Intel Developer Forum - Fall 2001: Day 2

NVIDIA: Bigger than Ever

On the show floor NVIDIA was showing off Personal Cinema which is NVIDIA's answer to ATI's All-in-Wonder line of cards. The Personal Cinema does have its advantages but I'll save that for our review of the unit.

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We also got a chance to visit NVIDIA's new buildings in Santa Clara. Much larger than their old facilities, NVIDIA gave us a quick tour of their new home. One of the most interesting things we learned about was the incredible testing that goes into NVIDIA's hardware and software. For example, this picture below you can see the same arrangement of racks that you'd normally find in the datacenter of a web host. These 4,000 Linux machines run nightly and test every build of NVIDIA drivers that is worked on during the day.

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This row of Sun machines is used for similar purposes; each one of the first two big cabinets are worth around $4M.

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