Nvidia says the future of mobile lines up perfectly with its core strength in graphics processors. More than half of all mobile data traffic is now video, according to Cisco, and that percent is expected to increase as smart devices and connections become faster and more widely available. Nvidia has long dominated the market for graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips that process graphics and video in mobile devices and computers. This week Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang described the capabilities of future chipsets at the company’s GPU Technology Conference.
Huang said the first new innovation will be unified virtual memory in the company’s upcoming Maxwell chipset. Unified virtual memory means that GPUs and CPUs (central processing units) will be able to access one another’s memory. In the next iteration, called Volta, memory modules will be piled into ‘stacked DRAM’ atop the cores. Nvidia said the new architecture will enable its chips to process a full Blu-Ray disc worth of data in just 1/50th of a second.
Nvidia has branched out from GPUs to CPUs with its Tegra chips, calling the new Tegra 4 “the world’s fastest mobile processor.” (Although Qualcomm might dispute that claim.) Going forward, Nvidia plans to integrate its mobile processors with its existing GPUs, an innovation it says will bring to mobile devices capabilities like Open GL 4.3 and CUDA 5 that are now reserved for computers.
The next step will be the combination of next-generation GPUs with CPUs. Nvidia says this will combine 64-bit ARM compatible CPU cores with the Maxwell GPU architecture, greatly increasing the amount of data the chip can process as well as the amount of memory it can access. The company says that within five years, its mobile processors will be 100 times more powerful than Tegra is today.
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