Inside Nvidia's Testing Facilities

An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad has up a behind the scenes look at NVIDIA's Santa Clara HQ. In addition to the usual shots of the server farm, they spend several pages talking about the Silicon Failure Analysis Lab which is the secret to NVIDIA's success as a fabless semiconductor company. They also have shots of NVIDIA's thermal analysis lab where they run the GPUs at 40 deg C and 0 deg C, and the Performance analysis labs."

Comments

I just got an empty page reading...

[Rah'Dick]

"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along." What?

Re:I just got an empty page reading...

[hasbeard]

I think that just means no one has posted yet. When you see that it's your opportunity to be the first to say something.

Excellent Article

[Anonymous Coward]

An excellent Article! Finally a change from the mundane 'IT Cable Puller Assembles Software System to blah blah blah' Great to know that people are interested in what real engineers are doing. If course I do like the props given to the NVIDIA IT folks that keep everything humming nicely.

Re:Excellent Article

[rvw14]

Good article, I especially loved the ATI adds that showed up on every page.

Where are the disco sofa's and pinball machines?

[heroine]

All this renewed interest in corporations has us wanting our dot com parties back. They didn't mention the on-site oil changes. Interesting that the most valuable part of these companies is the lowest paying part: the QA lab. And the QA lab is still powered by 100Mbit ethernet.

Then of course many of U thought runaway housing inflation would force these companies to think about moving elsewhere like, say, Pleasanton. Wrongo. Even with 4x more expensive rents than 2000, Silicon valley is still the king of corporate headquarters.

Tighten up the graphics testing facility

[graviplana]

NVIDIA Tech: Johnson, you've been playing that game for hours, how's it going? NVIDIA Tech 2: We just finished level three and need to tighten up the graphics a little bit. NVIDIA Tech: Great! http://youtube.com/watch?v=j9COTOUH4qU&mode=related&search=

why use Intel Clovertowns when they have there own

[Joe The Dragon]

why use Intel Clovertowns when they have there own real good chipsets for AMD servers / work station systems?

Feline body temperature??

[jwiegley]

I'm puzzled as to what is so "extreme" about 40C? My cat's temperature runs just slightly less than that and it purrs along quite nicely (literally).

Re:Feline body temperature??

[jjeffries]

Well then rest assured that if you wanted to implant a GPU in your cat, the Nvidia would handle your pussy's heat (other problems notwithstanding.)

40 deg C?

[JimboFBX]

40 deg C? So what is that, 104 degrees farenheit? Thats not very taxing at all. Doesnt my laptop pull in 80 deg C?

Re:40 deg C?

[quanticle]

Doesnt my laptop pull in 80 deg C?

Given that most processors shutdown to prevent thermal damage at around that temperature, I'd think not. The shtudown threshold of a P4 (one of the hotter running chips of late) was around 78C, I'd think that 80C is a bit high.

That said, I do think that 40C is a pretty low bar to pass. Given that my P4 idles at around 48-50C, I'm surprised that they consider 40C to be an "average" test environment.

Re:40 deg C?

[mbessey]

40 degrees C is a sort-of standard for "elevated ambient" testing of electronics. The point of testing at higher temperatures is mostly to ensure that heat transfer out of the chips is sufficient at that temperature to keep them from overheating. The chips themselves will likely be running at much greater temperatures internally, but as long as the heat sinks are efficient enough, the chips shouldn't overheat.

For consumer electronics, I guess the assumption is that if it's 40 degrees in your room, you're going to go find somewhere cooler to be, rather than sitting there with your PC blowing hot air on you.

In other industries, the standards are different. Many products designed for use in an automobile are tested at 50-60 degrees, which is closer to the interior temperature of a car in full sun in a temperate climate.

Re:40 deg C?

[Jarjarthejedi]

"For consumer electronics, I guess the assumption is that if it's 40 degrees in your room, you're going to go find somewhere cooler to be, rather than sitting there with your PC blowing hot air on you."

I'm sure that's a good assumption in many situations, but I've sat outside on my computer during the day a few (read: every friday since school started back up) times this year when the temp was over 110 F. I was out there when it was 117 F running along just fine for almost 20 minutes before my class opened up.

It's not a bad assumption, in general the amount of time a computer's going to be running in >104 F is very small, but it's not exactly impossible.

Re:why use Intel Clovertowns when they have there

[georgewilliamherbert]

The article greatly oversimplified the compute HW setup. Nvidia has a many-thousand-node computational grid with servers across a wide variety of size tiers for different job types (mostly chip design/validation). Stuff is tested pretty extensively prior to mass purchase, and what's running a given size tier depends a lot on combinations of demand scheduling and HW vendor model rollout scheduling, both in CPUs and the boxes they sit in.

Re:Did anyone else...

[JonathanR]

No. You are special.

Re:Driver testings?

[cibyr]

What's worse, there doesn't seem to be any mechanism to report driver bugs to nVidia. I suppose you just have to hope they notice it and fix it in the next release.

Re:real-time simulation?!

[Bill of Death]

No, they cannot simulate the hardware designs anywhere near real-time. Using hardware emulation, they can run real software on real PCs, but still not near full speed.