NVIDIA Press Conference - Tegra 4 - at CES 2013

The Tegra 4 Is Here

by Sam Biddle

Here it is: the next biggest, baddest mobile processor, the silicon monster that'll power your next coveted super-smartphone. It packs 72 GPU cores, 4 A15 CPU cores, and a built-in LTE.

In a (somewhat simulated) head to head test between a Nexus 10 tablet and and a Tegra 4 mystery machine, the latter loaded 25 webpages in only 27 seconds, with the older chip taking 50. Not many of us will be loading up 25 webpages simultaneously, but Nvidia is hammering beefed up browser performance here—as well as topping the iPad 4's A6X processor across the board. Nvidia says it's simply the fastest mobile processor in the world. Nvidia says.

The Tegra 4 will also have supercharged HDR photo rendering, Nvidia says, beating out the iPhone 5's abilities with better capture speeds thanks to all of those aforementioned cores working at once. In actual life terms, Nvidia says it'll be the difference between two seconds of rendering on the iPhone and 0.2 seconds on a Tegra 4-powered mobile camera.

One particularly nifty feature is "live HDR," which actually shows a video preview of the difference between a shot with and without HDR. Very impressive, and nothing we've ever seen before.

Nvidia is banking pretty heavily on the virtue of HDR here! Sometimes it looks nice, sometimes it looks tacky—but at least with a live preview you'll be able to tell beforehand.

A demo of Dead Trigger 2 running on Tegra 4 yielded some highly purty visuals—think early-PS3 era—though there was some slowdown. Still! This is phone and tablet tech. Fancy stuff.

No word on when we'll start seeing these things in our things. Soon!

Opengl ES

OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES) is a subset of the OpenGL 3D graphics application programming interface (API) designed for embedded systems such as mobile phones, PDAs, and video game consoles. OpenGL ES is managed by the not-for-profit technology consortium, the Khronos Group, Inc. Versions Several versions of the OpenGL ES specification now exist. OpenGL ES 1.0 is drawn up against the OpenGL 1.3 specification, OpenGL ES 1.1 is defined relative to the OpenGL 1.5 specification and OpenGL ES 2.0 is defined relative to the OpenGL 2.0 specification. This means that, for example, an application written for OpenGL ES 1.0 should be easily portable to the desktop OpenGL 1.3; as the OpenGL ES is a stripped-down version of the API the reverse may or may not be true, depending on the particular features used. Version 1.0 and 1.1 both have common and common lite profiles, the difference being that the common lite profile only supports fixed-point instead of floating point data type support, whereas common supports both. OpenGL ES 1.0 Contained much functionality stripped from the original OpenGL API and a little bit added. Two of the more significant differences between OpenGL ES and OpenGL are the removal of the glBegin ... glEnd calling semantics for primitive rendering (in favor of vertex arrays) and the introduction offixed-point data types for vertex coordinates and attributes to better support the computational abilities of embedded processors, which often lack a floating point unit (FPU). Many other functions were removed in version 1.0 to produce a lightweight interface: for example, quad and polygon primitive rendering, texgen, line and polygon stipple, polygon mode, antialiased polygon rendering (with alpha border fragments, not multisample), ARB_Image class pixel operation functionality, bitmaps, 3D texture, drawing to the frontbuffer, accumulation buffer, copy pixels, evaluators, selection, feedback, display lists, push and pop state attributes, back-face material parameters, and user defined clip planes. OpenGL ES 1.1 Adds to the OpenGL ES 1.0 functionality by introducing additional features such as mandatory support for multitexture, better multitexture support (with combiners and dot product texture operations), automatic mipmap generation, vertex buffer objects, state queries, user clip planes, and greater control over point rendering. OpenGL ES 2.0 OpenGL ES 2.0 was publicly released in March 2007. It eliminates most of the fixed-function rendering pipeline in favor of a programmable one. Almost all rendering features of the transform and lighting pipelines, such as the specification of materials and light parameters formerly specified by the fixed-function API, are replaced by shaders written by the graphics programmer. As a result, OpenGL ES 2.0 is not backward compatible with OpenGL ES 1.1. 2.0 also goes agnostic on the handedness of the coordinate system, and many implementations seem to be left handed, in contrast to OpenGL history.

IT Career Cross-Roads: Do I Stay Technical or Move to Management?

At some point, the IT professional rising from the ranks needs to make a major career decision: do I advance my career as a hands-on technical professional or should I focus on managing technical people? Here are some key points to consider when making this major IT career path decision.

What do I like to do?

There is a big difference between being hands-on technical and managing people, so start out by determining which you like best. Think back on the things you have done over the last six months and ask yourself what efforts really excited you. Do you enjoy working independently or with other people? In general, managers spend a lot of time working with other people while technical people will spend more time working independently with the various tools and technologies.

During your career you probably had some personality tests like Meyers Briggs and you should also review those to gain additional insights. If you test out as an Introvert with a deep technical slant, then staying technical might be the right step. Conversely, if you are an Extrovert who loves engaging with others, then management could be the right path.

Where will it take me and what will be the challenges?

For each career path, consider where it will take you in 5 and 10 years. If you are looking to management, how far will you go? Not everyone reaches the VP/CIO/CTO level, so try to determine where you would like to end up.

If you are technical, where do you want to specialize? One of the chief challenges in staying technical is to continually prove your worth in the face of the increasing number of younger technicians who have grown up with a Blackberry in their hand. So choosing the right in-demand technical skills is important as the ColdFusion programmer that was hot a while ago is not in demand today.

Now think about what your job would be like on a daily basis. The manager will have to deal with various personalities and navigate personal agendas, while the technical professional will mostly be focused on meeting the requirements and timelines for projects and initiatives. If “politics” makes you crazy, then management might not be the path for you. On the other hand, if you are terrific at liaising across various groups and driving consensus, then management could be the right choice.

Of course you can consider salary and compensation, but unless you are going for the C-level and high level management roles, this probably will not be your key factor in making a decision here. You can check out PayScale.com and Salary.com to get an idea of what folks are being paid in the jobs you identified.


What will I need to know in the future to be secure in my job?

For each career choice, consider what you would need to do to advance and maintain your career track. Management positions will require a strong understanding of the key business areas so you can partner with your internal customers to advance their goals through the use of technology. Those who are secure in their jobs are the ones who have an intimate understanding of the market, the competition and the inner workings of the company as this level of knowledge is not easily replaced.

On the technical side, no matter what you know now, you will have to learn new tools and technologies moving forward. Does that excite you or make you groan? Most importantly, you need to specialize in an area that cannot be easily outsourced and replaced. This is much easier on the applications side than the infrastructure side so consider how secure and in-demand you will be with your acquired skills. Consider too whether you are committed to securing the training needed to advance your skills, even if your employer does not provide this for you.

Validating your decision.

Once you have gone through this analysis, some excellent next steps to ensure you are making the right decision are to talk to people who are in the positions you have identified and find out what their job is like. Even better if you can find a Mentor to guide you. You can also hire an IT Career Coach to help provide the assessments and guidance to assist you.

For most IT professionals, this is the most important decision in your career so take the time to do the analysis and validation before you make the plunge.

WebCL

WebCL - Heterogeneous parallel computing in HTML5 web browsers

Visualization Library

Visualization Library is a C++ middleware for high-performance 2D and 3D graphics applications based on the industry standard OpenGL 1.x-4.x, designed to develop portable applications for the Windows, Linux and Mac OS X operating systems.

Visualization Library is currently used by professionals, researchers and students to develop 2D and 3D applications in fields such as scientific visualization, material sciences, geosciences, oil and gas exploration, health and medical training and visualization, civil and military simulation, virtual reality, augmented reality, visual simulation, plotting, data mining and visualization, presentations, multimedia applications, special effects, 2D and 3D games and so on.

ANNOUNCING CUDA 4.0

CUDA Toolkit 4.0 Overview