July 1 - 2:30pm EDT   The sequel to NVIDIA's Ion platform could be much faster than its predecessor when it ships, leaks today would show. While the current graphics and chipset combo is based on the GeForce 9400M and has just 16 visual effects cores, Fudzilla now hears that it will have 32 cores, potentially doubling the amount of simultaneous effects it can handle at once. The difference will have the most dramatic effect on 3D but could also impact general-purpose computing tasks that need CUDA or OpenCL. [full story]

May 21 - 10:10am EDT   Apple has posted a job listing that hints at the company's future hardware direction for the iPhone, iPod touch and possible other devices. The position for a High Perform/Low Level Programmer asks for someone familiar not only for programming assembly-level code for ARM processors, which Apple already uses in its handhelds, but for the NEON vector math units used in the newer Cortex architecture for the mobile chips. Apple is especially concerned about experience with vector math and particularly values anyone with additional knowledge of vector units through general CPUs, such as Intel's SSE or the AltiVec units found on PowerPC G4 and G5 cores. [full story]

January 15 - 4:35pm EST   Apple's Mac mini desktop will switch to NVIDIA's Ion platform and Intel's Atom chip as a result, an alleged confirmation by an NVIDIA partner asserts. The Cupertino company is believed to be using the combination graphics and system chipset in an updated computer that would also use the 1.6GHz, dual-core Atom 330. While slower in processing power than the existing Core 2 Duo, the mini system would have video performance close to if not exactly like the GeForce 9400M currently found in all aluminum MacBooks. [full story]

November 21 - 3:20pm EST   Apple has filed for a trademark on OpenCL technology, documents from the US Patent and Trademark Office show. The standard is intended to better distribute processing power on a computer, by using the normally segregated processing on a video card to help with tasks unrelated to graphics. Video cards can be extremely powerful, Apple notes, but only tend to maximize their use in certain applications, such as games. [full story]

November 17 - 4:45pm EST   The Portland Group has released PGI 8.0, the latest version of its compiling and development suite for Mac, Linux and Windows software. The v8.0 edition introduces support for the OpenMP 3.0 multi-core programming standard, which lets coders exploit multiple cores in C or Fortran. Concurrent with this is the ability to create and debug OpenMPI apps in Linux and the Mac OS, and build and deploy multi-core apps to any "major" desktop or cluster OS. [full story]

November 10 - 8:30am EST   NVIDIA on Monday established a new flagship video card for its workstation line. The Quadro FX 5800 is a major improvement over the earlier 5600 that brings 240 visual effects cores, or nearly double the old model's 128, but stands out as the first-ever video card with 4GB of onboard memory. The capacity allows for extremely large textures and geometry and also enables apps with CUDA general-purpose computing support to feed very large data sets: 4D modeling that factors in time is now more realistic. [full story]

September 25 - 11:40am EDT   NVIDIA on Thursday announced it has partnered up with digital video software creator MotionDSP to provide users with a way to enhance the quality of personal videos created by their cellphone cameras, point-and-shoot digicams, camcorders or video captured from the Internet. Written using NVIDIA’s CUDA general-purpose computing technology to take advantage of the GPUs’ abiilities to handle non-graphics tasks, MotionDSP’s codenamed Carmel software tracks every pixel from tens of video frames before reconstructing high-quality video from low-res sources. [full story]

August 22 - 12:50pm EDT   NVIDIA today formally released the finished version of CUDA 2.0. The second generation of the company's general-purpose programming language for its video chipsets supports 64-bit versions of Mac OS X and Windows Vista and adds support for instructions that can help offload more specific tasks from the main processor to the video card, such as 3D textures and hardware-accelerated interpolation of information. [full story]

August 20 - 9:05pm EDT   Apple has updated its download site with the latest version of the NVIDIA CUDA development kit. CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) allows users to crunch mathematical formulas using the GPU resident inside a computer, speeding up otherwise lengthy tasks, such as encoding video or other rich media, as well as scientific and design uses. The kit will allow developers to tweak their code to run optimally on systems such as the MacBook Pro, and its GeForce 8600M graphics chipset. [full story]

July 30 - 8:40pm EDT   Apple's rumored non-Intel mainboard platform may primarily involve a change of suppliers to NVIDIA rather than any kind of custom development, PCPer suggests. The enthusiast site notes that Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA has been developing its first nForce mainboard chipset for Intel-based notebooks, currently codenamed MCP79, with the aim of improving several weaknesses that have affected Intel's own designs and thus Apple as well. The architecture would support all the necessary components for Intel's just-announced Core 2 processors, including a 1,066MHz system bus and the option of DDR3 memory. [full story]

June 6 - 4:35pm EDT   Apple may be looking to adopt proprietary Nvidia code for Macs, an interview reveals. The latter company's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, has proposed that Apple is extremely interested in his company's CUDA programming language, which simplifies the coding process for Nvidia graphics hardware and can in theory improve performance. In February, an early Mac SDK for CUDA was released in the form of a beta. [full story]

May 23 - 2:40pm EDT   (Update with corrections) The version of Photoshop included with Adobe's future Creative Suite 4 will include fuller acceleration both for dedicated video hardware as well as the first support for physics processing, TGDaily has been told as part of an early demonstration. While CS3 has already had limited support for graphics processing units (GPUs) for certain filters, the new version will use video hardware to improve performance across much of the image editor's pipeline. It will also enable new editing techniques: users can bring in a 3D image and paint it with changes applied immediately. [full story]

May 22 - 1:10am EDT   NVIDIA plans on refreshing its GPU line-up next month with two new graphics card that will feature its next-generation CUDA-enabled graphics core, codenamed D10U. The company is expected to deliver both the GeForce GTX 260 (D10U-20) and GeForce GTX 280 (D10U-30) on June 18th as part of its summer refresh, according to DailyTech. The report claims that the GTX 260 will be a "significantly" scaled down version of the GTX 280, which will enable all 240 unified stream processors designed into the processor. These second-generation unified shaders perform 50 percent better than the shaders than its previous-generation offering, the company claims in its documentation; however, ... [full story]

February 20 - 11:55am EST   Nvidia today announced the release of CUDA beta (12.9MB) for the Mac, a developer's kit that allows users to create derivative works for academic, commercial, or personal purposes. In addition to Nvidia's cards being used for gaming, some research firms use CUDA to do molecular modeling using parallel processing implementations, according to The Enquirer. The CUDA developers kit beta is available from Nvidia's website. [full story]

February 4 - 7:25pm EST   Nvidia today announced an official acquisition of Ageia Technologies, the company behind the PhysX software and hardware components. The acquisition will give Nvidia a physics element for its Cuda parallel processing systems. The PhysX technology is currently in use in many Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii games, as well as many gaming PCs worldwide. Nvidia will be hosting a quarterly conference call on February 13th to provide more information about the acquisition in its final stages. [full story]