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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.
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.
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.
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.