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NVIDIA Predicts 570x GPU Performance Boost
Gianna Borgnine writes "NVIDIA is predicting that GPU performance is going to increase a whopping 570-fold in the next six years. According to TG Daily, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made the prediction at this year's Hot Chips symposium. Huang claimed that while the performance of GPU silicon is heading for a monumental increase in the next six years — making it 570 times faster than the products available today — CPU technology will find itself lagging behind, increasing to a mere 3 times current performance levels. 'Huang also discussed a number of "real-world" GPU applications, including energy exploration, interactive ray tracing and CGI simulations.'"
In other news, ATI is selling their 4870 series cards for $130 on newegg, which are twice as fast as an Nvidia 9800GTS which is the same price (at least on Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty, and any other game that matters). ATI is blowing Nvidia out of the water in terms of performance per dollar and will continue to do so through at least the middle of next year. See here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-cards-charts-2009-high-quality/benchmarks,62.html
Yeah, I'd be making outrageous statements too if I were Nvidia.
moox. for a new generation.
The prediction is complete nonsense. It assumes that CPU processors only get 20% faster per year (compounded). That would only be true if they did not add more cores to the CPU. And finally GPUs are hitting the same thermal/power leakage wall that CPUs hit several years ago - they will at best get faster in lock step with CPUs.
A GPU is not a general purpose processor, as is a CPU. It is only good at performing a large number of repetitive single precision (32 bit) floating point calculations without branching. Double precision (64 bit) calculations - double in C speak - is 4 times slower than single precision on a GPU. And the second you have an "if" in GPU code, everything grinds to a halt. Conditions effectively break the GPU SIMD (single instruction multiple data) model and bring the pipeline to a halt.
The GeForce 9 series was a rebrand/die shrink of GeForce 8, but the GTX 200 series has some major improvements under the hood:
* Vastly smarter memory controller including better batching of reads, and the ability to map host memory into the GPU memory space
* Double the number of registers
* Hardware double precision support (not as fast as single, but way faster than emulating it)
These sorts of things probably don't matter to people playing games, but they are huge wins for people doing GPU computing. The GTX 200 series has also seen a minor die shrink during the generation, so I don't know if the next generation will be more of a die shrink or actually include improved performance. (Hopefully the latter to keep up with Larrabee.)
You mean like the Tesla?
No, that won't do. The NVIDIA architecture (which is shared between Tesla and graphic cards) is 32-bit, meaning that it can only flat-address 4GB of RAM tops. The more sophisticated Tesla solutions are essentially built from clusters of Tesla cards, each with its own 4GB of RAM tops. Separate memory spaces means expensive memory transfers to share data between the cards, which is not an issue if you can get good domain decomposition, but is a BIG issue if you cannot.
The revolution for HPC on GPUs would be a 64-bit GPU architecture.
Proper support for doubles and possibly even long doubles would be a plus, for applications that need it.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
For the rest of us of course 570% increase is 5.7X faster.
It seems the rest of us don't understand what a "percent increase" means, either.
(hint: 570% increase == 6.7X)
sic transit gloria mundi