Vejle is not only the name of a city in Denmark, it is also the codename of the new processor in Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Vejle is a combination of a compute processor and a graphics processor onto a single chip. By combining the two onto one chip, Microsoft and IBM are able to reduce the power, reduce the cooling needed, and to make it less expensive. VentureBeat has published an article on this new hybrid chip.
Redesigning a game console is important even though the redesigns do not make the game consoles faster. The console performance has to stay the same in general because it allows game developers to target a stable platform. But it’s important to reduce the costs, power, and size of the consoles because the rival console makers are in a constant battle to lower their prices and make their machines more appealing to gamers.
Microsoft has put their flag in the sand in a way that won’t soon be surpassed, with the release of their “Terapixel Image” project. A spherical image of the sky, from the Digitized Sky Survey, they combined 1800 images on a 64-node cluster into a massive 802GB file one 1 Terapixel.
The result of the Terapixel project is a full color 24 bit RGB terapixel image of the night sky. The artifacts of the original telescope imaging process have been programmatically removed. The resulting image can be viewed in the WorldWide Telescope and by Bing Maps.TeraPixel is a showcase for Microsoft technologies in many-core computing, in high performance and data-intensive distributed computing, and in scientific workflow management.
A TeraPixel (that’s 1-Million MegaPixels) would require roughly a half-million HD Televisions.
The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a computer program to allow people to view outer space. Written by Microsoft, the program turns your computer into a virtual telescope. It does this by using the best imagery available from both ground-based and space-based telescopes.
Recently the program has been updated with over 13,000 detailed images from various NASA spacecraft. This enables users to view Mars using a high-resolution 3-D map of the terrain.
“By providing the Mars dataset to the public on the WorldWide Telescope platform, we are enabling a whole new audience to experience the thrill of space,” said Chris C. Kemp, chief technology officer for information technology at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
NVidia has caught up to AMD in support for Microsoft’s RemoteFX product. If you haven’t heard of RemoteFX before, it’s best described as another version of VNC & VirtualGL. In a corporate environment, you currently must deploy some type of GPU at each workstation, particularly if you want decent performance under Windows Vista or Windows 7, which can drive up costs significantly and cause a bit of an administrative headache from the power and cooling requirements which may cause systems to fail a bit faster than desired. With RemoteFX, you can deploy thin clients that access remotely available GPU hardware.
That’s where NVIDIA and Microsoft RemoteFX come in. Enabled by server-discrete-GPUs, this solution will move the corporate user’s PC workload into the server room, and then IT managers will service those users’ PC requirements with anytime/ anywhere, secure access that is IT friendly. RemoteFX, combined with NVIDIA Quadro GPUs, will enable the full Windows 7 desktop experience including rich and 3D media for very low cost ‘thin’ clients from anywhere on a company’s network.
Not exactly new technology, Microsoft has had their Terminal Services product for a while and VirtualGL can do this today via VNC (for Free even), but it’s nice to see some major commercial entities acknowledging this use in something more than a hack. Lo0ks like right now it’s only for Quadro products (Which makes sense, this is a somewhat high-end tool meant for professional use), but no information on what the differences will be between the AMD version and the NVidia version. My guess is nothing, except the NVidia version will enable CUDA-type applications.
While I’m personally a fan of CUDA & OpenCL, you can’t deny Microsoft’s powerful impact on the GPGPU space with DirectX’s new DirectCompute capabilities. Spend your lunch break brushing up on the capabilities of this, complete with examples and source code, in a series of Lectures available on MSDN.
It’s been 6 months since Microsoft first demonstrated their new visualization tool ‘Pivot’, but now it’s finally publicly available and free for all at their website.
The Silverlight PivotViewer makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data on the web in ways that are powerful, informative, and valuable. PivotViewer lets us present thousands of things at once and visualize them in a way that exposes value from the group. PivotViewer experiences range in complexity to build. All involve the creation of a collection. PivotViewer is now available for you to begin building and embedding your collections directly onto your webpage.
They offer the offering software for free download, and it supports the ability to publish and embed your visualizations into the websites of your choosing.
The Microsoft Kinect is one of those user interfaces that could be great, or it could just as easily flop. Here we have a video showing the Kinect in action at the recent E3 conference.
Microsoft Research is shopping around a new 3D Display technology that can present stereoscopic images to 2 user simultaneously without glasses using special lensses.
The new lens, which is thinner at the bottom than at the top, steers light to a viewer’s eyes by switching light-emitting diodes along its bottom edge on and off. Combined with a backlight, this makes it possible to show different images to different viewers, or to create a stereoscopic (3-D) effect by presenting different images to a person’s left and right eye. “What’s so special about this lens is that it allows us to control where the light goes,” says Steven Bathiche, director of Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group.
This is different from displays like the Alioscopy display which are based on lenticular lenses, and is a mere 11 to 6 millimeters thick, making it easy to add to existing displays and projectors.
Now that NVidia finally has DX11 hardware available, Microsoft has the chance to compare how well the ATI RadeonHD cards stand up to the new GTX480/470. Specifically, they were looking for oddities in the DirectX11 implementation, and found one particularly interesting one in NVidia’s use of the “Feature Level” concept.
The ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series only provides one quality level per sample count, while the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470/480 exposes a number of fine-grain quality levels per sample count. This highlighted a few UI bugs in some of the samples as well as DXUT/DXUT11 that were corrected in the June 2010 release. Be sure to test the behavior of any MSAA settings and quality levels in your DX10.x and DX11 programs on both vendor's hardware.
The guys at Geeks3d took both cards for a spin to get the actual results from the ‘CheckMultisampleQualityLevels’ Microsoft mentions, and sees the obvious difference.
Here are the details for a GTX 480 (with R257.15 drivers – Win7 64-bit):
DirectX suffered a bit of a setback with DirectX10, being inextricably linked with an unpopular operating system (Windows Vista) and requiring significant investment of resources from developers due to the new API. With Windows 7, we got DirectX11 which seems to fulfill many of the hopes that DirectX10 never met, but does it live up to the hype? HotHardware runs it through some tests and writes up “The State of DirectX11″.
We’ve tested five of the earliest available DirectX 11 titles and we’re happy to report that the situation this time around is looking quite favorable for early adopters. While we observed performance hits when switching to DirectX 11 from DirectX 9 in all five games, we also observed a noticeable corresponding image quality improvement. The drop in performance for DirectX 11 in our tests can be attributed to the added image quality. Effects like tessellation, screen-space ambient occlusion, advanced post processing and DX11 exclusive anti-aliasing in some games brought the performance down in our testing, but they also boosted image quality.
NVidia has caught up 
It’s been 6 months since Microsoft
Microsoft Research is shopping around a new 3D Display technology that can present stereoscopic images to 2 user simultaneously without glasses using special lensses.
Now that NVidia finally has DX11 hardware available, Microsoft has the chance to compare how well the ATI RadeonHD cards stand up to the new GTX480/470. Specifically, they were looking for oddities in the DirectX11 implementation, and found one particularly interesting one in NVidia’s use of the “Feature Level” concept.
DirectX suffered a bit of a setback with DirectX10, being inextricably linked with an unpopular operating system (Windows Vista) and requiring significant investment of resources from developers due to the new API. With Windows 7, we got DirectX11 which seems to fulfill many of the hopes that DirectX10 never met, but does it live up to the hype? HotHardware runs it through some tests and writes up “The State of DirectX11″.
VizWorld.com 
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