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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.'"
Thanks for the heads up, Nvidia! I'll be sure to hold off for 6 years on buying anything with a GPU.
I do high-performance lattice QCD calculations as a grad student. At the moment I'm running code on 2048 Opteron cores, which is about typical for us -- I think the big jobs use 4096 sometimes. We soak up a *lot* of CPU time on some large machines -- hundreds of millions of core-hours -- so making this stuff run faster is something People Care About.
This sort of problem is very well suited to being put on GPU's, since the simulations are done on a four-dimensional lattice (say 40x40x40x96 -- for technical reasons the time direction is elongated) and since "do this to the whole lattice" is something that can be parallelized easily. The trouble is that the GPU's don't have enough RAM to fit everything into memory (which is understandable, they're huge) and communications between multiple GPU's are slow (since we have to go GPU -> PCI Express -> Infiniband).
If Nvidia were to make GPU's with extra RAM (could you stuff 16GB on a card?) or a way to connect them to each other by some faster method, they'd make a lot of scientists happy.
Well, it comes down to simple math. For the performance to get to 570-fold more than what it is now, in the same style package, either:
Both seem highly unlikely.
You don't feel it could be a combination of both? Kind of like they did with multi-core CPUs? Make a single unit more powerful, then use more units ... wow!
There is more than one way to skin a cat.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
So in six years, Gordon Moore says we should have 32x the performance we have now.
No - 32x the transistors.
You fail to predict how using those transistors in a more optimized way(more suitable to modern rendering algorithms) will affect performance.
Just think about it - a plain old FPU and SSE4 might use the same number of transistors, but when the code needs to do a lot of fancy stuff at once, one is definitely faster.
(inaccurate example, but you get the idea)
1. The GPU has to become 570-fold more efficient
2. The GPU has to become ~570-fold smaller so they can fit 570 of the things onto a card
Both seem highly unlikely.
If graphics card development in the last 10 years is anything to go by, nVidia's plan is that the GPU will become 570 times larger, draw 570 times more power and the fan will spin 570 times faster