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NVIDIA CEO Unveils Volta Graphics, Tegra Roadmap, GRID VCA Virtualized Rendering
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang kicked off this year's GPU Technology Conference with his customary opening keynote. The focus of Jen-Hsun's presentation was on unveiling a new GPU core code named 'Volta' that will employ stacked DRAM for over 1TB/s of memory bandwidth, as well as updates to NVIDIA's Tegra roadmap and a new remote rendering appliance called 'GRID VCA.' On the mobile side, Tegra's next generation 'Logan' architecture will feature a Kepler-based GPU and support CUDA 5 and OpenGL 4.3. Logan will offer up to 3X the compute performance of current solutions and be demoed later this year, with full production starting early next year. For big iron, NVIDIA's GRID VCA (Visual Computing Appliance) is a new 4U system based on NVIDIA GRID remote rendering technologies. The GRID hypervisor supports 16 virtual machines (1 per GPU) and each system will feature 8-Core Xeon CPUs, 192GB or 384GB of RAM, and 4 or 8 GRID boards, each with two Kepler-class GPUs, for up to 16 GPUs per system. Jen-Hsun demo'd a MacBook Pro remotely running a number of applications on GRID, like 3D StudioMax and Solidworks, which aren't even available for Mac OS X natively."
Ok I know this is Slashdot, but I could barely comprehend the summary. Is this a good thing?!
This Volta sounds pretty exciting, DRAM bandwidth is commonly a limiting factor in GPGPU applications, so if it can get 1TB/s, it'll be more than 3x faster for memory bound kernels than the current high-end scientific computing cards (e.g. the Tesla K20). With that said, I'm a bit apprehensive about how much it'll cost; Tesla K20's currently cost over $2k per card...
Staggering specifications, but maybe several years from now it'll be be commonplace on a $50 smartphone. One year after that it'll be in kerbside hard rubbish collections. Sigh...
So we're back to the heavy mainframe and thin client topology now?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Nvidia has had solid success, but the future is looking ever more troubling. The exotic ultra-high end toys that Nvidia promotes (expensive racks of stuff) didn't help keep Sun or Silicon Graphics afloat either.
Nvidia's important markets are discrete GPUs for desktop and notebook PCs and its ARM SoC tablet/ARMbook parts.
-The desktop GPUs. Nvidia is held hostage by TSMC's ability to fabricate better chips (on smaller processes). Nvidia itself issued a white-paper where they predicted the costs associated with moving to a new process would soon overwhelm the advantages of staying with the previous process (for high end GPU chips). In fairness, this pessimism was driven by TSMC's horrific incompetence at the 28nm node. Nvidia's talk of a future GPU with exotic stacked DRAM is very troubling indeed, since companies only usually focus on such bizarre idiocy (like holographic optical storage) when traditional solutions are failing them. Building special chips is insanely expensive, especially when you consider that ordinary DRAM is rapidly getting cheaper and faster. As Google proves, commodity hardware solutions beat specialised ones.
-The mobile PC GPU. Nvidia was forced out of the PC motherboard chipset biz by Intel and AMD. Now Intel and AMD are racing to build APUs (combined CPUs and GPUs) with enough grunt for most mobile PC users. Nvidia chose to start making ARM parts over creating its own x86 CPU, so the APU is not an option for Nvidia. The logic of an OEM choosing to add Nvidia GPUs to mobile devices is declining rapidly. Nvidia can only compete at the ultra-high end. Maybe the stacked DRAM is a play for this market.
-The Tegra ARM SoC. Tegra has proven a real problem for Nvidia, again because of TSMC's inability to deliver. However, Nvidia also faces a problem over exactly what type of ARM parts are currently needed by the market. Phone parts need to be very low power- something Nvidia struggles to master. Tablet parts need a balance between cost, power and performance- there is no current 'desktop' market outside the Chromebook (yeah, I know that's a notebook). The Chinese ARM SoC companies are coming along at a terrifying pace.
Nvidia has stated that it will place modern PC GPU cores in the next Tegra (5) although Nvidia frequently uses such terms dishonestly. Logan would be around the end of 2014, and would require Android to have gone fully notebook/desktop by that time to have a decent marketplace for the expensive Tegra 5. Even so, Samsung and Qualcomm would be looking to smash them, and PowerVR is seeking to crush Nvidia's GPU advantage. Nvidia would need a win from someone like Apple, if Apple gives up designing its own chips.
In the background is the emerging giant, AMD. AMD's past failures mean too many people do not understand the nature of AMD's threat to Intel and Nvidia. AMD has a 100% record of design wins in new forward-thinking products in the PC space. This includes all the new consoles, and the first decent tablets coming from MS later this year. Unlike Nvidia, AMD can make its parts in multiple fabs. AMD also owns the last great x86 CPU core- the Jaguar. AMD is leading the HSA initiative, and can switch to using ARM cores when that proves useful.
Sane analysis would project a merger between Intel and Nvidia as the best option for both companies, but this has been discussed many times in the past, and failed because Nvidia refuses to 'bend the knee'. Alone, and Nvidia is now far too limited in what it can produce. The server-side cloud rendering products have proven fatal to many a previous company. The high-end scientific supercomputing is a niche that can be exploited, but a niche that would wither Nvidia considerably.
Shouldn't Nvidia have expected to have become another Qualcomm by now? Even though Nvidia makes few things, it still spreads itself too thin, and focuses on too many bluesky gimmick concepts. 3D glasses, PhysX and Project SHIELD get Nvidia noticed, but then Nvidia seemingly starts to believe its own publicity. It doesn't help that Nvidia is sitting back as the PC market declines - eroding one of the key sources of its income. The excitement is about to be the new consoles from Sony and MS, and Nvidia has no part in this.
Pinging Google is 20ms from my home computer. I can see how it might be possible in twenty years with a fiber optic connection but not in five years. And certainly not on a cell phone network. I can imagine certain programming techniques but I'm sure most of them are already implemented just to get lag down on a standalone computer and the rest would require games to be designed and programmed for high feedback lag. Some of the techniques I can imagine would trade more bandwidth to make up for the lag.
Explain to me how they will defeat lag.
Nvidia ditching whatever embedded GPU Tegra has parallels with Intel dropping PowerVR for their latest Bay Trail Atom.
I wonder if this means the nouveau driver will be compatible with one's ARM tablet. If so, Canonical's convoluted architecture for Mir (embracing android blobs) might be shortlived - with lima, freedreno, nouveau, intel all targeting Xorg/Wayland - leaving PowerVR solutions as the odd one out.
Good for saving space. Good for making speeding things up. Bad for heat dissipation.
How can I increase the thermal resistance of my processor.... I know, stick a DRAM chip between it and the heat sink!
If nVidia didn't already have the de-facto standard for professional 3D graphics, they sure do now.
Is there somewhere a technical overview of what GRID is? Wikipedia seems unaware of it.
However i do recall a developement from a few years back that effectivly placed something like heatpipes inside the layers of the chips allowing it to be pushed out to the surface of the chip. TBH I wonder what level of fragility our CPUs are running on...
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What you were decribing sounds like what Intel did to produce a high bandwidwith chip (the Pentium 4) when their Pentium 3 failed to scale against the origonal AMD Athlon . That would seem to indicate they finally hit the wall CPUs ran into 10 years ago..
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1TB/s of memory bandwidth is indeed impressive
I do not understand why everybody and their great-grandmother's dog are drolling all over and goo-goo--gaa-gaa over the "memory bandwidth" thing
Even if that rig is dedicated for massive game-playing, what portion of the time the GPGPU needs to tap on the full strength of the 1TB/s memory bandwidth ?
Furthermore, the average rig wouldn't even use 0.1% percent of its time hitting the 1TB/s threshold
Which means, 99.9% of the time the GPGPU can get by with lower memory bandwidth requirements
Remember, 1TB/s of NOPs is 1TB/s of NOPs.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
So my choices of video card are between slow and expensive (intel integrated, intel CPUs cost more than AMD CPUs if you don't care about single-thread performance, and I don't, and the motherboards cost much more as well) or crap drivers (AMD) or evil lock-in (nVidia).
All I want for Christmas is a graphics card company I can buy from without feeling like an asshole.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
1 TB/s? That bus is insane, it could transfer my whole porn collection in less then 5 minutes!
839*929
They will not support 3 displays on the newer nvidia-cards, that's a windows-only feature, unless you buy the quattro cards. Never buying nvidia-again.
-- Linux user #369862