Issue #9

The Rise of the P55

Written by John Martinez Tuesday, 29 September 2009 17:46

Intel's new P55 platform has generated considerable amounts of interest at several levels: the chipset, the CPU, and the motherboards.

Intel’s Core 2-series CPUs gave resellers a real reason to get excited about mainstream computing when they launched back in 2006. The dual- and quad-core processors remain extremely competitive, even today, enabling everything from entry-level price points to enthusiast-class performance. However, Intel’s Nehalem micro-architecture is about to change the game completely, enabling more features, performance, and power-savings than you’ve ever seen in a mid-range machine.

Progress is a wonderful thing. It ignites excitement,it spurs sales, and it perpetuates that cycle of innovation. You got a taste of that with Intel’s Core 2-series CPUs, which borrowed critical design cues from then-modern Pentium M mobile processors and introduced unprecedented performance to the company’s desktop lineup, all the while slashing power consumption.

The new Xeon 3400 is based on the Nehalem architecture and features an on-die memory controller.

And now the Core 2 chips are giving way to Intel’s next generation of mainstream processors—only these aren’t the mid-range chips many of your customers might have been expecting. Rather, they’re based almost completely on technology already seen in the company’s enthusiast-class Core i7 and server-oriented Xeon 5500-series CPUs. Code-named Nehalem, this scalable microarchitecture enables more than just incremental performance increases over the Core 2 machines you build today. It also facilitates significant power savings, intelligent acceleration of single-threaded applications, and a brand new chipset, tuned for value.

An Era Of GPU Computing

Written by John Martinez Monday, 11 August 2008 01:12

AN ERA OF GPU COMPUTING If gaming cards are all that come to mind when you think about super-fast graphics processors, then you’re missing an important opportunity to sell workstation-class hardware to the many professionals who use high-end GPUs for their digital content creation, finance, manufacturing, and software development workloads.

Fret not if you’ve left workstation sales on the table; but don’t put off getting involved in selling top-shelf business systems, either. Between Intel’s latest Xeon 5500-series dual-socket platforms and NVIDIA’s brand new Quadro FX professional graphics cards, there has never been so much muscle available to the customers who can truly put it to use—the folks already running software optimized for massive parallelism.The most recent refresh to the Quadro FX family literally multiplies performance versus previous-generation boards. When time spent rendering translates into dollars lost, it’s easy for even the most budget-conscious businesses to justify the price of faster cards. So, based on 3D muscle alone, NVIDIA’s new Quadro FX boards—the 380, 580, 1800, 3800, 4800, and 5800—make for excellent upsell opportunities.

Moving Beyond Graphics

PRO GRAPHICS SWEET SPOT. The NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800 is one of the company's newest models. Its single-slot form factor, power GPU, and dual DisplayPort outputs make it a particularly well-rounded offering.

Of course, the freshest GPUs excel at more than just workstation graphics. And while 3D is a big part of why your customers will want to upgrade, NVIDIA, specifically, offers so much more than speedy rendering. To begin, all of the new boards support NVIDIA’s CUDA parallel computing architecture. In case you aren’t familiar with the idea of general-purpose GPU computing, graphics processors like those found on the Quadro FX lineup can be made to perform other demanding tasks, like video decoding, physics acceleration, or image processing. CUDA is the ISA and compute engine used to harness the GPU’s massive programmability and inherent parallelism. NVIDIA has spent much of the last two years developing the necessary tools needed by ISVs to write CUDA-optimized software. With that foundation in place, applications are now emerging that take advantage of these new GPUs. The availability of 192-core graphics processors, for example, like the one found on NVIDIA’s Quadro FX 3800, opens the door to massive performance increases in those optimized programs. As a VAR, you’re in the trusted advisor position. Find out if your customer’s business apps have or will be CUDA-enabled. Introduce SMBs that already do a lot of video or image processing work to some of the newest titles shipping with CUDA support, such as MotionDSP’s Ikena video forensic technology or Elemental Technologies’ Badaboom Media Converter.

Standardize On Adobe

Even businesses on a budget can benefit from a shift to professional graphics. The Quadro FX 580 enables capable 3D rendering and CUDA support at a price point under $200.

The digital content creation market is now so significant that NVIDIA has even designed a product specifically for professionals who use Adobe’s CS4 suite. The company’s Quadro CX centers on the same flagship architecture as NVIDIA’s highest-end Quadro FX boards. However, its CX also includes a CUDA-enabled plug-in for Adobe Premiere, which encodes HDV video to H.264 in a quarter of the time it’d take a typical dual-core workstation. NVIDIA has additional plug-ins planned, which Quadro CX owners will be able to access for free. Adobe Photoshop CS4 also benefits from the Quadro CX’s optimized architecture. Accelerated pan and rotate functionality, improved zoom, and split-screen image manipulation are all brand new features that most of your customers have likely never seen demonstrated. And because the Quadro CX includes a pair of DisplayPort outputs, you can match the card up to a high-end display like HP’s DreamColor LP2480zx, allowing workstation professionals to view their deliverable in 30-bit color. Or, upsell the optional SDI board and view in 10-bit/12-bit SDI before final output. Customers who don’t need the $1,799 Quadro CX’s immense horsepower can still get plenty of punch from a more mainstream Quadro FX running CUDA-enabled software. Between general purpose GPU computing and NVIDIA’s other value-adds, like SLI multi-card rendering, the latest professional graphics cards are worth much more than just their 3D performance—and that’s why you should be selling them.