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NVIDIA Unveils Tesla V100 AI Accelerator Powered By 5120 CUDA Core Volta GPU (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang just offered the first public unveiling of a product based on the company's next generation GPU architecture, codenamed Volta. NVIDIA just announced its new Tesla V100 accelerator that's designed for AI and machine learning applications, and at the heart of the Tesla V100 is NVIDIA's Volta GV100 GPU. The chip features a 21.1 billion transistors on a die that measures 815mm2 (compared to 12 billion transistors and 610mm2 respectively for the previous gen Pascal GP100). The GV100 is built on a 12nm FinFET manufacturing process by TSMC. It is comprised of 5,120 CUDA cores with a boost clock of 1455MHz, compared to 3585 CUDA cores for the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and previous gen Tesla P100 AI accelerator, for example. The new Volta GPU delivers 15 TFLOPS FP32 compute performance and 7.5 TFLOPS of FP64 compute performance. Also on board is 16MB of cache and 16GB of second generation High Bandwidth (HBM2) memory with 900GB/sec of bandwidth via a 4096-bit interface. The GV100 also has dedicated Tensor cores (640 in total) accelerating AI workloads. NVIDIA notes the dedicated Tensor cores also allow for a 12x uplift in deep learning performance compared to Pascal, which relies solely on its CUDA cores. NVIDIA is targeting a Q3 2017 release for the Tesla V100 with Volta, but the timetable for a GeForce derivative family of consumer graphics cards has has not been disclosed.
Where you see shame, I see honour and respect. It took generations for the public to learn the truth about his genius and tragedy. What better historical revenge than to slap HIS name on all the best and brightest things mankind creates with electricity? I can't think of a more just legacy. I think if science were to resurrect him, we would see tears of joy as the world lovingly respects his discoveries and hard work.
There does come a time though later in their production cycle where the production line begins to be well tuned and provides a high yield of pro level chips that surpasses the demand for those chips, in that case the vendor just sets the core count to what is required and ships to match demand.
No real ill intent here just good business practice, you are paying for what is promised to you, and if you find a way to re-enable the extra hardware so be it. This was done in many quadro/geforce cards in the past.
I am a figment of my own imagination.
Having a unit of measurement named after you by the scientific community is quite enough honour and respect, and it sure beats having a corporation trying to make an extra buck by exploiting your name (and posthumous fame) for an ephemeral product line, without your consent.
Besides, do you really think that the marketing oils at Nvidia sat in a conference room asking themselves: “Guys, what deserving hero could we possibly honour with this product?”, rather than: “What name is likely to strike a fancy within our target demographics? Lightning? Magnetos? Hey, how about Tesla? Yeah, it worked for Musk!”
You are actually applying a lot of ill intent here where they are just using a standard business practice among both GPU and CPU companies. The majority of the chips come from the same production line. Chips that fail QA on a certain % of their CUDA cores are "binned down" to consumer level chips. This allow them to recoup costs and provide an adequate supply of pro chips while keeping prices relatively low.
Well there's certainly that from the supply side, but they're hardly that innocent. Every company tries to create products that make sure the people who can afford it pick that product and not a cheaper one. The classic quote on this is Dupuit (1849):
It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches... What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fee from travelling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich... And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class customers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.
This is how you choose to not include some feature like Intel's missing consumer ECC support - which apparently AMD can afford to include, so clearly it's not that expensive - simply so the right pick people pick the "right" product. You can certainly claim some of this is for cost saving on the bill of materials or validation cost, but that's often just part of the reason or simply an excuse.
A smart company also doesn't want to create their own Osborne effect even if their performance comes more in leaps and bounds. Money comes from having a constant supply of product that's always better than the last one, if your performance would be like 100% -> 130% -> 130% -> 130% you can probably gouge out more money doing 100% -> 120% -> 125% -> 130% even if you're artificially putting the handbrake on. Like for example how they release hardcover books first, or show movies exclusively in the cinema for the first months... it's a way to forcibly upsell the fans, even though you'd gladly read a paperback or watch it on your own TV.
Or simply scale down the size of chips and deliver a 5% performance increase for a much cheaper cost, like Intel's been doing when AMD has been out of the high end market. It's not always you want to give the market more, just because technology improves. I know our Telco was really holding out on rolling out DSL because they made more money keeping people on pay-per-minute PSTN/ISDN lines. If you have a captive/loyal customer group they can make more money doing less. There's lots of tricks you can pull off in the border area between product design and economics to maximize profit. Capitalism isn't about serving the customer, that's an occasional side effect of making profit. Never forget that.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
When I got my first CUDA card, my Seti@home totals over 7 years doubled in two weeks. My next upgrade redoubled all that in three months.
This would redouble all that in days. I concluded there was little need to sweat working on it all along because doing nothing all those years, then buying one of these, say, would only put you a week or two behind where you'd otherwise be
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
These are co-processors. Basically entire second computers added alongside the primary. GPU functions are only a minor part of their capabilities. It's like calling my mobile device a "phone" because it has one app called "Phone" which I use twice a year.
Does no one remember when installing a match co-processor in your PC was the new hotness? This is the same thing!