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GDDR2 Emerging As A Real Standard
An anonymous reader writes "I noticed here that EE Times is reporting that the GDDR2 standard is finally becoming a reality. Both NVIDIA and ATI's latest chips offer support. ATI helped spearhead the initiative to develop the standard. The significance of this is great, since it may very well mean that every 18 months or so a new graphics memory standard will be released."
But it seems like this whole 'building names on each other' thing is getting out of hand.
GDDR2 SDRAM? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Sheesh. Why can't you just call it something like DDR3 or GDRAM or something simple like that?
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Well, if they could get the number of vendors that offer this type of memory to increase, then they could lower the price enough to make it cost effective. Also, this would make it great for sites that benchmark various video cards - making all of the video cards have the same/very similar types and speeds of memory would be excellent for comparison.
Gotta get me one of these!
the special requirement of graphics specific RAM is the simultaneous in/out access. (At least that's my understanding of VRAM (video RAM))
For that point, why arn't they doing a QDR architecture? QDR is basically DDR but with dedicated in / out pins (separate) that allows this kind of simultaneous read/write.
Granted, pin count is higher but I think it would be better suited to the graphics people.
That or I am not quite clear on the GDDR-n specs. heh. Or I am thinking about frame-buffer memory instead of texture memory (AFAIK the latter only need to be continuously read, really fast) hmm...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
"GDDR3 will consume half the power of GDDR2 and operate up to 50 percent faster."
Maybe graphic makers should hold out on GDDR2 for GDDR3. People that buy high-end graphics cards want quality. Look at the GeForce FX. It's going to kill NVIDIA. I think NVIDIA and others (ATI) are going to really learn from the FX and make extra sure that what they come out with will be real innovation, not a quick way to get back on top and the expense of their customers.
That's exactly why ANSI C is a standard, but Java isn't.
I've always wondered this, since those two patterns are the ones I've fallen in and out of for the past few years.
I still think this is why console gaming is more mainstream, either way. With a console, you might not get the best quality in graphics, but hell, you pay $200-300 and the machine lasts 5 years, and you get quite a nice selection of quality games (that's really a bias, I started out on the NES...).
"Doesn't this defeat the purpose of "Standard"?"
No because the lowend is the bulk of the market and there every penny counts.
"A new standard means the old one isn't..."
No it just means that they get the benefits of a new standard for high end and high margin devices while reaping the prior standard as well.
"Or am i missing something?"
You are missing the fact that the bulk of graphics chips sold are at the low end. This low end bulk is good for 18+ months which is an eternity in the graphics business due to the rate of change (which seems to still be at a rate of preformance doubling every six to nine months). Standardization on this low end will allow lower prices while meeting the need for faster and more specialized RAM than is required compared the more stable CPU markets. In addition the standards will insulate all parties from lawsuits or patent claims lending more stability to their ventures. Finally it may herald a change from the bad old days where a great deal of R&D had to go into reinventing the wheel for memory or relying on exclusive vendors who may not even have the capacity when the need came. I'm thinking in particular of the year with the semiconductor fire that ratched up certain graphics card vendors highend cards.
Even in this market standards are good.
It would be nice if that EEtimes article even gave a slight, non-indepth, technical description of what exactly GDDR2 is.
Can anyone answer me that? What makes it special?
SuPz.orG
Isn't it interresting how graphics adapters use the fastest memory available these days, not the CPU. Not counting L1/2/3 caches that is...
This really goes to show how humans are visual animals above all. I wonder how much more power could be squeesed out of porcessors if we were to use memory like this and wider buses...
.: Max Romantschuk
This write-up is pretty much bogus. The first half of the article talks about how there are a zillion different companies all peddling their own versions of GDDR2. Then the second half talks about how it looks like GDDR3 will not have this problem, and will therefore be widely adopted.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
its called the Cameron Law - it dictates that game companies and graphics cards companies are in a conspiracy together to force us buy more and more of each, and every 18 months we will have to buy a new video card, which probably coincides with new technology video game releases. (this is a joke, so don't take it that seriously)
The good news in the article is that the much "better" memory GDDR3 will be standardized from the beginning with may suppliers and hopefully a lower price. Forget GDDR2!
A standard is what most people conform to.
If the standard changes frequently and new ones are created, that doesn't make the new one any less of a standard.
It's still a standard.
Got that?
it says that GDDR3 is going to be the standard, not GDDR2 - which sounds like it has multiple different implementations.
(I know it is against the spirit of
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
Actually there is a difference in the way CPU and GPU see
memory.
A CPU cares a lot about latency because typical code will
have "random" accesses scattered with calculations in
between. The same data and code areas are often
accessed many times and data are small
(e.g. a Word document is small) while code
maybe quite large.
That's why CPU's don't have enormous
256-bit buses (which have the same latency as a 64-bit
bus)
A GPU performs "multimedia" calculations which typically
involve serial access to memory where caching can be of
very little help. You cannot "cache" a whole texture set
and code is of really trivial size (until now, maybe
PixelShader 2.0+++ will change all that). Therefore
a GPU needs serial access to huge areas of memory,
involving items of similar size and in regular intervals.
That's why a GPU needs BANDWIDTH (not necessarily
latency, because when the calculation starts latency
is hidden inside the calculation loop).
Considering the above, P4 is a "multimedia" design (much
more like a GPU) that's why it was made to work with
very high FSB and RAMBUS (high bandwidth) originally.
Contrary to this, AMD Athlon is a "generic" design which
does not depend on huge bandwidth but on very low
latency (hence the HUGE L1 cache). That's why P4 needs
HyperThreading : its long pipelines do not care a lot about
latency but can cause a big bottleneck if they stall. Intel
feeds them continuously by drawing instructions from 2
processes at once (so that the pipeline does not remain
empty if one process is stalled from the front side bus or
something...).
Anyway, I expect GPUs to drift slowly towards the generic
CPU design because pixelshader language has become
quite complicated with long loops etc. Gradually this
means that GPUs (esp. with DirectX9) will start being
compute-limited and not texture-fill-rate limited
(anything over 2 GTexel/s is really absurd for
typical screen sizes). This will propably become apparent
with DOOM III.
P.
Oh, it's some graphics chipset related thingy. I seriously thought the acronym was for a global standard for Dance Dance Revolution...
while many will bitch that they "have" to upgrade more since the changes are so rapid the reality of the situation is that more choice means more innovation. Plus, we all know how long it takes anything but the most bleeding edge "toys" to make use of new technology. Faster memory onboard is much more transparent and thus will be utilized immediately (unless they do something silly and add to the instruction set for using it)
So what you are saying is that they are STILL reinventing the wheel, but at least since it will be a "standard" reinvented wheel, they can all work together to reinvent it right? Well, I guess that is "sort of" progress...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
ATI took over the market (The Elite High-End) that NV (- brutal pun) left wide open and is now neck and neck with the goliath card maker for that reason. The High End gets all the market and media attention, lose focus of that and you just LOSE. Like Nvidia has.
I went to battle MC Escher but drew a blank
PS. slashcode is a lame lump of shite - without this PS, it wouldn't let me post...! :-p
I want my GQDR dammit!
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Games don't expire. But, without a lot of effort on my part, I can't just go and play Doom like I did in 1995. I need to go get a 486 or a P1 around 100Mhz in speed if I want to play Doom the way I did.
OTOH, I can still play SMB3 off of my SNES Mario Allstars cart, and that's older than Doom by a couple of years. In PC gaming, games may not expire, but targetted architectures do. This classic interview contains some insight into this (Glide/Verite vs. OpenGL targetting).
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
One of the port was a normal R/W port, and the other was a read-only port. This port also had a very wide word-size. That is, you would select an entire column of the RAM (2K bits back then, 4K or 8K now) and it would parallel load it into a internal buffer, then shift it out bit by bit. This may sound very slow, but it was VERY fast, and you only had to deal with latency with each parallel load, so every 2K to 4K bits. This system was ideal for video display and still is.
Also note that latency is a relatively minor issue when refreshing video since you read the memory in an absolutely predictable, sequential way, so you know far enough ahead of time to ask for the data in order to have it ready when you need it. Bandwidth is a larger issue, back when 1024x768 (at 32 bit) was big time, video cards had 4 or 5 banks of memory in order to keep up. It would be worse now.
Whos to say games ever 'expire'?
The internal battery used to power the SRAM that saves the state of the game, that's what. It will eventually run out of charge.
Will I retire or break 10K?
OK, so I started on typical 150 bpm songs such as "Hot Limit". I then tried increasing the bus speed to 200 BPM with the "Paranoia" songs. But why am I having so much trouble passing songs once I've doubled the data rate from 150 bpm to 300 bpm with "Max 300"?
Will I retire or break 10K?
One: look it up. The word "unilaterally" cannot be used to describe a coalition of 46 countries.
Two: the framework was broken. France and Russia made sure of that.
Three: you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. The legal basis is established in resolution 678. Read it, bitch.
Four: UN resolutions are NOT very precise. They are the opposite of precise: deliberately vague. If they were precise, one of the five magic members would veto them, and nobody would ever get anything done. So they're made as vague as possible, on purpose.
Five: Bush never said that we must go into Iraq because of a threat to the US. He said we must go into Iraq to enforce UN resolution 687. That is all.
You're a fucking idiot.
I can't just plonk in my DOOM floppies and play the game. How do I play the game with no difference in methods after all these years?
I don't.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
It's hard to find any technical description since its pretty new and there is no JDEC-standard yet.
But the key that makes it worth the extra bucks is the fact that DDR-II delivers twice the external bandwidth of a standard DDR solution for the same internal frequency. The 1.8-volt device features a high-speed data transfer rate of 533Mbps that can be extended to 667Mbps for networks and special system environments.
The last year chip-makers have released diffrent DDR chips with increasing frequency like DDR 266, DDR333 and DDR400. But its limited how much higher its possible to go so instead they are trying to add another sort of "bus" inside the chip.
The reason they started producing DDR (vs. SDR) is because it's much easier to implement such a double data rate (DDR) bus than it is to actually double the clock rate of a bus. So DDR allows you to instantly double a bus's peak bandwidth without all the hassle and expense of a higher frequency bus.
DDR-II is made thinking in the same way.
So your Linux magically has SB emulation and VGA emulation for a program which expects a real (protectei) mode DOS environment it can change to flat addressing?
Or your Windows XP has SB emulation and VGA emulation, etc?
I can't play DOOM anymore than I can play Genecyst and get my Shinning Force state files. Luckily my Sega Smash pack on Dreamcast isn't on a platform that's a moving target.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
It doesn't matter what my console "runs," because it'll run any title I put into it.
The only way you can still play titles is to use Win98, which is 5 years old. At that point I might as well buy a new computer every 5 years and live with each one as its own gaming console. Even old DirectX games don't work on new DirectX.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.