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NVidia has released a new price-conscious Fermi card to the market today, a GeForce GTX460 SE, that packs in 288 CUDA Cores and 1GB GDDR5 memory into a $189 package.

GeForce GTX 460 SE is GF104 based,but the amount of SM(streaming multiprocessor)decrease from seven groups to six groups.It features only 288 CUDA Core,in order to make up for the loss of performance due to decreased CUDA Core,the graphics card will be with 1GB GDDR5 memory and memory interface of 256-bit.

It seems a bit odd at first to reduce the number of CUDA cores from the already low-ish 336 of the GTX460, but with the low price and overclocking-friendly nature of the card it could do quite well in the overclocking circles.

via NVIDIA Officially Introduces GeForce GTX 460 SE Graphics Card – Expreview.com.

Hardware nvidia

The internet is changing, and so are the user’s preferences when it comes to browsers, as we can see on TechKing‘s latest infographic. All those changes make some victims along the way, of course, and Yahoo looks to be the next big one, at least according to Scores. From Wix comes the interesting look at the differences between Web Designers and Web Developers, Dotcom Monitor shows what is the Internet backbone for Noobs, and finally we get to know the components of a successful Data Center, brought by Wikibon.

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Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

Pixar has just announced a new price for the RenderMan Pro Server software, dropping it an incredible 40% to only $2,000 per license (with additional discounts when buying multiple licenses).  In addition, annual maintenance has dropped to $600 per license per year.

“RenderMan Pro Server’s new price adapts to the ever increasing scale of rendering requirements and is the largest adjustment in many years” said Chris Ford, RenderMan Business Director at Pixar Animation Studios, “RenderMan’s quality is now even more accessible to anyone aspiring to create the highest levels of cinematic imagery, and we look forward to seeing what our customers will produce next.”

Renderman Studio and the Maya Integration features remain at their original prices.  Full details after the break.

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Graphics pixar, renderman

We’ve discussed junaio a lot here on VizWorld, and today they’re back with another augmented reality press release.  It’s really no different that their other work, except this time it’s with a bigname company: Coca Cola of Germany.  It’s actually done with Sausalitos, a restaurant and bar chain popular in the region, but by viewing the ad with the “Sausalitos” Channel in the junaio app, you see the AR ad and get a coupon for a free Coke.

Sausalitos together with Coke zero of Germany just launched their Augmented Reality campaign on junaio this week. Traditional advertising is losing traction and people often pay little attention to commercial messages found in newspapers and magazines. Now, the much talked about Augmented Reality (AR) technology as available within the smartphone AR browser junaio may change all that. junaio`s highly sophisticated image recognition and object tracking capabilities make it possible to recognize a print ad and call up additional digital content to delight the viewer and draw renewed attention to a sponsor`s message.

Read the full release after the break.

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Graphics advertising, augmented reality, junaio

For Tiago Veloso’s latest piece at Inspired Magazine, he tackles the plethora of infographics that came out around Brazil’s recent election.

Obviously, all the main local media and even a few talented designers made some great pieces of design to illustrate this historical moment, so, enough politics, and let’s just enjoy the infographics – and, please, all of you awesome non-Portuguese speaking Inspired readers, forgive me for making this post, that can really be a bit hard to understand.

via 40 Ways of Visualizing Brazil’s Historical Election | Inspired Magazine.

Graphics infographics, list

The 2010 Formula 1 is over, with a surprising winner this year, Sebastian vettel, and Make and Model pinpoints the major highlights of another exciting season. We continue our first selection of the week with Mint‘s overview on the financial impact of salads, Mademan explains how dreams help our brain, and from Mother Nature Network comes some odd facts about the human body. To close this up, a look at some of the toxic dangers that we have hiding around our houses, from the folks at Fixr.

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Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

If you work with Particle effects and rendering but find yourself trapped by proprietary file formats, Walt Disney Animation Studios may have the solution for you in their new Partio library.  With support for several of the most popular formats, it’s a combination library and application to not just translate between the file formats but enable some computation, and it’s all open-source.

• Supports Houdini’s GEO and BGEO, Maya’s PDB and PDA, RenderMan’s PTC
• Arbitrary back end in-memory/cached formats can be supported from a single interface
• A Python API for easy scripting of particle manipulation
• A C++ API for high performance particle manipulation
• Nearest Neighbor Lookups for density estimation, Voronoi computation, etc.

via Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Graphics disney, sdk, software

The Top500Minder is an interactive visualize of the Top500 lists going back to 1993 that lets you plot HPC growth against nations per-capita and GDP, showing the growth.  Of course, right now everyone is plotting the differences between US and China.  Shown above is the Flops Per $GDP for the US and China, showing how China has nearly caught up.

The visualizations are very similar to the popular Hans Rosling moving charts, flash and web based.

Top500Minder.

Science interactive, top500, visualization

I have to admit it’s no surprise that China’s impressive Tianhe A1 supercomputer, powered by over 7,000 Nvidia Tesla cards and 14,000 CPUs, just claimed the coveted #1 spot in the newest Top500 List.  What may be surprising is just how fast it actually went.  The previous press releases discussed the impressive 2.5 Sustained Petaflops of power, but the actual results show an astounding 4.7 Petaflops of peak performance.

Jaguar (of ORNL) continues to take #2, while China’s Nebulae system claims #3.  Read the full list online.

TOP500 List – November 2010 (1-100) | TOP500 Supercomputing Sites.

Hardware, Science hpc, top500

Guru3D is reporting that the Radeon 6900 series has been delayed until Dec 13th. The reason for this shortage has been reported to be due to the immature manufacturing process at TSMC. However, Guru3D is reporting that the real reason could be that it is a component shortage.

This TI component is an integrated driver-MOSFET (DrMOS) that was first used on AMD’s Radeon HD 6800 Series. This DrMOS is so new to the point there is no information on it on the Web, not even from the manufacturer itself.

This explanation seems to be more reasonable than the manufacturing process being the problem. TSMC has had plenty of time to get its 40nm processes working, and it does not seem to be affecting rival NVIDIA. But that brings up another possible reason for the delay. With the recent release of the NVIDIA GTX 580, might be trying to increase the performance of the 6900 series to beat the GTX 580.

via : AMD Radeon HD 6970 delay due to component shortage

Hardware amd, radeon