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The Internet is broken – This is starting to sound like a broken record. Didn’t we just write about the DNS flaw that could cripple the Internet? Now two security researchers demonstrate a new technique to intercept Internet traffic on a scale similar to the abilities of agencies such as the National Security Agency.

Android unveiled? — The Android Guys say a trusted source has given them the detailed specs of the first Google Android phone. We reported already the phone, built by HTC and running the Android operating system, will be released soon, likely in October or November. The latest blueprints of the phone, now dubbed the G1 (Google’s first phone), show it has a touchscreen, a slight tilt to the trackball mouse location, and a five-row QWERTY keyboard, reminiscent of recent Sidekick devices. There’s more here, including notes about its kicktail and arc slider screen. Just make sure you take this with a five-pound bag of salt, because there’s feverish speculation and false information flying around right now.

Technorati buys Blogcritics.org – Technorati shifted into content as it announced it is buying Blogcritics.org, a community of 2,000 bloggers and news sites.

Eye-Fi scores deal with Nikon — The maker of wireless memory cards for digital cameras, announced tonight that it has a deal with Nikon to integrate Eye-Fi’s Wi-Fi-enabled memory cards into Nikon’s newest digital SLR camera, the Nikon D90.

Food service workers protest Nvidia’s chip flaws – At the Nvision 08 conference in San Jose, attendees were asking the people handing out anti-Nvidia flyers who they worked for. Was it Intel or Advanced Micro Devices, trying to stir up trouble for a rival that had an unlucky product bug in notebook computer graphics chips? Nope. It was Unite Here, a labor group in a dispute with Aramark, Nvidia’s food service vendor. But judging from the thousands of folks who lined up to play games all night long, stare at the booth babes in the exhibit hall, and get green T-shirts signed by “Battlestar Galactica” actress Tricia Helfer, Nvidia seemed to be weathering it all just fine.

HP completes $13.9 billion acquistion of EDS — Hewlett-Packard will become a juggernaut in tech services as it finalizes the EDS deal and goes after Big Blue.

YouTube now sending updates to Twitter — This looks to be the first Google product to embrace the Twitter lifestyle.

Spore comes to iPods ahead of regular release – Electronic Arts releases cell version of upcoming Spore game for the iPods ahead of its PC release.


Google’s subsea ambitions expand — Why just take over the world when you can takeover everything under the sea as well? Google is working with a consortium of carriers to build an intra-Asian submarine cable system, dubbed the Southeast Asia Japan Cable (SJC), which would hook up Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore to the previous subsea cable Google already invested in, the Unity trans-Pacific submarine cable, which serves Japan.

Tapulous co-founder booted from company — Mike Lee, co-founder of Tapulous, has been booted from the hot maker of iPhone applications, according to TechCrunch.

Life after the HP spying scandal – George “Jay” Keyworth figured prominently in the spying scandal that brought down HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn. Now he has been appointed chairman of Green Plug, the company that is trying to establish a new standard for low-power electronics plugs and chargers.

Sixty start-ups gathered today to talk at the Emerging Companies Summit about how they’re using graphics technologies in their businesses. The summit was one of the many sub-conferences at the Nvision 08 Visual Computing conference in San Jose.

Jeff Herbst, (left) vice president of business development at Nvidia (sponsor of Nvision and the summit), said the company had many more applicants for the 60 presentation slots than it could accommodate. Those chosen came from 16 different countries.

None of those companies is creating a new graphics chip. The industry has moved on to funding start-ups that take advantage of ubiquitous graphics processors on computers. David Kirk, chief scientist of Nvidia, said many new companies are moving into the “first cousins” of graphics processing, such as image processing, computational photography, video editing and other things that take a lot of parallel calculations.

Kirk (middle right) made the point that there is a lot of graphics horsepower out there in the base of computers in homes and businesses. In fact, DisplaySearch calculated that the number of pixels in the world has grown to 8 trillion in 2008, up four-fold from 2004, largely because of the growth of all sorts of digital displays. It follows that making applications for these displays is going to be a good business.

Start-ups should also consider how the technology will improve, thanks to Moore’s Law and design improvements. Computer vision might be possible with about 10 times more memory per chip and 100 times more processing power. Kirk said that might require a rack of servers full of graphics chips now, but the day isn’t that far away when a single chip could handle the computer-vision calculations.

Among the start-ups presenting today were gaming companies such as Nurien, a Seoul, South Korea-based 3-D social networking start-up which was highlighted in Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s keynote speech on Monday. It is a kind of Second Life (or IMVU, more accurately) on steroids with highly realistic Unreal Engine graphics. The game avatars, or characters, have as many as 150 simulated bones in their bodies, said Taehoon Kim, CEO of Nurien.

The three-year-old company raised $15 million in a first round in November 2007. Kim said he expects to raise another round after launching in September in China and South Korea. He expects to launch in the U.S. in May 2009. It will compete with Lively by Google and IMVU. Kim believes his 3-D characters will be more realistic and he expects to create a variety of casual games where players can use their avatars. The game will be free to play but players will buy items such as clothes or furniture for their apartments. Its closest competitor is Blue Mars, which is being developed by Hawaii’s Avatar Reality.

Asked about the focus on visual computing, Kim said he sensed more excitement because graphics is evolving much faster and the platform lets start-ups reach mass market consumers more quickly than they could before.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, started his graphics chip company in 1993 and is now the last man standing. Back then, no one could have predicted that PCs and game machines would spawn the powerful visual computing we have today. In a speech in San Jose, Calif., Huang talked about how video games and movie special effects are only the tip of the iceberg for visual computing, which encompasses everything from digital art to medical imaging. Huang is celebrating the growth of this ecosystem this week with his own new visual computing conference, dubbed Nvision 08. But it’s a turbulent time for Nvidia as the company struggles against competitors and its own product bugs. After his speech, Huang took questions on a wide range of topics at a press conference. I’ve blended questions from the general press Q&A with my own one-on-one questions in this edited transcript.

VB: I remember when I interviewed you 14 years ago. You talked about how your graphics chips could be used as “Windows accelerators.” It was like there was no other use for a 3-D chip.
JH: The real breakthrough for our industry came when we at Nvidia discovered this perspective: graphics is not just putting pixels up on the screen, but graphics can be a medium for artistic expression. That was when we decided we had to build programmable shaders (subprograms that add custom special effects to a 3-D scene). We didn’t want graphics to just all look the same. This medium has a real artistic element. To deal with that, we had to create an infinite palette. To do that in a computer architecture, we had to make it programmable. That was the insight that allowed us to see that programmable shaders were the future. We blindly believed in it and made everyone believe it. Now, when you say that computer graphics is an artistic medium, you don’t sound like a psycho. That notion isn’t more than 10 years old.

VB: A lot of people in the world get excited about computer-animated art in movies or video games. But you’re excited about digital still art.

JH: If you think about what these people are doing, computer-generated art is part math, part imagination, and part programming. You have to know what the technology is capable of doing. It’s a complicated thing. It’s not for your average artist. Yet, as extraordinary as it is and as beautiful as it can be, it is really complicated to make worthy. Most people think all of the valuable things in life are expensive. But it’s hard to make a digital art piece expensive because it’s easy to replicate. The whole point is that it is written in software so that it can be generated flawlessly over and over again. There are complicated issues to solve with digital art. It doesn’t take away from how amazing digital art can be. I don’t know how artists even come up with the combination of skills to do it. I admire them for it and I hope that someone can figure out how to make it valuable. Read the rest of this entry »

Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage at the inaugural Nvision 08 conference to celebrate the era of visual computing. You’d expect him to be the chief ambassador for this era, since the graphics chips that his company designs are at the heart of the hardware that powers visual applications, from car designs to video games.

The talk showed the range of what is now possible and where computer visualization technology will go. Huang said that the new era is just at its start. He brought up numerous examples of how visual computing is changing the way we do things. He noted, for instance, that Google Earth has been downloaded 400 million times and can transport us to the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Statdium in Beijing within seconds.

He also noted there are about 100 million people who are actively playing virtual world games, known as massively multiplayer online games, around the world. At some point, social networks and MMOGs will converge and become one, he said. To reinforce that point, Huang invited the founder of Nurien, a three-year-old Korean company which has created a 3-D animated world where players can create their own realist avatars, or virtual characters. On stage, the company showed off a virtual character modeled after Huang. The fake Huang proceeded to kiss a virtual girlfriend.

“How much did she have to pay me for that?” Huang said. “You guys are awfully generous with that character. He looks like he is six feet two.” (Huang himself is considerably shorter than that.)

Nurien allows gamers to create their own virtual rooms and embed live videos in the walls, much like in worlds such as Lively by Google. Except the difference is that the Nurien technology is as close to lifelike as is possible with today’s graphics technology. Huang said such technologies would be the backbone of “the next Facebook.” He noted that Strategy Analytics predicts that one in seven people will be in such worlds by 2015.

Huang also highlighted the work of Sportvision, which created the still-frame “augmented reality” images used to visualize the performance of athletes at the Beijing Olympics. It showed, for instance, how Nadia Liukin proceeded through the air during a gymnastics routine. With the technology, Sportvision can insert graphics pointers into images, such as showing the path of a football pass during play. It can also show the flow of air over race cars in the midst of a race. That takes a lot of computation and thus maximizes the use of Nvidia’s graphics chips.

Huang also noted how visual computing is changing how we enjoy still photography. That’s where you use computer graphics to enhance a photographic image to blend both real and artificial images together.

Naturally, Nvidia had a lot of commercials for its technology sprinkled in the speech. Huang invited a Lamborghini car designer on stage to talk about how the designers had to use a combination of ray-tracing and rasterization to get the best graphics effects for a simulated car. It so happens that Nvidia’s newest graphics chips are capable of such hybrid processing. This capability is one of the ways that Nvidia hopes to hold off Intel as the world’s biggest chip makers readies a rival chip, dubbed Larrabee, that also promises to combine rasterization and ray-tracing.

Lorne Lanning has had a wide-ranging artistic career: He’s a classically trained canvas artist. He’s been a voice actor. He co-founded video game firm Oddworld Inhabitants and made four Oddworld games before shutting the studio in 2005. Lately, he’s been working on a new digital entertainment business.

He will be one of the speakers at Nvidia’s Nvision 08 this week in San Jose, where he will expound upon digital art. Lanning says digital art will become a much bigger business and become a viable career for budding young professional artists.

VB: You started your career as a painter in New York.

LL: I was painting. I had an art factory with artists. We got ten paintings done every eight weeks. We were preselling them for $50,000 each. That was the real art market. Some people were selling paintings for $500,000 each. When I moved to California, I got into the digital animation and then video game business.

VB: Do you think digital art (like the piece pictured left) can cross from the niche to the mainstream?

LL: You can’t sell it for that much. It’s hitting the mainstream, but in the form of screen savers and desktop art. But that could change. When people buy 120-inch TVs for their homes, they will want to do something with those screens. They’re not just for watching movies. They can display art. You can stick a memory card in there and start showing slide shows of art. This visual real estate will become much more than a motion picture machine. It will be an extension of your environment. That means there will be new business models emerging for digital animators and digital still-frame artists.

VB: What is different about digital art?

LL: I’m excited about what computing is doing to enhance one of our greatest natural resources, which is our artistic community. We have a stigma that digital art might not be perceived as real art. That’s an absurd assumption in the first place. But let’s ignore that conversation about ignorance for now. What’s happening with visual computing for artists is that it is making things possible that couldn’t be done before. Traditionally with oil painting, the chances are you spent an enormous amount of time on that. The art is not appreciated for the intent of the artist, but more for the pain and perseverance and craftsmanship of it. These sadists believe artists should doodle everything on the canvas. But sometimes the artist’s message is far more important than anything he brings with his craft. That message is what’s potent, whether it’s a novel or journalism or animation. If we hold the idea that the artist should be painting all that detail, then an artist can paint no more than 200 paintings in a lifetime. We’ve learned that excellence comes through iteration in art. You have to do a lot of art before you do something great. With digital art, I can infinitely experiment. With experimentation comes growth. The medium of the oil painting becomes a hindrance to artistic growth. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems obvious that the graphics chip wars are done, as far as start-ups are concerned. Intel is squaring off against Advanced Micro Devices (which bought ATI Technologies) and Nvidia. There is no obvious nook in this multibillion-dollar market where a start-up could thrive.

But somebody forgot to tell that to the folks at LucidLogix Technologies, an Israeli graphics start-up that came out of stealth today. They’re not doing a graphics chip. Rather, they’re doing a chip that serves as a kind of traffic cop and enables multiple graphics cards to be used together in parallel processing fashion.

Graphics experts might scratch their heads at this vague explanation. Nvidia does what I just described with its SLi technology for ganging together up to four graphics cards in a single PC. AMD does it with CrossFire. But when you put two graphics cards together, the processing isn’t as efficient. Maybe you get 1.5 times or 1.6 times the single-card performance.

With the LucidLogix Hydra 100 chip in the system, you could get a much better result. It’s almost linear, or close to two times better performance when you put two cards together, said Offir Remez, (pictured above) president and co-founder of the company, based in Kfar Netter, Israel.

The chip sits on a computer’s main board, or motherboard, and it acts as the traffic cop, directing tasks to the different graphics cards in a system to keep them busy. It doesn’t matter if those cards are from different vendors (theoretically, an Nvidia card ought to work with an AMD card) or if those cards are different types, such as an old Nvidia card paired with a new Nvidia card. The LucidLogix chip balances the load of processing chores so that every card stays busy.

Moshe Steiner, chief executive, and Remez started the company three years ago. They were joined by a familiar figure in the graphics chip industry, George Haber, who loved the idea (10 minutes into the pitch) and agreed to become chairman.

Haber has some unfinished business when it comes to succeeding in graphics, where, once upon a time in the 1990s, there were more than 50 start-ups. He is a serial entrepreneur who started a graphics chip company late in that last war. His company, Gigapixel, created a great technology that almost made it into Microsoft’s first Xbox video game console as it was being designed in 2000. Haber’s team had the deal and even moved into Microsoft’s Silicon Valley quarters to start design work. But Nvidia’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, cut a last minute deal that stole the contract away from Gigapixel. Nvidia went on to become the sole survivor among stand-alone graphics companies. And it eventually bought Gigapixel. Haber was frustrated with that result because he thought he had a better technology. (I know all of this because it was a chapter in my first book, “Opening the Xbox,” published in 2002).

But that was the last war. Haber says he’s happy that LucidLogix figured out a way to compete without going head-on against the big companies. It would be crazy, he said, to start a brand new graphics chip because it would require $200 million worth of investment and years of work just to get to the market. But Lucid completed its initial chip design with a total of $16 million in funding so far.

The investors include Giza Venture Capital, Genesis Partners, and Intel Capital. The latter is starting to make a lot of investments in graphics, including the design of a many-core graphics-oriented processor, dubbed Larrabee, coming out next year. LucidLogix has 70 employees and is expanding fast to deal with a number of customers, Remez said. The chip is expected to be available in the first half of 2009. A working prototype was on display at the Intel Developer Forum today.

Computer makers and motherboard designers would likely have to design the chip into their own high-end computers for gamers. That’s going to take time. In the meantime, it’s conceivable that big guys could figure out their own methods for more efficient parallel graphics processing. But LucidLogix has applied for 60 patents on the technology.

Historical resonance doesn’t get any better than this. It would be a wonderful company for either AMD or Nvidia to buy. Maybe even Intel. For Haber, it might mean he has a chance to sell a second company to Huang. But Remez notes that the company hopes to make it on its own.

Now the commercial starts. If the morning keynote here at the Intel Developer Forum conference by Intel Chairman Craig Barrett was light on the Intel hard sell, the afternoon is full of it. Pat Gelsinger, head of Intel’s digital enterprise group, is busy touting Intel’s latest products.

For many years, Intel all but ignored the system-on-a-chip and embedded processor markets. But as computers and the Internet infiltrate everything, the company has lined up a new family of chips for everyday gadgets. Gelsinger said that Intel’s low-power Atom chip has been designed into 700 gadgets since its debut less than two quarters ago.

Among the products that will use the Intel Atom chips is OpenPeak’s new IP media phone, which serves as a digital picture frame as well as a touch-screen Internet telephone. (Think the iPhone for the home). Another emerging market is computers in cars. Alex Bush of the BMW Group says his company is embracing the idea of an “open entertainment platform” for the car using Intel’s Atom processors. Yes, we now use smart GPS systems and other sorts of gadgets that, if we don’t pay attention, will get us into more car wrecks. The GPS system features 3-D scenery software from Planet 9 Studios, which hopes to make it easier for GPS users to see where they need to go.

All this Atom talk, however, is just preamble for Intel’s major announcement. Intel is now talking about its newest family of processors, code-named Nehalem, and formally to be known as the Core i7 processor family. This new chip aims to negate two advantages that Advanced Micro Devices has had for five years in its Opteron. (AMD’s Randy Allen, however, says that his company has its own advances on the way that will keep AMD ahead on performance and power efficiency.) The new Intel chip will use similar techniques to the Opteron for managing memory and data transfer.

Nehalem arrives in the fourth quarter, Gelsinger said. The chips will have as many as eight cores, or computing brains, on a single chip. The chip’s basic design is power efficient because it turns off parts of the chip that aren’t being used. That’s been done for at least a decade, but Intel can always improve on it. Gelsinger says that Intel can make these improvements because it controls both design and manufacturing.

Gelsinger said NASA will use a supercomputer with thousands of Nehalem chips for climate modeling and other scientific research. He said Intel is working with digital artists at Sony and Disney as well on the creation of computer animations for movies.

Of course, Intel didn’t want to just beat up on AMD. Gelsinger also talked about Larrabee, Intel’s new graphics-oriented processor with lots of cores on a chip. Gelsinger didn’t say it, but this chip will go after rival Nvidia. Intel showed a video with large numbers of translucent surfaces. The company also said that its memory design makes it easier for game developers to create complex scenes without going overboard on memory usage. In a word, Nvidia says that Larrabee isn’t quite so capable compared to its approach to graphics. You can bet that Nvidia will have more to say at its Nvision 08 conference next week in San Jose, Calif.

After the press slammed Intel in June for its hard-line stance on the USB 3.0 standards battle, the world’s biggest chip maker has apparently changed its position. Faced with an unpleasant spotlight, Intel chose to compromise. In doing so, it has probably headed off an antitrust fight.

Rivals in the chip set business said that Intel didn’t play fair when it took control of the standard, dubbed Universal Serial Bus 3.0 (or SuperSpeed USB), for transferring data in and out of PCs at high speeds. Intel said it shared details about the standard with everyone. But rivals accused it of withholding details of its design for implementing USB 3.0 in the form of a host controller for a chip set. By withholding details, Intel could selfishly give its own chip set designers a head start, but such a move was risky. It could either slow adoption or fracture the standard.

The technology is important to consumers because it will allow data transfer between computers and gadgets at a rate of 4.8 gigabits a second. That’s blazing fast compared to data transfer in the megabits a second today. For iPod users, that means you could move a high-definition movie from a computer to an iPod at much higher speeds.

Now Intel has released its host controller specification, dubbed the Extensible Host Controller Interface draft 0.9. Now the company’s rivals can also get started on making their own chip sets that are compatible with the USB 3.0 specification. In a press release, Intel said that “interoperability among devices from multiple manufacturers is important for consumer adoption of ‘SuperSpeed USB’ products.” The specification is available royalty free to any companies that sign a “contributors” legal release with Intel.

“Given the industry trend toward one specification, we resolved it was best to sign,” said one source.

Chip set makers — Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Via Technologies and SiS — threatened to rebel and pull out of the standard, setting the stage for a fight with Intel that resembled the revolt of PC clone makers against IBM in the 1980s. In a blog post where it defended its actions, Intel said that the design wasn’t done and it couldn’t yet share it. Intel had previously said it would share the design in the second half of 2008.

Intel compromised because it came under pressure from the chip set makers as well as Microsoft. The Redmond giant has a lot of clout itself and it didn’t want to write two types of software to support an Intel standard and the rivals’ standard. Microsoft offered its blessing on the latest deal, as did AMD, NEC, and Dell.

Nick Knupfler, a spokesman for Intel, said, “The industry is well on its way to high-speed USB nirvana.” Translation: all the chip set makers are expected to sign. Update: Knupfler also said that Intel has always planned on delivering the specification as soon as the silicon design was robust enough to be shared without fear that it will have to be redone in some way.

Clearly, Intel didn’t need this kind of bad publicity over alleged anti-competitive failure looming over it as the Federal Trade Commission kicked off a formal antitrust investigation against Intel. What is interesting is that Intel came around. The company had said that its work wasn’t done on the host controller and that it was under no obligation to share work that it had put “gazillions” of hours into.

But Intel changed its tune, invited the chip set rivals to come to talks, and said it would share that data to head off a fracturing of the standard. As we all learned in kindergarten, sharing is nice.

Tipping the see-saw battle yet again in the battle for the hearts of hardcore PC gamers, Advanced Micro Devices is announcing a PC graphics solution which will take the single-card graphics speed crown away from Nvidia.

The $549  graphics solution — the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 — combines two graphics chips on a single PC add-in card with relatively low power consumption. It also has a lower performance ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 card. The products will appeal to hardcore gamers, a small but influential slice of the market. The see-saw tips with each new announcement. More important, it appears that, for the first time in years, AMD may have thought smarter than its arch rival.

“We call it out sweet spot strategy,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president at AMD in Sunnyvale, Calif., and general manager of the graphics products group. “It’s our attempt to shift the playing field.”

The new 4870 X2 card can compute 2.4 teraflops, a measure of its raw computing speed. That’s more than twice the speed of Nvidia’s high-end single-chip graphics chip, the Nvidia GTX 280 at 0.93 teraflops. Through its SLi solution — where Nvidia links two graphics cards in a computer — Nvidia can also put two graphics cards with one 280 each in a system. But in the same vein, AMD could put two 4870 X2s in a system, giving it an advantage of having four graphics chips to Nvidia’s two. (Nvidia takes the crown back if you want to put three cards in a system). Few gamers would pay for such expensive solutions, but this is about bragging rights at the very high end.

The bigger problem for Nvidia is that AMD shot for a smaller chip with slightly lower performance but much lower costs and much lower power consumption. It can thus price its chips lower than Nvidia across the product line, from high end to low end. It did so in part by being more aggressive with its manufacturing technology — which gives it an edge in miniaturization — by using 55 nanometer technology while Nvidia used 65 nanometers. (In this case, the smaller number is more advanced).

JoAnne Feeney, an analyst FTN Midwest Securities, believes that AMD is in the midst of taking market share away from Nvidia in a variety of product lines. Since Nvidia launched its flagship GeForce GTX 280, the company has had to cut its prices about 29 percent, while the single-chip ATI Radeon 4870 chip has fallen only 8 percent.

AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 chips launched in June and received fairly wide acclaim in comparision to the Nvidia GeForce GTX 280, which launched at the same time. That’s reflected in gains AMD has made in high-end game PC machines such as Hewlett-Packard’s VoodooPC, Falcon Northwest and Dell’s Alienware. And the newest X2 products are getting great reviews too.

“After what ATI pulled off (in June), I’m not counting them out of any race,” said Kelt Reeves, founder of Falcon Northwest.

Nvidia is pushing non-performance features, such as its CUDA programming language that allows the graphics chip to be used to handle general-purpose functions, and its physics technology for creating more realistic movement in games.

Tony Tamasi, a senior vice president at Nvidia, said that AMD’s strategy of putting two chips on a board has its trade-offs. Those two chips both have to have their own frame buffers, or memory systems. He notes that the performance doesn’t scale up as efficiently as possible and so it remains possible for one big chip to outperform two mid-range chips. AMD did include a port for communication between the graphics chips, but that doesn’t create big gains in efficiency.

I can remember the first interview I did with Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, back when the company was coming out of stealth in 1995. Since 3-D games didn’t exist back then, Huang described his graphics chip as the ideal “Windows accelerator.” And if you remember those days, Windows needed a lot of help. Then came no less than 50 3-D graphics startups. They all came and went. Nvidia remains.

The company’s newest cell phone processors have more power than that PC graphics chip from 1995. And state of the art graphics processors can recreate a human head in uncanny detail, from the 5 o’clock shadow on a man’s face to the way light scatters underneath the skin and makes it glow.

Now the company is the big kahuna of graphics. It still faces Advanced Micro Devices, which bought ATI Technologies, and Intel is now moving into graphics chips. But now it’s Nvidia’s turn to encourage startups in the field of visual computing. Entrepreneurs are coming out of the woodwork to use the horsepower of the latest graphics chips to create rich applications from scientific computing to visual imagery from professional artists who are recognized by the nonprofit digital art group CG Society.

About 60 of those companies will talk about their plans at Nvidia’s Emerging Companies Summit, which takes place Aug. 26-27 in San Jose, during the Nvision 08 conference Aug. 25-27 at the San Jose Convention Center. Nvision 08 is Nvidia’s first major conference, featuring everything from a professional gaming tournament to a speech by Battlestar Galactica star Tricia Helfer.

Jeff Herbst, vice president of business development at Nvidia, said his company has invested in a variety of applications companies that exploit Nvidia’s chips and its new CUDA programming environment. The companies that will talk at the conference all fit into the tracks of visual computing, gaming, lifestyle computing, and high-performance computing based on Nvidia’s CUDA programming language. Over the years, Nvidia has invested in companies that exploit graphics, such as Keyhole, the satellite imagery company that was acquired by Google, which turned the application into Google Earth. Emerging companies scheduled to participate include Acceleware, Cooliris, Elemental Technologies, Emergent Game Technologies, MotionDSP, NaturalMotion, and Right Hemisphere.

“We’ve come to realize that visual computing is a platform in its own right,” Herbst said. “Without this ecosystem, our hardware won’t get used the way it should be.”

Calisa Cole, vice president of corporate communications, says that the time has come for these twin conferences because startups are plentiful and the benefits of visual computing are all around us. Our cars are better designed, digital movies are easier to edit, baby ultrasounds are clearer than ever, and bone scan results come back quicker.

Nvidia’s chips (as well as AMD’s) are the foundation for the visual computing ecosystem, including game developers such as Epic Games, which makes games such as the upcoming “Gears of War 2” as well as engines for graphics that game startups use to get into the business. There are hardware and software companies with applications ranging from airplane design to medical research to special effects animation.

Company conferences are starting to supercede industry-wide events in the tech industry. In a way, Nvidia is taking a page from the playbook of its biggest rival, Intel, which holds a variety of “Intel Developer Forum” (Aug. 19-21 at Moscone Center West) events to encourage an ecosystem around Intel products. It’s interesting that Nvidia’s first big event comes under a shadow; Nvidia reported a lousy quarter, which included a $200 million write-off related to technical problems with how its graphics chips are affixed to notebook computers. But Nvidia hopes that this era of visual computing will begin to overshadow the era of the microprocessor. The battle between Nvidia and Intel is just starting to heat up.

Speakers at the conferences include luminaries such as Jeff Han, the pioneer of multi-touch displays who was named one of Time magazine’s 100-most-influential people last year. Conference titles include “How We Crammed a Black Hole, a Star Cluster, and Turbulent Plasma into a GPU (and Live to Tell About It).” And for entertainment, there is the pro-gaming tournament and an evening music concert and light show dubbed “Video Games Live.” An estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people are expected to attend Nvision 08, while several hundred are expected at the Emerging Companies Summit.

Intel is in that part of the James Bond movie where the bad guy talks about how he’s going to eliminate Bond, which in this case is that pesky little company, Nvidia.

Intel has disclosed more details on Larrabee, the stand-alone graphics chip with lots of Intel-compatible x86 cores on it. Those cores, or little processors, are like little PC microprocessors on a chip, but they can handle the functions of a graphics processor. There will be anywhere from eight to 48 cores on different versions of the Larrabee chip, according to industry analysts.

Intel will more fully describe the chip at the Siggraph graphics conference in Los Angeles Aug. 11 to 15. Larrabee isn’t expected to debut until 2009 at the earliest, but that hasn’t stopped Intel executives from talking about its potential to wipe out the rivals in the graphics chip market, which also include Advanced Micro Devices.

As we’ve written before, Intel has been watching the rise of visual computing and how much more processing is happening in the graphics chips in a computer, as opposed to the microprocessor. Justin Rattner, chief technology officer, said that chips such as Larrabee will be capable of a kind of hybrid processing. That means it will be able to do both “rasterization,” which paints pictures on a screen in the traditional way that graphics chips do by drawing one layer of an image at a time, and “ray tracing,” which paints images by sending rays into a 3-D space and then rendering only the points that the rays hit, not the points obscured by something. Nvidia and AMD are going to have to slug back in a big way in order to hang onto their market share in the graphics chip market, which analyst Jon Peddie pegs at 400 million units a year. For a couple of years, it’s safe to say that Nvidia and AMD will be OK.

Meanwhile, Nvidia had to address a story in Digitimes about how Nvidia allegedly told a Taiwanese motherboard maker that it planned to exit chip sets, which are chips that combine graphics with other PC functions such as input-output systems. Nvidia has an estimated 60 percent market share for chip sets on Advanced Micro Devices processor platforms, and Nvidia still has a lock on SLi chip set technology for tying together multiple graphics cards on a computer.

Brian Burke, who writes the NTeresting e-mail newsletter for Nvidia, wrote, “There is so much ridiculous stuff posted on certain websites that many of you do not even bother to inquire when silly stories go up. Many have asked about this one….The story on Digitimes is completely groundless. We have no intention of getting out of the chip set business.”

Anything is possible here, and Charlie Demerjian of the Inquirer, who has been one of the company’s harshest critics, just put a stake in the ground saying that Digitimes is right. But to give up on the chip set business would likely be tantamount to suicide for Nvidia. If they’re giving up on that, they might as well surrender to Intel. Logically, we’re a long way from that.

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Apple criminal backdating probes dropped: It’s a happy day for Apple, and not just because of the iPhone 3G launch. The criminal backdating probe of Steve Jobs and other Apple executives has been dropped, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Attorneys involved in defending various participants said the Justice Department concluded no charges should be brought against Jobs or anyone else invovled in the backdating. The Securities and Exchange Commission, however, is still pressing a civil complaint against former Apple lawyer Nancy Heinen.

Sun Microsystems cutting jobs: The struggling server company said it is cutting about 1,000 jobs across the U.S. and Canada. Of those, 213 are at its headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., 192 are at its Menlo Park, Calif. office, and 212 at two offices in Colorado. The cuts amount to 3.4 percent of the company’s work force. The company announced it was trimming jobs in May.

AMD to take huge charge: Advanced Micro Devices said Friday it would take a charge of $948 million in the second quarter to write down the value of goodwill for its acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI Technologies. The write-downs amount to more than $800 million in lost goodwill, and are an addition to a $1.6 billion goodwill write-off AMD took last year. You could say that AMD paid a little too much when it bought ATI for $5.4 billion in 2006. AMD will report its second quarter results next Thursday.

Watch out, World of Warcraft: Electronic Arts has launched the beta version of “Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning” for members of player groups known as guilds. More than 10,000 guilds and a total of 750,000 people have applied to join the game, which will officially launch this fall. This is one of the tidbits that game companies are leaking as the E3 game show in Los Angeles approaches on Monday.

Rambus adds to Nvidia’s headaches: Rambus accused graphics chip maker Nvidia of violating 17 patents related to memory controllers. The company alleged that Nvidia’s chip sets, graphics chips, and media communications processors across six product lines infringe Rambus patents. Nvidia reported earlier that its results for the second quarter would be weaker than expected, and it took a $150 million to $200 million write-off for product defect problems.

Meebo expands music distribution: Online chat company Meebo announced a bunch of partnerships with music distributors. Participants include Sparkart, DashGo, Nettwerk Music Group and Wind-up Records.

ON24 raises $8 million round: ON24 has raised an $8 million round of funding as it expands from webcasting to staging virtual trade shows. The company will compete with Unisfair in offering virtual shows for job fairs, training, and conferences in an online format. The 10-year-old company will produce about 25,000 webcasts during the year, and it expects to put on possibly 25 trade shows this year.

[Updated: Previously, we'd cited a report that suggested wrongly that Monster had acquired Alerts. Corrected version follows:] Monster Venture Partners leads bridge round in Alerts.com: Monster Venture Partners has led a $1.2 million bridge investment in Alerts.com, a service delivering alerts and reminders to consumers. Alerts bought the domain Alerts.com from IBM in 2007. In that previous incarnation, Alerts was a service notifying users when content changed on high-traffic sites, but the model failed.

Webroot founder missing: Steve Thomas, founder and former owner of Webroot Software, has been reported missing in Oahu, Hawaii. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported that Thomas, who has not been involved in the company since 2004, was disraught and his family hasn’t heard from him since June 30. Meanwhile, the company appointed Frederick Ball as its chief financial officer.

iPhone web use is getting big in Europe: comScore reported that 80 percent of iPhone users in France, Germany and the UK browse the mobile web with their iPhones.

AideRSS announced new ranking system: AideRSS said it has created PostRank as a new system for filtering and ranking online news articles and blog posts.

Swedish ad startup is the bleeping bleep: VC firm Creandum has invested 420,000 euros in Swedish online video ad startup VideoPlaza, which has an amusing video.

Another day, another game startup gets funded: Sequoia Capital and investor Ron Conway have invested $4.5 million in Challenge Games, a maker of short form browser-based games.

Citizen journalism 2.0: Allvoices has officially launched a new citizen journalism site that weaves together traditional media and new media, creating a forum for sharing news, videos, images and blogs. It will use 4,000 online news sources as well as its own citizen journalists.

These graphics don’t compute: Nvidia stock fell 19 percent in after-hours trading today after the company disclosed some big problems with its second-quarter performance. The company said it will take a charge of $150 million to $200 million for high failure rates in certain models of its graphics-processing units and its chip sets. It blamed heat problems on weak materials used to attach the chips to their packages in notebook computers. The company is also being hurt by poor demand across the globe, a delay in producing a next-generation chip set, and price cuts. Advanced Micro Devices also recently introduced a competitive graphics chip for the first time in more than a year. Analysts had expected Nvidia to report revenue of $1.1 billion, but the company now says its revenue range will be $875 million to $950 million.

Debate on the Long Tail reignites: Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has gotten a lot of mileage out of his thesis/book “The Long Tail” that argued there is more money to be made in niches than with big hits thanks to the internet, which gives you the potential to hold gazillions of books, movies etc. in perpetual store shelves. But the Harvard Business Review just published a piece by professor Anita Elberse arguing that the two-year-old book is hogwash and that the Internet is actually doing the opposite of what Anderson says. She says the hits are as big as ever and are thus a better investment than niche plays, just as is the case in the physical world.

Google Maps for Mobile now on BlackBerry: Google’s mapping technology will now be available with voice searching on BlackBerry Pearl phones. If you own the Pearl models 8110, 8120, and 8130 in the U.S., you can use voice search to find locations in Google Maps. It uses the same speech-recognition engine that’s available with GOOG-411.

Google wins a round against Viacom, users and privacy advocates lose: Google came out ahead when a federal judge ruled Wednesday that it doesn’t have to share source code for search functions on Google-owned YouTube with Viacom. Media giant Viacom had asked for the code as part of its $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against Google in 2007. Viacom argues that Google allows users to post pirated videos or content owned by Viacom without doing much to stop them. Google won this particular legal round on the argument that its source code was a trade secret that can’t be disclosed without the risk of losing business. However, users lost out — the judge also granted Viacom’s motion that YouTube has to turn over the login information and IP address of every viewer of YouTube videos.

IBM acquires mainframe rival PSI: One way to make a nasty antitrust problem go away is to acquire the folks who are complaining about you. IBM is doing just that, saying it will acquire Platform Solutions Inc. for an undisclosed price. PSI had been complaining to European Union regulators that IBM was behaving in an anti-competitive manner in the mainframe computing software market. The Computer & Communications Industry Association said that antitrust regulators should review the “extinguishing of competition in the mainframe market.” IBM said PSI’s revenues are too small to require a review.

Antitrust regulators review Yahoo-Google deal: The Justice Department has issued civil investigative demands asking for more information to examine whether the Google-Yahoo alliance on search breaks any antitrust laws. Under the deal, Google will provide some of the search results for users doing searches on Yahoo’s sites. Legal experts say that the demands, which carry subpoena power, show that the investigation has moved beyond a preliminary phase. Yahoo is hoping that the deal with Google will generate $800 million in new revenue, since Google’s search ads are far more valuable than Yahoo’s.

Judge unseals Facebook-ConnectU transcripts: U.S. District Court judge James Ware ruled that reporters will have access to redacted transcripts of hearings in the case between Facebook and ConnectU over whether Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ripped off ConnectU when he started Facebook. ConnectU sued a while back saying that Facebook owed it money for the purloined ideas and it wanted legal damages from Facebook. They settle the deal, but ConnectU wanted to reopen the case when it said it found more evidence of fraud. Ware ruled earlier that there was no reason to toss out a previously negotiated settlement between the two companies. ConnectU wanted to re-open the settlement because it found new evidence.

Adobe’s PDF format standardized: The Portable Document Format from Adobe is one of the most commonly used formats for electronic documents and it’s now an ISO international standard. That means it meets standards for openness and can be used in a wide array of scenarios such as government contracting.