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Nvidia Discloses Details On Next-Gen Fermi GPU
EconolineCrush writes "The Tech Report has published the first details describing the architecture behind Nvidia's upcoming Fermi GPU. More than just a graphics processor, Fermi incorporates many enhancements targeted specifically at general-purpose computing, such as better support for double-precision math, improved internal scheduling and switching, and more robust tools for developers. Plus, you know, more cores. Some questions about the chip remain unanswered, but it's not expected to arrive until later this year or early next."
... run Linux?
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To the best of my knowledge, double-precision floating point operations are actually pretty important for some scientific applications of GPUs, and as such this is significant for those using GPUs as supercomputers.
...I'm not sure it means what you think it means.
No sig today...
Yes.
"Ignorant" would be a better rating - there's a lot of compute power but it's in the middle of a very different architecture to an x86 CPU. Not usable for running an OS.
No sig today...
Sure, they have lots of power, but only when used for parallel tasks. Each individual core is considerably slower than a normal CPU core and much more limited in what it can do.
Back in the day up till the year 2000, I used to upgrade my PC four times a year. The point was to always improve multi-tasking and obtain faster frame rates with higher detail in games that I already have. Since then however, the hardware has always been "good enough" for general computing and playing even the latest/popular games. The only time I'm compelled to upgrade my computer (mainly the video card) is if there's a game out that I love.
Honestly, the only game I'm looking forward to is Diablo3. Even then, my nVidia 8800GT card should be more than sufficient. If not, it would be games like these that will send me over to Newegg to make a purchase. Given the lack of games compounded with hardware that's already decent in the market, I'm willing to bet it's got Intel, AMD, and nVidia scared. Who really wants/need bleeding edge technology anymore? Am I wrong thinking the desire for better video card technology has plateaued in the last few years?
Life is not for the lazy.
It could also be useful in raytracing. The official reason POV-Ray hasn't been able to use video cards is that they don't have the required precision. That's probably pre-CUDA though, but "better support" sounds helpful.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=789
Just for a second glance.
I work at a physics lab, and demand for these newer NVIDIA cards are exploding due to general-purpose GPU programming. With a little bit of creativity and experience, many computational problems can be parallelized, and then run on the multiple GPU cores with fantastic speedup. In our case, we got a simulation from 2s/frame to 12ms/frame. It's not trivial though, and the guy in our group who got good at it... he found himself on 7 different projects simultaneously as everyone was craving this technology. He eventually left b/c of the stress. Now everyone and their mother either wants to learn how to do GPGPU, or recruit someone who does. This is why I bought NVIDIA stock (and they have doubled since I bought it).
But this technology isn't straightforward. Someone asked why not replace your CPU with it? Well for one, GPUs didn't use to be able to do ANY floating or double-precision calculations. You couldn't even program calculations directly -- you had to figure out how to represent your problem as texel- and polygon-operations so that you could trick your GPU into doing non-GPU calculations for you. With each new card released, NVIDIA is making strides to accommodate those who want GPGPU, and for everyone I know those advances couldn't come fast enough.
It depends on what you are doing, but when you get something that involves a lot of successive operations, even 32-bit FP can end up not being enough precision. You get truncation errors and those add up to visible artifacts. This could also become more true as displays start to take higher precision input and even more true if we start getting high dynamic range displays (like something that can do ultra-bright when asked) that themselves take floating point data.
OF COURSE, who do you think they are? Apple, Sony, HP and Microsoft?
Nvidia just makes the cards. It isn't their fault if they're not installed, cooled or properly read bedtime stories after use.
What I'd like to see is nVidia embed a decent x86 CPU,
They did, its called Tegra. Except its not using the x86 hog, but way more efficent ARM architecture
There were a hand-full of issues behind that decision. One of them was that some GPGPU platforms fail silently, which, in practice, means that you start crunching numbers with less than the expected mantissa and therefore you get considerably larger rounding errors,. This is something that may bring disastrous results. Another issue is that even in some cases the announced double-precision support of some products was a bit flawed, as it failed to comply with IEEE 754, the standard for floating-point arithmetic. Although it didn't complied due to only a hand-full of issues, to rely on GPGPUs to crunch numbers when they don't conform to that standard would mean that someone would be forced to spend a considerable time formally checking what effects that non-compliance would have on the project being developed. That means that that would take precious man-hours from projects which may already be poorly manned, not to mention that that task would be rendered to waste as the next GPGPU generation would either fully support with IEEE 754 or, in the worst case scenario, fail to support it in some other aspect, which would mean that the poor chap assigned to verify the effects of the product's non-compliance would be forced to do everything from scratch, once again.
So, to sum things up, GPGPU's support for double-precision math is, in fact, great news. It means that everyone may have it's own personal vector-processing super-computer on his desktop. Heck, even on laptops. That may not mean much for the proverbial joe-sixpack (at least not beyond the "oohh... shiny graphics" side of things) but being able to crunch a lot more numbers on the same time frame means the world to anyone writing/using number-crunching software, which is a lot of people.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
GTX 280 is a graphics card. The GT200 is the GPU core the GTX 280 card is based on. Likewise the 8800 series graphics cards were based on the G80 chip (and later G92, I think). There were also the G84, G86, G94 that power a number of nvidia's economy or mobile platforms. The Quadro 5600 and 4600 are also G80 based. There were other, cheaper Quadros based on the G84. The Quadro 5800 is based on the GT200 chip. The Tesla 870s were based on G80s, the 1070s are based on GT200. The cards also tend to have different memory interfaces (and amounts), clock rates and even firmware, which is why there are many different cards all based on the same handful of chips.
So no, I do mean the GT200. The GT200 processor supports double-precision, the G8x and G9x processors do not.
That is an astoundingly bad analogy.
What about it's like having a regiment of 5000 soldiers vs 5 ninjas. If the task can be accomplished by rote then the regiment will win on sheer manpower, but it requires adaptability then the ninjas will triumph.
Substitute pirates for ninjas for an instant paradox.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
That's better than nothing. But I want all the x86 packages, especially the Windows AV codecs. That requires an x86.
Though that requirement suggests an architecture of ARM CPU for OS/apps, little x86 coprocessor for codecs, and MPP GPU cores doing the DSP/rendering. If Linux could handle that kind of "heterogenous multicore" chip, it would really kill Windows 7. Especially on "embedded" media appliances.
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make install -not war
Hi thar. We gave you some useful hardware to support general purpose calculations in your graphics accelerator so you can compute while you compute.
The only thing we can't support is decent graphics in games without resorting to special, NVIDIA-specific patches.
FLOPS aren't directly comparable, as the ATI chips are arranged more like the Itanium, while nVidia looks more like a Core Duo. ATI has more raw power, but uses a smaller percentage of it.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.