Computer Graphics World

April 2011

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Workstations•Graphics n n n n peers to be used as the situation requires. In reality, it’s a lazy mistake to say software companies “lag” hardware companies. What has happened in the workstation industry is that the tools have been slow to evolve. Nvidia has done amazing work to help prime the pump with CUDA. CUDA, OpenCL, and DirectCompute are all going to play a role in pushing software development forward in astounding ways. Processor Revolutions In spite of all the drama between AMD and Nvidia, GPUs need CPUs, and CPUs need GPUs. The advances made in GPU com- pute have made the processor developers even more aware of the bottlenecks between CPUs and GPUs, and how much more ef- ficiently they can work together if they were better designed. Intel and AMD are introducing new proces- sors that integrate the GPU with the CPU in a chip. They’re doing it differently, of course, but their work speaks to the power of hetero- geneous computing. It’s expected that AMD’s Fusion technology will have a stronger GPU than that of Intel, which is not really surprising considering the core strengths of each company. Intel’s tools tend to emphasize the CPU over the GPU, and the firm has made no secret of the fact that it plans to leverage the power of the CPU and use the GPU as an accelerator. AMD, for one, be- lieves its tightly coupled design, which makes for faster interconnects between CPU and GPU, will result in a processor that can handle the duties for many workstation applications. Both Intel and AMD will enable users to integrate a GPU add-in board to raise the level of compute power to accommodate more resource-inten- sive applications. These processors will be able to manage the tasks that were once accomplished by power- ful CPUs coupled with discrete GPUs. As a result, we’re going to see the advent of more low-power computers with high-power capa- bilities, and they’ll be incorporated in tablets, notebooks, and new classes of devices. Brian Harrison now works at Nvidia, but he was in charge of software development at SolidWorks for many years. He has seen a shift in the kind of computers people use as the workforce becomes mobile. “People want to work at home, but they might not have that powerful of a system at home,” he says. As a result, Harrison has seen several trends in this regard: People find that they can do much of their work on a more modest system, and they shift the type of work they do, reserving the heavy-duty portion for the office and more lightweight tasks for home. In the future, people might leverage remote computing to take advantage of powerful sys- tems back at the office. AMD general director Janet Matsuda is thinking along the same wave- length as Harrison when she thinks about how people are going to be working with computers in the future. “We see a future with notebooks and tablets accessing the cloud for mobile pro- ductivity,” she says. “When professionals are working in their homes and offices, they’ll rely on robust clients with multiple monitors.” And, there’s another dimension: the cloud. “AMD’s Fusion technology will offer tre- mendous power efficiency for delivering graphics from the cloud,” says Matsuda. Autodesk has been famously experimenting with the cloud for Inventor, Revit, and Maya, and the company has just released a cloud- based version of AutoCAD WS. Autodesk is working with OnLive to enable CAD ap- plications to be streamed in much the same way that Assassin’s Creed is streamed to gamers. Maybe some customers will want just to access and super-charged apps courtesy of hundreds and even thousands of GPU cores are going to keep the workstation market heading on its current trajectory with impressive advances in visualization and efficiency. Multiple monitors and low-cost stereographics are going to put advanced visualization on the desktop of any- one who wants it. While that may be just a step along the path of business as usual, it’s a giant leap for those in visual professions. More people will be able to use advanced visualization because advanced visualization will be available on a much broader range of systems. Also, users will take advantage of visualization more often because they don’t have to troop down the hall to the power wall or switch to a separate 3D system. Everything they need is at their desks. We are finally going to see applications tak- ing advantage of multiple processors—CPU and GPU. That means when you spend more money for a computer, you are going to see a huge leap in performance. On the other hand, even when you don’t spend a bunch of money on computers, you’re going to see a leap in per- Software firms, including Autodesk, are taking advantage of multiple processors in high-end workstations. some capabilities on a metered basis. Maybe streamed versions will be an added capability customers will want to pay for. Right now, there’s a lot getting in the way of flawless inter- action with apps in the cloud, but Autodesk CEO Carl Bass, Solid Works CEO Jeff Ray, and Dassault CEO Bernard Charles have all said that different models for selling and buy- ing CAD are inevitable. The World Right Now Presently, it’s all about doing more with less, but that concept itself is going to change. For today and tomorrow, advances like 30- bit color, low-cost, multiple monitor setups, formance. Autodesk’s Kowalski says Autodesk is seeing a future where the traditional idea of the workstation is changing. He, too, believes that there is going to be a mix of machines that people use. “I can see new technologies further accelerating a split migration,” he says, noting that the real change is in where people work. The pace of change seems slow, but it always comes much faster than you expect. n Kathleen Maher is a contributing editor to , a senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research, a Tiburon, California-based consultancy specializing in graphics and multimedia, and editor in chief of JPR’s “TechWatch.” She can be reached at Kathleen@jonpeddie.com. April 2011 33 CGW Image courtesy Adrian Smith & Gordon Gill Architecture.

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