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Nvidia Announces 192-Core Tegra K1 Chips, Bets On Android
sfcrazy writes "Nvidia just announced Tegra K1, its first 192-core processor. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made the announcement at CES 2014. He also said that Android will be the most important platform for gaming consoles. 'Why wouldn't you want to be open, connected to your TV and have access to your photos, music, gaming. It's just a matter of time before Android disrupts game consoles,' said Huang." Nvidia's marketing department created a crop circle to promote the chip after CEO Jen Hsun Huang declared that it was so advanced that "it's practically built by aliens."
Nvidia's just saying that because they lost the bid for all the consoles.
(It doesn't mean it's not true, though.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Am I the only person that read the headline and thought CPU? Misled?
Have to remember that one for the next time I present a design or an engineering proposition to some pointy-haired bosses. Ha !
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
That's just in the US, because you guys suffer from cold winds from the north and cold streams from the north. :)
You should try living in europe, we don't even need warm coats. Also in the summer you guys have it the opposite, the warm water streams from the south make things very, very warm, in europe we just had a relatively cool summer, nice and non-PCoverheating
Completely off-topic and feeding the troll so I'm AC'ing but here in Trondheim, Norway our Christmas Eve was the warmest on record ever. Ever see those nice pressure spirals on TV? Where air flows down on the left-hand side (assuming northern hemisphere) it gets fucking cold, where air flows up on the right-hand side it gets fucking hot. It pretty much evens out for the planet.
I definitely thought the crop circle was manmade, given the design and the reports that said a group of people were in the area. I thought it was more an independent attention-whore art-prank, though; nor did bells go off in my mind that the Braille "192" meant a 192 core processor either (though it obviously was a processor or circuit board by appearance).
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
This is why we locate all of our datacenters in Iceland. We stay away from Europe because it is very employer unfriendly. Six weeks of vacation and a $15 minimum wage with full health benefits? You can keep it.
... Why would Sony and Microsoft be open? What interest would they have in using a competitor's OS? And creating a completely NEW platform would still be very hard...
The CPU in this has four 32-bit 2.3GHz Cortex A15 cores. A model will come out later with two 64-bit 2.5GHz "Denver" cores -- a CPU of NVidia's own making which they haven't released many details about but their benchmarks show as significantly faster.
When I saw them marketing it as 192 cores I let out a sigh... because these kind of dumb tactics are so expected now.
Well over here in Sweden, we haven't seen such a warm winter in 50 years, there was a tiny dusting of snow in late november, but since then, no snow and frequent above-zero nights. Global warming is *global*, it's the average temperature across the globe, which, believe it or not, is larger than the continental United States or your hometown.
I don't want to be connected to my tv... When im playing a game i also don't want access to anything but the game. And when i do.. I want it on my terms. Not their approved methods and programs. apps...
After doing the rounds of the consoles... I'm more than happy with my PC as my game device. It's easy to upgrade. It can multi-task easily on demand. Or not. Runs far faster and looks far better than any console ever will. Not to mention mouse and keyboard beats the fuck out of sloppy console controls that need aim assist to even come close for most games. And theres still whole styles of games that will NEVER work well without a mouse. And fuck all those games on any system that won't let you remap controls.
Maybe android can make inroads on pc gaming. But i don't see android being for games much beyond stuff like plants vs. zombies point and click type games, the kind of stuff you want on your phone. Quick time killers. Not in depth multi-hour session games. Andorid might hurt the consoles. But after surviving the console wars and choosing the PC.... meh.
Why didn't they give this the code name Roswell?
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
Oh man, maybe I should move. How is the fuck scene, though?
It would have been a lot more interesting if it actually was 192 CPU cores in it. Of course it would be a bit of a challenge to code for it - and to get an efficient OS build for it. But on the other hand it's probably the way that we need to go in order to get more performance in the future.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan
Better be careful with statements like "Practically built by aliens". Nvidia might be getting a visit from immigration control to make sure their aliens are not illegal.
When can I have it in my phone?
How many more GPU cores are needed until computers can auto-correct apostrophes for illiterates?
32bit so games will be cap about 2.5 gb ram and 1gb video ram?
In the Netherlands, on the other hand, we're currently having the mildest winter I can remember.
It's the first year since I was born some 36 years ago without snow or ice.
Typically, temperature would be well below freezing. Right now it's 14C (57F).
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Ironically, it was 56 degrees and raining this morning in upstate NY. It's normally in the 20s or 30s on a high day this time of year.
To begin with, the summary and headline are being misleading - that's 192 GPU "cores" (really ALUs - there's only one scheduler on this entire GPU), so it's already inaccurate. But it's also hardly the first Nvidia chip with 192 "cores".
First Tegra with a 192-core GPU, but it's not their first 192-core GPU. Their first was the GeForce 260, followed by the GeForce GTS 450, GTX550 Ti, GT630, and GT635.
In fact, this is basically a GT630 with a smaller memory interface (64-bit LPDDR3 instead of 128-bit DDR3) and a few power optimizations.
The sad thing is, they don't have to make up bullshit for marketing - they're bringing a full-fledged, full-featured GPU to mobile products, with all the modern features that entails. And even with just one SMX at low clocks, that's still a lot of horsepower - I run Crysis at 1080p on high with just two SMX units (660M). Putting that amount of power into a tablet would be impressive on its own, no lying about "cores" necessary.
I was about to ask the potential scrypt mining power of this thing relative to its cost and power requirements and then I realized it's nVidia.
Forget about it.
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I was misled too. The useless headline is using the same pointless info nVidia presented, because they can't use "CUDA cores".
Global warming is caused by aliens, if you are not covered, I suggest complaint to them directly by going to the nearest crop circle.
In the meantime you can get a bunch of 192-core Tegra K1 chips to heat up your house. You'll need a lot of them though as mobile GPUs tend to have low TDP.
So this was designed in Southern California?
32bit so games will be cap about 2.5 gb ram and 1gb video ram?
What phone has more than that?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
A 5W chip producing 360 gflops. To put that into persective a GeForce 730M, which has the same architecture, but twice as many cores and rated at 556.8 GFLOPS, is a 33W part.
So basically, Nvidia have made Kepler 4 times more efficient with no architecture changes. What magic did they use?
Sure, why not?
That's considerably more than an xbox 360 or ps3, and people are more than happy to play games on those.
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for what 1-2 hours and then the battery dies?
I don't see the original post. Kinda interesting if there never was one. In any case, whatever it's origins, it's a fine example of the use case bigotry genre.
This is the kind of thing frequently heard expressed by a person riding the special-needs short bus—as in, not comprehending the needs of others worth a damn. The longer one lives life the more one realizes that we are all special needs in some dimension, which is why the fascist unification of consumer sentiment sucks ass.
From my perspective, ? what the hell else would you do ? with a $500 television if you subscribe to Telus Optik 50, and you haven't even installed the television modem—as I haven't—because the default content available represents negative value: for every good show one manages to watch, there's an equal amount of cognitive filth to studiously avoid.
Studious avoidance is an expensive activity. Ask any college drop-out. Or read any of the recent science on the will-power muscle, which suggests that the effort expended successfully avoiding the tempting (but awful) TV program is quite likely to show up as inferior decision making later that evening when you juggle your retire savings plan.
I suppose that "Nobody" is just a youthful code word for "Nobody who is anybody" after first screening out the educated, the thoughtful, and the literate in order to better isolate the spending demographic of happening now.
32-bit means only that a single process sees a 32-bit virtual address space. The underlying A15 hardware supports 40-bit physical addresses, so the OS can deal with up to 1TB of RAM, if it wanted to. The only restriction is each process can only see 4GB at a time. The GPU frame-buffer is not mapped into the game processes address space (parts of it may be mapped in to the graphics driver's address space), so your app/game can use 4GB of ram (more or less).
http://www.arm.com/files/downloads/ARMv8_white_paper_v5.pdf talks about the limitiations of this approach and why 64-bit addressing is generally nicer, though
The Tegra 5 is renamed to Tegra K1, but either way Nvidia is the LAST of the big three to merge a true current generation GPU with the CPU cluster. AMD, of course, was the first. Intel finally got round to replacing its atrociously implemented PowerVR GPU licensed from Imagination with its own barely functional integrated solution, that at least, on paper, 'supports' modern GPU functionality.
With the Tegra K1, Nvidia releases its FIRST SoC part with a desktop class GPU. The BIG PROBLEM is who needs it?
The chip is HOT (very, very hot when its units are actually being utilised), and very expensive. The so-called 5Watt power profile is no such thing. 5W refers to power use when the chip is essentially doing little but browsing- switch to AAA gaming mode and power usage goes through the roof. But whether your battery can afford to max out this K1 or not, you still have to pay for the chip, so all that essentially unusable functionality adds to the cost of your device.
Be in no doubt. Mains-powered mobile gaming (yeah, I know that's a contradiction) will be world-beating on the K1. But exactly how big is that market, when most mobile gamers play 'casual' games easily handled by the cheapest of Chinese ARM parts. Meanwhile, as Sony's PS4 and Vita owners have discovered, the BEST path to AAA mobile gaming is to use the handheld as a remote display/input for games otherwise being created on a powerful mains connected console. Such a handheld can, again, simply contain the cheapest of Chinese ARM chips, all of which can easily handle the H264 video streams needed.
What about Chromebooks? Well no Nvidia part (if memory serves) has found its way into that market, and the K1 strengths lie in the wrong direction. The K1 is well under half the performance of AMD's mobile Kaveri, and while it uses far less power, mid-range performance notebooks (even if people were buying notebooks based on Android) need at least Kaveri levels of CPU and GPU performance.
There is a good reason the boss of Nvidia spent so much time wittering on about luxury cars. Nvidia needs such FANTASY markets badly, because the ordinary ARM/Android market is a VERY bad match for Nvidia's coming high-end parts. Nvidia could try to win back Apple's business, but the K1 again is weak in those areas that matter to Apple.
The K1 will follow the disastrous Tegra 4. Nvidia will build its own tablet around the chip, which at the very least will be great value for money. Nvidia will build Shield 2, their mobile platform with the obscenely large battery, but this time few will consider Shield a good option against remote PS4 play on a Vita. Meanwhile the vast ARM market will prefer good enough parts from anyone but Nvidia. Nvidia needs Android for Desktops- a version of Android that offers OSX/XP/Win7 like windows functionality, but there is no sign of Google releasing such a product this year. Nvidia needs SteamOS for ARM, but Valve seems only interested in quite high-end traditional PC solutions.
Nvidia's essential hardcore fan base wanted a new high-end gaming GPU this year, but unlike AMD and Intel, Nvidia doesn't fabricate its own chips, and is at the mercy of an industry increasingly focused on much lower performance mobile chips. At this time, all Nvidia can hope to do is prevent a slow decline from becoming a rapid decline.
Those 'cores' are far more powerful CPU processors than anything we used in the pre-80486 age. The are NOT usually programmed like a traditional CPU, since such a paradigm would give LOUSY performance (see the world's most disastrous CPU/GPU project- the Larrabee- for a textbook example of why you NEVER EVER simply build loads of what a very very dumb person considers 'proper' cores).
You, PhrostyMcByte, are the kind of cretin that causes the Chinese companies to stuff EIGHT useless CPU cores in their newest ARM SoC parts, just so dribblers can say "DUH- my phone has 8 'proper' cores, duh". Meanwhile, everything that runs on that phone only lights up 2 cores, for power and coding reasons.
It gets worse for the dribblers. The GPU architecture of AMD and Nvidia is actually VASTLY more efficient doing most database operations- sorting, searching, indexing- often operating so quickly that the limiting factor is the speed of the memory itself- and remember the GPU has a VASTLY better memory sub-system than even the most expensive solutions from Intel. It is the DUMB, traditional CPU cores that hold back a modern computer, and it is the smart cores of AMD and Nvidia GPUs that allow levels of performance unthinkable only a few years back.
...Beowulf cluster of..... ...oh, nevermind.
That is really smart because Iceland has such a huge talent pool which keeps the wages low.
I really do not see Nvidia making much headway in tablets. After all, most tablet users are fine with the game play they get from those cheap app store games and are not heavy into gaming. Android may be Nvidia's target, but what other target do they have? Not like Apple will suddenly adopt Nvidia chips or that Windows tablets will magically start setting sales records. Nvidia really has to convince not only tablet makers that their chips are worth more. But that generally consumers will also think so. I find that a tough sell to both.
It would have been a lot more interesting if it actually was 192 CPU cores in it.
I'm afraid it probably wouldn't, it would be expensive and pointless. Its virtually impossible to parallelize CPU code to that degree. No matter what you do, creating full fat CPU threads is very expensive just to do a bit of computation, and keeping a bunch of worker threads hanging around waiting for jobs is not only wasteful but just synchronising them is generally slower than starting a job on the GPU. That is why GPU computing is actually useful -- you create the equivalent of threads almost instantaneously, and they have a specialised memory set up (some dedicated per core, some shared) that allows them to work together or individually very efficiently. The GPU cores are of course limited in some senses, but the difference is what makes them useful.
These are CUDA cores. You can program them.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Battery technology could overturn the new approach in less than a year. Unless and until, yeah this is what we've got.
I know - but I still would like to see them provided natively by an OS.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.