NVIDIA today introduced the new GeForce GTX TITAN, powered by the fastest GPU on the planet and designed to unleash the world's fastest gaming PCs including personal gaming supercomputers and svelte, quiet, small form-factor PCs.

"GeForce GTX TITAN is a beast of a GPU -- and the only one in the world powerful enough to play any game at any resolution at any time," said Scott Herkelman, general manager of the GeForce business unit at NVIDIA. "And yet, all of this immense power is housed in a sleek, sexy design, so gamers can also build beautifully-designed PC gaming machines about the size of a gaming console, yet magnitudes more powerful and always upgradeable."

Specifications of NVIDIA's upcoming high-end graphics card, the GeForce GTX Titan, which were reported in the press over the last couple of weeks, are bang on target, according to a specs sheet leaked by 3DCenter.org, which is allegedly part of the card's press-deck. According to the specs sheet, the GTX Titan indeed features 2,688 out of the 2,880 CUDA cores present on the GK110 silicon, 6 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 384-bit wide memory interface, and draws power from a combination of 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

The GeForce GTX Titan core is clocked at 837 MHz, with a GPU Boost frequency of 876 MHz, and 6.00 GHz memory, churning out 288 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The chip features a single-precision floating-point performance figure of 4.5 TFLOP/s, and 1.3 TFLOP/s double-precision. Despite its hefty specs that include a 7.1 billion-transistor ASIC and 24 GDDR5 memory chips, NVIDIA rates the card's TDP at just 250W.More slides and benchmark figures follow.

Here it is, folks; the first pictures of NVIDIA's newest pixel crunching dreadnought, the GeForce GTX Titan. Pictures leaked by various sources east of the Greenwich Median reveal a reference board design that's similar in many ways to that of the GeForce GTX 690, thanks to the magnesium alloy cooler shroud, a clear acrylic window letting you peep into the aluminum fin stack, and a large lateral blower. The card features a glowy "GeForce GTX" logo much like the GTX 690, draws power from a combination of 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and features two SLI bridge fingers letting you pair four of them to run 3DMark Fire Strike as if it were a console port from last decade.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today reported revenue for fiscal 2013 ended Jan. 27, 2013, of a record $4.28 billion, up 7.1 percent from $4.00 billion in fiscal 2012. GAAP earnings per share for the year were $0.90 per diluted share, a decrease of 4.3 percent from $0.94 in fiscal 2012. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.17, down 1.7 percent from $1.19 in fiscal 2012.

During the quarter, NVIDIA repurchased $100.0 million of stock and paid a dividend of $0.075 per share, equivalent to $46.9 million. "This year we did the best work in our company's history," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of NVIDIA. "We achieved record revenues, margins and cash, despite significant market headwinds.

AMD's product manager for desktop graphics products Devon Nekechuk, in an interview with Japanese publication 4Gamer.net, revealed that his firm won't be launching any new Radeon GPUs in 2013, and that the company would instead play out the year on its current Radeon HD 7000 series' performance, with price adjustments and possible performance increments through driver updates. In a slide released to 4Gamers.net, AMD pointed that its Radeon HD 7900 series (high-end), HD 7800 series (performance), and HD 7700 series (mainstream), will carry on the company's mantle "throughout 2013."

This announcement is indication that GPU makers have decided to slow things down from the streak of rapid new GPU launches that lasted from some time around 2007, running up to 2012, which can be heavily taxing in terms of R&D costs for either companies. We know for sure that NVIDIA is clearing its backlog of consumer GPU development by releasing the GeForce GTX "Titan" graphics card in a couple of weeks' time, and we know from older reports that NVIDIA could launch a "refreshed" GeForce Kepler lineup, that largely retains the GeForce Kepler silicon while topping up with subtle changes (clock speeds, software features that don't involve redesigning the silicon, etc.,) but AMD coming out in the open with this announcement could change everything. NVIDIA has the opportunity to save a few coins by sticking to its current lineup (plus the upcoming GTX "Titan,") and responding to competition from AMD by price-adjustments and timely driver optimizations of its own.

A store listing by Danish online retailer Proshop reveals a couple of things, one, that NVIDIA's next flagship graphics card will indeed be called "GeForce GTX Titan," and two, it could be out of reach of a vast majority of enthusiasts. The retailer is listing an ASUS-branded card for 5,820.80 Danish Krone (US $1,046), and that's before Europe's famous taxation kicks in. After, that goes up to 7,276 DKK ($1,307).

If one has to infer performance of the card from this price, given that NVIDIA won't botch up price-performance in relation to GTX 690, the GTX Titan should perform on-par, or outperform the GTX 690. Even if it's a tiny bit slower, NVIDIA could focus its marketing efforts on the card's 4-way and 3-way SLI capabilities, using which one could outperform GTX 690 QuadSLI setups.

2013 started off on a rather dull note for the PC graphics industry. NVIDIA launched its game console platform "Project: Shield," while AMD rebranded its eons-old GPUs to Radeon HD 8000M series. Apparently it could all change in late-February, with the arrival of a new high-end single-GPU graphics card based on NVIDIA's GK110 silicon, the same big chip that goes into making the company's Tesla K20 compute accelerator.

NVIDIA may have drawn some flack for extending its "GTX" brand extension too far into the mainstream and entry-level segment, and wants its GK110-based card to stand out. It is reported that NVIDIA will carve out a new brand extension, the GeForce Titan. Incidentally, the current fastest supercomputer in the world bears that name (Cray Titan, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory). The GK110 silicon physically packs 15 SMX units, totaling 2,880 CUDA cores. The chip features a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.

AMD today demonstrated its ongoing support for high performance computing by providing massive compute capability, performance and flexibility for the world's number one ranked supercomputer. This ranking, the sixth number-one spot for AMD-based supercomputers in the last five years, highlights AMD's commitment to enabling indispensable computing technology by offering competitive performance at low cost.

The top supercomputer, a Cray XK7 nicknamed "Titan" and containing more than 18,000 AMD Opteron processors, was cited in the latest list of the Top500 Supercomputer Sites and is installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL).

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced the launch of the Company's new series of production hybrid supercomputers -- the Cray XK7 system -- in conjunction with today's debut of the Cray XK7 supercomputer nicknamed "Titan" located at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Titan is capable of more than 20 petaflops of high performance computing (HPC) power and is the world's most powerful supercomputer for open science.

The Titan system is a 200-cabinet Cray XK7 supercomputer with 18,688 compute nodes each consisting of a 16-Core AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU Accelerator. Titan was upgraded from a Cray XT5 supercomputer nicknamed "Jaguar."

NVIDIA today unveiled a new family of Tesla GPUs based on the revolutionary NVIDIA Kepler GPU computing architecture, which makes GPU-accelerated computing easier and more accessible for a broader range of high performance computing (HPC) scientific and technical applications.

The new NVIDIA Tesla K10 and K20 GPUs are computing accelerators built to handle the most complex HPC problems in the world. Designed with an intense focus on high performance and extreme power efficiency, Kepler is three times as efficient as its predecessor, the NVIDIA Fermi architecture, which itself established a new standard for parallel computing when introduced two years ago.

MAINGEAR, an award-winning PC system builder offering custom desktops, notebooks, workstations and media centers has updated their high performance 17" desktop replacement, the Titan 17, with the all new GeForce GTX 675M, and built-in 3D option powered by Nvidia 3D Vision 2.

MAINGEAR's Titan 17 is the most powerful desktop replacement with the latest technology available on the market. The Titan 17 is powered by Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition desktop processor clocking in at up to 3.90 GHz, and the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675M in SLI that offers the ultimate graphics for any task. The GTX 675M is 60% faster than the previous 660M GPU and can also be configured in SLI offering up to twice the performance scaling on today's hottest games and entertainment applications.

MAINGEAR, an award-winning PC system builder offering custom desktops, notebooks, and workstations, has updated the TITAN 17 high performance desktop replacement solution with all new aesthetic features while still maintaining top of the line performance for PC gamers who want to harness desktop-like power wherever they go and creative professionals that can work on site with no loss in productivity.

The TITAN 17 features support for both the latest Intel Core i7-3930K and the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition. With fast, intelligent multi-core technology that accelerates performance to match your workload, it delivers an incredible breakthrough in gaming performance. For both gamers and demanding users, the Titan 17 capitalizes on a dramatic leap forward in processing technology to provide all the power you need for even the most advanced games and applications.

Titan Technology unveiled its latest Siberia CPU Cooler, the TTC-NC55TZ(RB). The cooler has an asymmetric aluminum fin tower design, which cools other hot components on the motherboard along with the CPU. The design consists of a nickel-plated copper base, from which five copper heat pipes pass. One end of these heat pipes pass through an aluminum fin stack that propagates along the plane of the motherboard, while the other passes though a stack that propagates perpendicular to this plane.

The stack that's along the plane of the motherboard is the larger of the two, and is ventilated by a 140 mm fan. The perpendicular stack is ventilated by a smaller 120 mm fan. The 140 mm fan spins at 700 ~ 1,800 RPM, pushing 34.78 ~ 89.43 CFM of air, with a noise output of 8.3 ~ 28.8 dBA. The 120 mm fan, on the other hand, spins at 800 ~ 2,200 RPM; pushing 24.23 ~ 66.2 CFM, with 15.0 ~ 35.0 dBA noise output. Both fans have 4-pin plugs and support PWM control. The heatsink itself measures 200 x 130 x 162 mm (WxDxH), weighing 755 g. All current sockets, including LGA2011, LGA1366, LGA1155/LGA1156, AM3+/AM3/AM2+/AM2, and FM1 are supported. It is priced at 6,980 JPY (US $91.6).

In an effort to make it easier for programmers to take advantage of parallel computing, NVIDIA, Cray Inc., the Portland Group (PGI), and CAPS enterprise announced today a new parallel-programming standard, known as OpenACC.

Initially developed by PGI, Cray, and NVIDIA, with support from CAPS, OpenACC is a new open parallel programming standard designed to enable the millions of scientific and technical programmers to easily take advantage of the transformative power of heterogeneous CPU/GPU computing systems.

OpenACC allows parallel programmers to provide simple hints, known as "directives," to the compiler, identifying which areas of code to accelerate, without requiring programmers to modify or adapt the underlying code itself. By exposing parallelism to the compiler, directives allow the compiler to do the detailed work of mapping the computation onto the accelerator.

Titan launched the TTC-SC07TZ(RB), a graphics card fan attachment. This isn't really a graphics card cooler as such, but supplements your graphics card cooler by blowing air on to it. The attachment is modular, consists of three parts, and takes up an expansion slot. The three parts include a fan controller attached to the expansion bracket, and two 95 mm fans.

The fan frames can be rearranged along a Z-axis of each other, so one fan blows air along the plane of the motherboard, while the other perpendicular to it. The fans spin at speeds between 1000 to 1800 RPM, with 15 ~ 27.8 dBA sound output. The frames are designed such that the bundled 95 mm fans can be replaced with your own 60 mm, 80 mm, or 92 mm fans. Pricing is not known.

G.Skill has also expanded its solid-state offerings, by introducing the new Titan SSDs. Available in 128GB and 256GB models, the 2.5-inch Titan drives make use of MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash chips, have a second generation SATA 3.0 interface and a MTBF (mean time between failure) of 1.5 million hours. The drives also have built-in EDC/ECC data protection. The manufacturer claims sequential read and write speeds of up to 218MB/s and 162MB/s respectively. The G.Skill SSDs are covered in a strong metal alloy housing and ship with a 2 year warranty.

Titan introduced today new Elena TEC VGA cooler, which combines the latest TEC and Heatpipe technology to provide powerful cooling performance especially for high-end GPUs and overcloking. By monitoring the VGA temperature, Elena's TEC control system is able to automatically switch ON/OFF power to maintain the temperature in a certain range that is, if the GPU is too hot, the TEC will start cooling; on the other hand, if the GPU is cool enough, the TEC will stop cooling. Thus, there is no condensation problem like old TEC solutions. In addition to the TEC cooling, the Elena TEC VGA Cooler is equipped with two silent 80x80x10mm fans(1800RPM-2500RPM/21dB-25dB) and four copper heatpipes that help speed up heat dissipation. The Elena TEC VGA Cooler has a universal mounting mechanism that supports all ATI video cards from X1300 to X1950 series, and all NVIDIA cards from GeForce 6800 to GeForce 7950GT except the 7800GS model.