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Nvidia's Fermi Architecture Debuts; Nouveau Driver Already Working
crookedvulture writes Nvidia has lifted the curtain on reviews of its latest GPU architecture, which will be available first in the high-end GeForce GTX 680 graphics card. The underlying GK104 processor is much smaller than the equivalent AMD GPU, with fewer transistors, a narrower path to memory, and greatly simplified control logic that relies more heavily on Nvidia's compiler software. Despite the modest chip, Nvidia's new architecture is efficient enough that The Tech Report, PC Perspective, and AnandTech all found the GeForce GTX 680's gaming performance to be largely comparable to AMD's fastest Radeon, which costs $50 more. The GTX 680 also offers other notable perks, like a PCI Express 3.0 interface, dynamic clock scaling, new video encoding tech, and a smarter vsync mechanism. It's rather power-efficient, too, but the decision to focus on graphics workloads means the chip won't be as good a fit for Nvidia's compute-centric Tesla products. A bigger GPU based on the Kepler architecture is expected to serve that market." Read on below for good news (at least if you prefer Free software) from an anonymous reader. Update: 03/22 19:35 GMT by T : Mea culpa -- that headline should say "Kepler," rather than Fermi; HT to Dave from Hot Hardware (here's HH's take on the new GPU).
Our anonymous friend writes "The open-source Nouveau driver project that reverse-engineers the official NVIDIA driver to provide a free software alternative has made some big accomplishments. Nouveau announced today they have same-day Kepler support and are now de-staging on Linux. The GeForce GTX 680 'Kepler' launch just happened hours prior to Nouveau, somehow managing initial mode-setting support with early hardware, from a project that NVIDIA 'officially' does not support. The de-staging in the Linux kernel now means that the driver is at version 1.0 with a stable ABI."
I believe you mean Kepler, not Fermi, in the story title.
Isn't it Kepler ?
I thought Fermi was the previous generation's name...
someone made a total fail post here
OMGAWD its too fast for me i only play 15 year old games. wheres mah lunix support???
Never change slashbots.
We're probably looking at the GPU for next gen Xbox/Playstation consoles, probably in a multi-GPU version.
"A bigger GPU based on the Kepler architecture is expected to serve that market." Doh.
If the Nouveau project doesn't get support from Nvidia, how did they manage to support this new chip before it's release? Have they had access to one of the cards sent to the press?
Mada mada dane.
for mining bitcoins?
Firstly, this new architecture (GK104) has a great number of cores (192 versus 32 of the Fermi architecture) sharing a single control logic within a stream multiprocessor (SM). Internally, each SM is SIMD, so this move is bad for divergent kernels, i.e., algorithms containing if-then-else constructs. Secondly, as usual from Nvidia, the GeForce brand has poor double-precision performance, only 1/8 of the SP's. On the other hand, the AMD Radeon HD7000 family doubles this fraction, being much faster at DP operations, which is a must for scientific computing.
Once again they don't have same day OS/2 support. Do they seriously expect to remain viable if they don't know who there customers are?
It more means that nVidia helps them out in some ways, however it is at nVidia's discretion. They also aren't going to help you out if it doesn't work and so on.
So nVidia officially supports their binary driver, this one they are willing to help the project out when they want, but that's it.
thats weird. I've had fermi since last summer - hope I didn't break the NDA
Nvidia Fermi cards have problems since drivers 280.xx they are causing TDR while browsing Firefox and using Flash Player. It's an documented problem and they can't find the cause (read their forums). Let's hope the open source community can fix this!
in fact ive got a gtx550 and its got 192 fp32 stream processors. dont know if nvidia is being very honest.. is there a 192 fp64 chip out there somewhere and how much does it cost ??
Try reading, it's fun!
If you bothered to read my post you would notice I said those were the performance figures for GK104 and consumer cards. Of course Tesla has fp64 at 1/2 fp32, but to get a worthwhile Tesla card you're looking at ~$2000.
NVidia have pulled a past one here, which doesn't seem to have been widely picked up yet.
The codename for the 680 is GK104. The 460 and 560 cards were based on the cut-down GF104 and GF114 GPUs respectively and were midrange parts. The 480 and 580 high-end parts were based on the full GF100 and GF110 GPUs respectively and had a 384-bit memory bus (rather than the 256-bit bus used on the GF1x4 parts).
In other words - the 680 is really what would otherwise have been called the 660, it's just that nVidia's worked out they can make some extra cash by marketing it as a high-end part. Don't be at all surprised when in a few months time a 685 or 690 appears, based on the "full" GK100 (with a 384-bit memory bus and a fair bit of extra oomph....