmatched application compatibility, this is the only shared, direct GPU acceleration available on the market with Citrix HDX 3D Pro technology.

The world’s leading hardware-makers are building NVIDIA GRID K1 or K2 boards into their servers.

OEMs and ISVs can validate and certify their wares through our certification program and testing center. And we’ve made it easy: Our reciprocal agreement with Citrix gives apps simultaneous NVIDIA GRID and Citrix Ready certification.

With NVIDIA GRID, virtualized devices and applications “just work.”

The most demanding applications like Autodesk AutoCAD, Inventor and Revit and Bunkspeed SHOT, PRO and DRIVE are already certified. We’ll be announcing more certifications of popular apps soon.

The channel is ready to engage customers as well. M7 Global Partners, a consortium of the top nine Citrix platinum-level IT providers in the U.S., announced its strong endorsement of NVIDIA GRID. They’ve got customers around the world looking to deploy visually rich applications across a wide range of industries. M7 plans to deploy GRID technology on servers from all the major OEMs.

In fact, we revealed last week that 175 customer trials with NVIDIA GRID are already underway. The future of virtualization is looking very bright indeed.

Read more about the news from Citrix and NVIDIA in our press release. If you’re at Citrix Synergy, stop our booth, as well as those for Cisco, Dell and IBM, where demonstrations of GRID technology are taking place. And follow us on Twitter at @NVIDIAGRID.

Update: Post updated to include video from keynote address at Citrix Synergy.

Behind the Camera: A Lab That Perfects Tegra’s Knack for Taking Snapshots

2013-05-22T23:31:59Z

It’s one of the most sophisticated photo calibration labs in the world. It’s at NVIDIA. And it’s not easy to find.

To visit the labs where NVIDIA’s engineers make sure the smartphones and tablets that use Tegra take amazing photos you’ve got to leave NVIDIA’s distinctive – and crowded – main campus and wander through the bland 1980s-era office park across the street.

Step inside NVIDIA’s photo calibration lab for a tour, though, and it’s clear you’ve found something special. The floors and walls of the spotless lab’s four rooms are matte black – to absorb any stray light that could throw off the lab’s delicate instruments. The science-fictioney equipment and dramatic black walls make the lab look like something you might see on ‘CSI.’

Mastering the Mix

Pick and choose: using these ‘tinker’ toys, engineers can recreate any mobile device’s camera.

You’ll notice the most telling detail the moment you walk through the door: a wall lined with black bins filled with scores of different image sensors, lenses and tiny flash modules. NVIDIA faces a unique challenge: our Tegra processors are used in devices from nearly a dozen companies. Each one relies on sensors and lenses from different suppliers, different displays and different software.

By reaching into these bins, NVIDIA’s engineers can replicate the combination of parts used in a boggling array of smartphones and tablets. NVIDIA engineering VP Brian Cabral calls these ‘tinker toys.’ “The first step in building a great camera is knowing what they do,” Brian says as he shows a visitor around the lab. “Every cellphone camera behaves differently.”

Brian knows how to tell this story well. A trim, quick-talking engineer with a precisely-trimmed beard who holds 13 patents, Brian has been studying photography since he grew up in California’s central valley. Brian’s mission: to put Tegra’s visual computing smarts to work in every photograph taken with a Tegra smartphone or tablet.

These efforts include technologies that deliver high-dynamic range images with a single exposure and the ability to ‘tap’ on an object in a frame to keep it in focus throughout a series of shots. Such features rely on a cutting-edge computational photography technology NVIDIA calls “Chimera” that taps into the power of Tegra’s CPU and GPU to make it possible to wring jaw-dropping images out of the tiny camera systems being built into mobile devices. “It’s almost like a Photoshop plugin for hardware,” Brian explains.

Getting Light Right

To do that, NVIDIA needs to know how that hardware works, intimately. Brian’s tour of the photo calibration lab reveals the depth of NVIDIA’s commitment to great photographs. That starts with the monochromator, which helps NVIDIA’s engineers understand the way the tiny sensors built into today’s digital devices see light.

The device – which to the untrained eye it looks like some kind of futuristic space rifle mounted on a table top — is used to measure how sensors detects light. That’s critical because the light-absorbing pixels that comprise each sensor become less sensitive to light the further you go away from the center of each sensor.

Not So Pretty In Pink

An array of instruments help engineers insure Tegra-powered phones get light right.

The result is easy to see, Brian explains. Pick up many smartphones and take a picture of a white surface, such as a whiteboard. Now look at the photo. You’ll notice that the board will appear “pinkish” around the edges, Brian says. That’s because the image hasn’t been corrected to account for the different ways each part of the smartphone’s sensor detects light.

Images taken by a device that uses a Tegra processor, by contrast, will show the entire surface of the whiteboard as white. That’s because Brian’s team has used the monochromator to shoot a carefully calibrated beam of light at a sensor so that each pixel gets light in exactly the same color and intensity.

This let’s NVIDIA’s engineers take measurements that let them build “spectral response curves,” measurements that allow them to adjust how each phone’s Tegra processor handles light from a camera’s sensor, correcting for the differences in the way pixels on different parts of the sensor detect light.

Going the Distance

No detail is too small. Adjacent to the monochromator is another instrument – in a box about the size of a curbside recycling bin – that uses lasers to measure the distance to the edge of the tiny lenses used in modern camera phones.

Like a point-and-shoot camera, the lenses inside smartphones move back and forth as they focus on objects at different distances – the tiny lenses in smartphones just move incredibly small distances. No room for error here.

Knowing precisely how each lens moves helps Brian and his colleagues tune software so that each smartphone knows exactly where the lens is when it moves back and forth within its housing, resulting in better focus.

That precision also helps determine the ‘settle time,’ for each lens, the fraction of a second the lens needs to stop jittering after it’s moved, so that a smartphone can quickly capture a focused image.

Even the images displayed from the camera on each smartphone’s screen are studied, Brian explains, as he picks up a high-speed camera the size of a football. The camera can shoot 50,000CK frames per second. That’s fast enough to study every detail of how the pixels are painted on smartphone’s digital display, so the team at the lab can know how fast an image on the screen can be refreshed and how the colors captured by the camera look on it.

The Still Life From Hell

The tour doesn’t end here, though. Leave the sleek black-walled lab and follow Brian and he strides briskly across the building and you’ll find a room that looks very different from the sleek black lab where we started the tour.

In one room, you’ll find a series of abstract black-and-white patterns are used to test the quality of the images taken by each freshly-tuned Tegra device.

Next door: a room that could be the live-work space from hell. It’s the opposite of the crisp, all-black labs where Brian began his tour.

Every possible indoor scene jammed into a single tennis court sized space: an office, a kitchen, a living room, a dining room are all duplicated in a room whose walls alternate between warm orange and yellow tones and cool blues and greens.

The odd colors and strange combinations let NVIDIA’s engineers test a wide-range of common – and hard to photograph – combinations.

It’s enough to give a visitor a headache. If the resulting photos don’t result in the same, NVIDIA’s engineers know they’ve tuned their Tegra device to perfection.

Fast and Frugal: NVIDIA Demos World’s Most Efficient Cat 4 LTE-Advanced Modem

2013-05-20T21:03:17Z

NVIDIA’s mobile processor for mainstream smartphones – Tegra 4i, which includes an integrated NVIDIA i500 LTE modem, chewed through 150Mbps of LTE data in a demo this week at CTIA 2013 in Las Vegas.

First shown at Mobile World Congress in February at Cat 3 100mbps, this Tegra 4i demo is fully based on a software update – no new hardware, no new processor. This showcases the adaptability and flexibility of NVIDIA’s software-defined radio technology.

Speed to Burn: Tegra 4i chewed through 150 Mbps of data in a demo at CTIA this week.

An additional advantage of the technology is its tiny size. Because the modem is designed with general purpose Deep Execution Processors (DXP), it’s 40 percent the size of a conventional LTE modem. The benefit is a fast, high performance, adaptable modem in a tiny footprint.

Tegra 4i’s modem is also multi-mode. It delivers 4G LTE Advanced and is backward compatible so it can offer LTE Cat 3, 3G, and 2G. That means it will work even where LTE networks aren’t available. Other LTE Advanced features will be coming soon in software.

The CTIA demo used a tester which emulates an LTE Cat 4 network because live local LTE Cat 4 networks don’t exist yet. In this demo Phoenix – the Tegra 4i reference smartphone – is connected to the tester and shows 150 Mbps.

We also demonstrated Phoenix running on a live AT&T LTE network – showing video streaming over LTE and voice calls. It’s a great proof point of our strong progress in Tegra 4i modem stability and performance.

Nearly Three Dozen New CUDA Centers Announced, Bringing Grand Total Toward 300

2013-05-20T19:55:12Z

Nearly three dozen institutions from 11 countries were added this past quarter to our roster of CUDA Research Centers and CUDA Teaching Centers, bringing the total to 273 in 42 nations.

Work being done there includes three-dimensional genome sequencing for cancer research, graphics and numeric programming, and design of programming and runtime systems for heterogeneous nodes and clusters.

CUDA Teaching Centers — of which there are 18 new ones — equip tens of thousands of students graduating each year with the knowledge and expertise to take advantage of the parallel processing power of GPUs (see “What Is CUDA?”). They get free teaching kits, textbooks, software licenses, NVIDIA CUDA architecture-enabled GPUs for teaching lab computers and academic discounts for additional hardware.

CUDA Research Centers – of which there are 17 new ones — embrace GPU computing across multiple research fields. They have access to exclusive events with key researchers and academics, a designated NVIDIA technical liaison and specialized training sessions.

Here are some examples of CUDA-related work taking place at some of our newest CUDA Research Centers:

Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo (U.S.)

The CUDA Research Center at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo supports a diverse range of applied research activities that benefit from CUDA technology. Research applications include ocean modeling, computational bioinformatics, cyber-security and parallel computing education. These research efforts have resulted in several papers, and have allowed undergraduate and graduate students in computer science to collaborate with faculty and students in other disciplines. Interdisciplinary, GPU-centric research is enabling better science through improved scale and resolution, which in turn provides excellent teaching opportunities for applied parallel computing.

Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan (France)

The CFD team in the Department of Mathematics, Center for Mathematics and their Applications develops numerical methods dedicated to GPU-computing for general fluid dynamics. Research focuses on real time visualization and human interaction and on challenging industrial problems involving complex multiphase flow applications.

Pennsylvania State University (U.S.)

Research undertaken by the Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure (RCC) Unit at Penn State is largely dictated by the needs of its various schools, including the Eberly College of Science, the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, and the College of Engineering. These needs fall into categories such as quantum physics and chemistry, classical molecular dynamics, and computational engineering.

Turkish Air Force Academy (Turkey)

The Turkish Air Force Academy was awarded the National Support Program Grant by the Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council (TUBITAK 1001 #112E281)to study how GPUs can be used in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. This study aims to produce a solution for the re-calculation of dynamic vector fields by developing parallel algorithms which will be computed on NVIDA CUDA-accelerated GPUs.

Additional new CUDA Research Centers include:

Applied Technology Operation at SURVICE Engineering Company (U.S.)
Duke University (U.S.)
KTH Royal Institute of Technology & Stockholm University (Germany)
MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore (India)
National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (TIFR) (India)
Providence University (U.S.)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (U.S.)
Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning (India)
Stevens Institute of Technology (U.S.)
Universidad Industrial de Santander (Columbia)
Università degli Studi di Torino (Italy)
Universität Bielefeld (Germany)
University of Washington – Seattle (U.S.)

The new CUDA Teaching Centers include:

B V Bhoomaraddi College of Engineering & Technology, Hubli (India)
Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics (Belarus)
Eckerd College (U.S.)
Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China)
Illinois Institute of Technology (U.S.)
Istanbul Technical University (Turkey)
Lanzhou University (China)
Newcastle University (UK)
Portland State University (U.S.)
San Diego Supercomputer Center (U.S.)
Santa Clara University (U.S.)
South China University of Technology (China)
The Army Institute of Technology, Pune (India)
Universidade Estadual do Centro-Oeste (UNICENTRO) (Brazil)
Universität Duisburg-Essen (Germany)
University of Alabama, Huntsville (U.S.)
University of Washington (U.S.)
Wright State University (U.S.)

We Came, We Saw, We Made Stuff: NVIDIA’s GeForce Team Hits the Maker Faire

2013-05-20T22:07:32Z

A choir of mechanical lobsters, bass, trout, catfish and sharks mounted on a blue Volvo sedan belted out tunes. Children wearing t-shirts proclaiming “Will Render For Food,” clutched bags of kettle corn. Young and old stepped out of the California sun for hands-on workshops on soldering. This is our kind of scene.

NVIDIA’s GeForce team put on a show at the Maker Faire for the tens of thousands of do-it-yourselfers crowding through the grounds of the San Mateo County Event Center for the weekend event.

The Faire is at the center of a movement of do-it-yourselfers who take pride in mastering the technologies in the world around them, whether that means turning scooters and sheet metal into cupcake cars — complete with sprinkle-adorned hats — or learning how to mix Diet Coke and Mentos into magnificent, and messy, displays of do-it-yourself science.

Hands on: NVIDIANs walked fairgoers through the process of building a PC.

NVIDIA’s GeForce team fit right in, leading attendees through hands-on workshops showing them how to build their own PC, overclock a GPU and turn a PC case into a work of art.

“The reason we’re here is we want to celebrate the spirit of do-it-yourself,” NVIDIA’s Peter Kingsley said as he toted his 20-month-old daughter around the show. “Building your own GeForce gaming PC is easy, cost efficient, rewarding and a lot of fun.”

In between sessions led by NVIDIANs clad in black and green t-shirts, the GeForce hardware on display at NVIDIA’s booth drew lustful glances.

“What I would give for that PC,” said Chris, as he eyed a machine equipped with three NVIDIA GTX Titan graphics cards.

“I’m a total NVIDIA fanboy,” said David, a freshman at Harvey Mudd College, before diving into a session led by NVIDIA’s Tom Petersen explaining how to tune up your GPU. “All this hardware is first rate.”

Also drawing gawkers: Brian Carter — who runs Bods Mods, a custom PC case shop — hand assembled a robot-shaped PC case out of acrylic over the course of the weekend as fair-goers asked him about his work.

The clear plastic case, and its motorized robot arms, drew plenty of comments as Carter pieced the machine together.

“Amazing, that’s just amazing,” said Andy, who was showing his son, Rob, around the Maker Faire.

Andy, who hand-built his own gaming PC for sessions of “Call of Duty: Black Ops II,” was inspired.

“We need to build him one at some point,” he said, gesturing towards Rob, who grinned. “In fact, I think it’s time to get started.”

Mission accomplished.

NVIDIA will be at the Maker Faire all weekend at booth #328. Check our list of workshops and plan your day here: http://ow.ly/l8ODO

NVIDIA Shows Off First 1080p High-Def Mobile Video Conferencing at Google I/O with Tegra 4

2013-05-17T21:21:40Z

Imagine being able to participate in smooth, 1080p high-definition video conferences on a mobile device. Better still, imagine being able to dive in with nothing more than a web browser. No need to install any special browser plug-ins or dedicated software.

That’s the idea behind an amazing technology called Web with Real Time Communications capabilities, or WebRTC, that Google is spearheading. And our Tegra 4 mobile processor will be the first to fully support the royalty-free VP8 video compression format at the core of WebRTC.

Demonstrating our key role in the Android ecosystem, we’re showing how Tegra 4 supports high-definition 1080p videoconferencing on a system running Android Jelly Bean at a buttery-smooth 30 frames per second. With Tegra 4, NVIDIA is the first to offer built-in support for both VP8 encoding and decoding.

That’s four-times the performance of earlier software-only efforts, which delivered only 8 frames per second of video at 1080p. Even more impressive: that performance is accomplished using just half the power, a mark our engineers are hustling to drive even lower.

NVIDIA has been working closely with Google’s Android ,Chrome, VP8 and WebRTC teams to support VP8 hardware acceleration in the WebRTC architecture. The goal: to deliver the best WebRTC experience on Android, Chrome OS and Google TV.

This Tegra 4-powered demo shows off the great work the two teams have done so far.

Drop by the WebRTC pod at the Chrome area at Google I/O to learn more, and to see a demonstration of this technology in action.

SHIELD Pre-Order Moved Up in Response to Growing Buzz

2013-05-17T18:51:37Z

Good news: our partners are so excited about SHIELD that they’re moving up the pre-order date for our amazing new open platform gaming portable.

You can now pre-order your SHIELD today.

Check out what some of our partners are saying about SHIELD:

“SHIELD is a brand new kind of gaming portable and we’re thrilled to be one of the few retailers who will be carrying it,” said Stephen Weller, director of product management at Newegg. “Our tech savvy customers love gaming and are anxious to get their hands on it. In fact, we’ve decided to move up the pre-order date for those customers who want to be among the first to own a SHIELD!”

“Gamers look to GameStop as their defacto gaming destination,” said Joe Gorman, vice president of mobile at video game retailer GameStop. “As Android gamers look for a place to get the latest and greatest gear, it made total sense for us to carry SHIELD. We believe this handheld console will revolutionize the Android gaming market.”

Here’s where you can pre-order SHIELD now:

NVIDIA – store.nvidia.com/buyshield
Newegg – www.newegg.com/buyshield
GameStop – https://www.gamestop.com/android/consoles/nvidia-shield-16gb/109517
Canada Computer – http://canadacomputers.com/nvidia/nvidiashield.php

Look for Micro Center to go live with a pre-order page within the next few days. We’ll update this post with a link to it when they do.