Nvidia, KFA2 To Launch Fermi-Based Wireless Graphics Card
Graphics card manufacturer KFA2, a subsidiary of Galaxy, on Friday offered initial plans for an upcoming Nvidia-based wireless graphics card, the KFA2 GeForce GTX 460 GPU. The card is completely cable-free and will allow video streaming within a 100 feet on any device with WHDI support. KFA2 did not offer details regarding pricing or availability.
KFA2's GeForce GTX 460 graphics card will feature WHDI technology that enables streaming of uncompressed 1080p video from a PCI Express bus. The card includes no less than five antennas extending out the back of the PCIe 2.0 card, as well as a bundled 5 GHZz WHDI Receiver.
KFA2's card runs at 1.35GHz, and offers 1024MB of RAM memory, HDCP 2.0 compliance, and 336 Nvidia CUDA cores. CUDA is the technical term for Nvidia's Fermi architecture, which provides a platform to Nvidia's high-performance GPU-based parallel processing , an increasingly important part of the graphics specialist's overall strategy.
Despite being known for developing reference architectures for graphics chips that other companies manufacture, Nvidia has recently shifted away from that strategy, and more toward manufacturing chips based on other companies' designs. Last week at CES Nvidia unveiled Project Denver , a desktop and server processor product family based on British chipmaker ARM's CPU architecture.
Considering that ARM currently provides chips for over 90 percent of mobile embedded devices, and considering that Nvidia's Tegra 2 mobile processors were on display at CES as the ideal processor for high-performance, small form-factor devices, it seems Nvidia is acknowledging the opportunities in mobile and wireless technology.
While the creation of a wireless graphics card might seem frivilous (desktops usually aren't that far away from their monitors, after all), there may be some applications for the technology, especially with the growth of wireless-enabled devices.
Now that an Nvidia architecture is being applied to an innovative wireless solution, Nvidia may be in a position to both design the technology and manufacture the hardware that will drive the future of mobile processing.