Sexy silicon
"We have a small surprise for you," Jen-Hsun told the crowd. "[our engineers] worked around the clock to get us a working system," he continued before launching a demo he described as "sexy".
"We can't wait to tell you guys more about it," said the Nvidia CEO before deciding that he actually wasn't going to say too much more about it and, instead, launched into praise for Nexus, the first development environment for massively parallel computing integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio.
Then, proving Nvidia had grown up and was no longer all about the fun and games, Jen-Hsun invited associate laboratory director for Computing and Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Jeffrey A. Nichols to the stage. Nichols explained that his team would be using Fermi for climate modelling and other complex scientific problems currently too cumbersome for ye old run of the mill supercomputers.
"What else can we do for you guys?" Jen-Hsun asked Nichols. "Well, another order of magnitude or two in peak performance would be great," quipped Jeffrey, only to have Jen-Hsun respond "Sure, no problem!"
Jen-Hsun said he looked forward to announcing Fermi architecture in Geforce at some point in the near future, but said "you'll have to wait a little longer." He also maintained that OEMs around the world were waiting for Fermi, because it not only captured people's imaginations but also allowed Nvidia to deploy something it is describing as "serious computing."
Serious indeed. Well, it certainly seems the green machine has its confidence back.
