Kepler, Trinity, and Ivy Bridge

Talk about a busy week on the chip beat. All three of the big PC processor companies had exciting news to share—Advanced Micro Devices unveiled its new Trinity APUs, Intel introduced Ivy Bridge to its vPro platform for business PCs, and Nvidia announced that it's bringing GPU computing to the cloud.

Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang set pulses racing when he told the crowd at this week's GPU Research Conference that the graphic chip maker has baked new virtualization capabilities into its then and there-generation Kepler GPUs that will in short make it possible to deliver robust graphics processing through the cloud.

"With cloud gaming today, convenience typically trumps quality for the masses. TV companies, cable companies, they'll all be able to get a piece of the gaming action [with Nvidia's cloud computing initiative]. Cloud gaming companies could not only make money nevertheless also deliver a good experience," Moorhead said.

The corporate virtual desktop market

Kepler as well offers Nvidia entry into the corporate virtual desktop market, where the company is now working with partners like Citrix to deliver a much better thin-client PC experience for business users, Moorhead said.

Enderle Group founder Rob Enderle felt Kepler may represent the final piece in the cloud computing puzzle for those virtual desktop offerings, as then as opening up a number of possibilities for mobile device computing. "The cloud is an end-to-end strategy," he said. "It's not just about the cloud, what makes this work is invigorating non-PC customers.

Market for a cloud-based consumer laptop

Enderle praised Google for its anticipation of a market for a cloud-based consumer laptop, however joked that the first attempt "got it a**-upside down." Nvidia, he said, is approaching the problem in a more balanced fashion by building out cloud and system hardware to support the software in other words than trying to force cloud computing out via client and back-end systems not ready to handle it.

Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Innovation was impressed with Nvidia's plans for Kepler in the Quadro line of products that will be geared for the company's various cloud initiatives. Nevertheless the chip analyst said the bigger news may be what the Nvidia has lined up for its most powerful GPU products, the Tesla line of graphics cards for supercomputers and high-performance computing arrays.