With the introduction of VGX and the announcement of NVIDIA’s GeForce Grid offering, NVIDIA and their partners are taking square aim at one of the biggest market opportunities around: gaming. Video games are big business, damned big business.

For example, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3” totted up more than a billion in sales after only 16 days on the market in late 2011. Hollywood movies, for all of 2011, only pulled in $10.5 billion in ticket sales. The Call of Duty franchise has harvested more than $6 billion in sales since it was introduced in 2003. In comparison, the somewhat successful Star Wars films have earned around $8.3 billion in ticket sales after being adjusted for inflation.

But Call of Duty is only part of the picture. According to VGChartz, who seem to have a decent handle on these things, more than 430 million games were sold in 2011 for the top three consoles (xBox, PS3 and Wii). If we use an average (and conservative) price point of $35 per game, that’s at least $15 billion in revenue for retail game sales. This isn’t counting any additional earnings from PC versions, online accounts or add-ons. (Read more and view charts below.)

The article about NVIDIA’s new VGX virtualized GPU as a potential holy grail for task- and power-user desktop virtualization inspired comments from readers of The Register that are well worth addressing. They also brought out a few details that I didn’t cover in the article. First, let’s address a few of the specific comments.

From reader Twelvebore:

“21st century X-terminals then. Didn’t SGI (Silicon Graphics back then) push this sort of stuff a couple of decades ago?”

Absolutely right, Twelve (if I can call you Twelve). One of my former bosses, who also held down a top position at SGI at one time, called that to my attention. According to him, it wasn’t a trivial effort at SGI at the time, but they got it done and delivered it to a few clients who were demanding it. I don’t think it was all that long ago, though; maybe 10 years?

Reader JustNiz talked some gaming:

“This demo was obviously running on a LAN, which will not happen in real world application…Manufacturers will love the relatively cheap cost of parts compared to making a fully featured console but almost certainly won’t pass the savings on to the end-user, as we are already conditioned to pay $399 for a console…Software houses will love the fact that end users never get an actual copy of the software (so no pirating). I wonder what they will blame low sales on next. Distributors will love the fact that they can charge users again and again to play the same game…

These 3 groups will drive this to replace all current gaming regardless of the fact that its totally worse for the end-user. The populace will just buy this en-masse because they’ve been told to by the advertising..”

First: nope, the demo wasn’t running on a LAN. Grady Cofer from Industrial Light & Magic actually went out to their server farm and made adjustments to the “Avenger” and “Battleship” footage on the fly. (Read more and view photos here…)

What’s a “holy crap” moment? For me, it’s when I see or hear (or do) something that has far-reaching and previously unforeseen consequences. I’ve had at least two of these moments (so far) at the GTC 2012 conference. The first was when Jen-Hsun Huang, in his keynote presentation, tossed up a slide about Kepler and this new thing they’re calling VGX.

VGX is a Kepler device that packages the GPU with components that enable very fast, virtualized, GPU streaming. For a good summary of VGX, Tim Prickett-Morgan, America’s premiere technology journalist (and national treasure), wrote one here.

At a basic level, what VGX brings to the table is desktop virtualization for the knowledge worker and power user. In some ways, it will give power users more resources than they’ve ever had before. In real terms, it will give them the freedom to truly work (or display their work) on a wide variety of devices from anywhere they have a broadband connection. It looks to me like any device that can handle a H.264 video stream can also handle the stream of any application – regardless of its size, complexity, or need for lots of compute resources. (Read more and view images below…)

Hybrid computing (using CPUs plus GPUs to accelerate processing speed/throughput) and Necrotizing Faciitis (flesh-eating bacteria) have more in common than is typically thought. Both exhibit high growth rates, and both are incredibly difficult to stop once they get started.

This story is perhaps best told via pictures. One measure of how hybrid computing has advanced is to look at its presence at the annual Supercomputing (SC) events.

In this first picture, we’re looking at the booth layout of the SC07 show floor in Reno. Like a typical SC show, there were a few hundred exhibitors ranging from hardware, software, and service vendors to academic institutions, research labs, and government research organizations.

The sole presence of hybrid computing is the tiny green dot at the upper left of the schematic. It’s NVIDIA’s small booth – the lone beachhead for GPU-accelerated HPC.

Fast-forward four years and… look at the progress. The SC11 show floor diagram is literally covered with green squares and rectangles. One of those squares is NVIDIA’s own booth, of course; but what about all the others? (Read more below…)

Hybrid computing has come a very long way in a relatively short period of time. My first exposure to hybrids came at SC08 in the lovely city of Austin, Texas. Earlier that year, the Roadrunner system at Los Alamos National Lab had achieved two milestones: 1) It was the first system to break through the petabyte barrier; and 2) It was the first high-profile hybrid system.

Roadrunner was a combination of IBM 8-core CellBE accelerators and AMD Opteron CPUs. In my first meeting with NVIDIA’s Tesla team at SC08, I was skeptical. To me, it looked like IBM had a winning combination and would be off to the races, building smaller HPC hybrid systems and even commercial versions (like they did a little while later with Cell blades). IBM talked about building a vibrant ecosystem around Cell and ensuring that potential customers had all of the apps and tools they’d ever need to take advantage of the accelerated goodness promised by this new hybrid architecture.

NVIDIA agreed that the ecosystem was the key, and pointed to work that they were doing with this new CUDA environment. But in 2008, it wasn’t an overwhelming success. Here are some stats (taken from Jen-Hsun Huang’s GTC12 keynote).

(Read more below…)