NVIDIA's Fermi: Architected for Tesla, 3 Billion Transistors in 2010
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The RV770 Lesson (or The GT200 Story)
It took NVIDIA a while to give us an honest response to the RV770. At first it was all about CUDA and PhsyX. RV770 didn't have it, so we shouldn't be recommending it; that was NVIDIA's stance.
Today, it's much more humble.
Ujesh is wiling to take total blame for GT200. As manager of GeForce at the time, Ujesh admitted that he priced GT200 wrong. NVIDIA looked at RV670 (Radeon HD 3870) and extrapolated from that to predict what RV770's performance would be. Obviously, RV770 caught NVIDIA off guard and GT200 was priced much too high.
Ujesh doesn't believe NVIDIA will make the same mistake with Fermi.
Jonah, unwilling to let Ujesh take all of the blame, admitted that engineering was partially at fault as well. GT200 was the last chip NVIDIA ever built at 65nm - there's no excuse for that. The chip needed to be at 55nm from the get-go, but NVIDIA had been extremely conservative about moving to new manufacturing processes too early.
It all dates back to NV30, the GeForce FX. It was a brand new architecture on a bleeding edge manufacturing process, 130nm at the time, which ultimately lead to its delay. ATI pulled ahead with the 150nm Radeon 9700 Pro and NVIDIA vowed never to make that mistake again.
With NV30, NVIDIA was too eager to move to new processes. Jonah believes that GT200 was an example of NVIDIA swinging too far in the other direction; NVIDIA was too conservative.
The biggest lesson RV770 taught NVIDIA was to be quicker to migrate to new manufacturing processes. Not NV30 quick, but definitely not as slow as GT200. Internal policies are now in place to ensure this.
Architecturally, there aren't huge lessons to be learned from RV770. It was a good chip in NVIDIA's eyes, but NVIDIA isn't adjusting their architecture in response to it. NVIDIA will continue to build beefy GPUs and AMD appears committed to building more affordable ones. Both companies are focused on building more efficiently.
Of Die Sizes and Transitions
Fermi and Cypress are both built on the same 40nm TSMC process, yet they differ by nearly 1 billion transistors. Even the first generation Larrabee will be closer in size to Cypress than Fermi, and it's made at Intel's state of the art 45nm facilities.
What you're seeing is a significant divergence between the graphics companies, one that I expect will continue to grow in the near term.
NVIDIA's architecture is designed to address its primary deficiency: the company's lack of a general purpose microprocessor. As such, Fermi's enhancements over GT200 address that issue. While Fermi will play games, and NVIDIA claims it will do so better than the Radeon HD 5870, it is designed to be a general purpose compute machine.
ATI's approach is much more cautious. While Cypress can run DirectX Compute and OpenCL applications (the former faster than any NVIDIA GPU on the market today), ATI's use of transistors was specifically targeted to run the GPU's killer app today: 3D games.
Intel's take is the most unique. Both ATI and NVIDIA have to support their existing businesses, so they can't simply introduce a revolutionary product that sacrifices performance on existing applications for some lofty, longer term goal. Intel however has no discrete GPU business today, so it can.
Larrabee is in rough shape right now. The chip is buggy, the first time we met it it wasn't healthy enough to even run a 3D game. Intel has 6 - 9 months to get it ready for launch. By then, the Radeon HD 5870 will be priced between $299 - $349, and Larrabee will most likely slot in $100 - $150 cheaper. Fermi is going to be aiming for the top of the price brackets.
The motivation behind AMD's "sweet spot" strategy wasn't just die size, it was price. AMD believed that by building large, $600+ GPUs, it didn't service the needs of the majority of its customers quickly enough. It took far too long to make a $199 GPU from a $600 one - quickly approaching a year.
Clearly Fermi is going to be huge. NVIDIA isn't disclosing die sizes, but if we estimate that a 40% higher transistor count results in a 40% larger die area then we're looking at over 467mm^2 for Fermi. That's smaller than GT200 and about the size of G80; it's still big.
I asked Jonah if that meant Fermi would take a while to move down to more mainstream pricepoints. Ujesh stepped in and said that he thought I'd be pleasantly surprised once NVIDIA is ready to announce Fermi configurations and price points. If you were NVIDIA, would you say anything else?
Jonah did step in to clarify. He believes that AMD's strategy simply boils down to targeting a different price point. He believes that the correct answer isn't to target a lower price point first, but rather build big chips efficiently. And build them so that you can scale to different sizes/configurations without having to redo a bunch of stuff. Putting on his marketing hat for a bit, Jonah said that NVIDIA is actively making investments in that direction. Perhaps Fermi will be different and it'll scale down to $199 and $299 price points with little effort? It seems doubtful, but we'll find out next year.
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SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Jeezus, you're just that bright, aren't you.The article is dated September 19th, and "they scored a picture" from another website, that "scored a picture".
Our friendly reviewer herer at AT had the cards in his hands, on the bench, IRL.
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I mean you have like no clue at all, don't you.
palladium - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
I agree. GPGPU has come a long way, but it's still in its infancy, at least in the consumer space (Badaboom and AVIVO both had bugs).I just want a card that can play Crysis all very high 19x12 4xAA @60fps. Maybe a dual-GPU GT300 can deliver that.
wumpus - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
First first reaction after reading that the cost of double multiply would be twice that of a single was "great. Half the transistors will be sitting there idle during games." Sure, this isn't meant to be a toy, but it looks like they have given up the desktop graphics to AMD (and whenever Intel gets something working). Maybe they will get volume up enough to lower the price, but there are only so many chips TMSC can make that size.On second thought, those little green squares can't take up half the chip. Any guess what part of the squares are multiplies? Is the cost of fast double point something like 10% of the transistors idle during single (games)? On the gripping hand, makes the claim that "All of the processing done at the core level is now to IEEE spec. That’s IEEE-754 2008 for floating point math (same as RV870/5870)". If they seriously mean that they are prepared to include all rounding, all exceptions, and all the ugly, hairy corner cases that inhabit IEEE-754, wait for Juniper. I really mean it. If you are doing real numerical computing you need IEEE-754. If you don't (like you just want a real framerate from Crysis for once) avoid it like the plague.
Sorry about the rant. Came for the beef on doubles, but noticed that quote when checking the article. Looks like we'll need some real information about what "core level at IEEE-754" means on different processors. Who provides all the rounding modes, and what parts get emulated slowly? [side note. Is anybody with a 5870 able to test underflow in OpenCL? You might find out a huge amount about your chip with a single test].
SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
I think I'll stick with the giant profitables greens proven track record, not your e-weened redspliferous dissing.Did you watch the NV live webcast @ 1pm EST ?
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Nvidia is the only gpu company with OBE BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR IN R&D.
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That's correct, nvidia put into research on the Geforce, the whoile BILLION ati loses selling their crappy cheap hot cores on weaker thinner pcb with near zero extra features only good for very high rez, which DOESN'T MATCH the cheapo budget pinching purchasrs who buy red to save 5-10 bang for bucks...--
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Now about that marketing scheme ?
LOL
Ati plays to high rez wins, but has the cheapo card, expecting $2,000 monitor owners to pinch pennies.
"great marketing" ati...
LOL
PorscheRacer - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Just so you know, ATI is a seperate division in AMD (the graphics side obviously) and did post earnings this year. ATI is keeping the CPU side of AMD afloat in all intents and purposes. Is there a way to ban or block you? I was excited to read about the GF300 and expecting some good comments and discussion about this, and then you wrecked the experience. Now I just don't care.Adul - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
silicon idiot is doing more harm than good. please ban himSiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
The truth is a good thing, even if you're so used to lies that you don't like it.I guess it's good too, that so many people have tried so hard to think of a rebuttal to any or of all my points, and they don't have one, yet.
Isn't that wonderful ! You fit that category, too.
SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Do you think yhour LIES will pass with no backup ?" A.M.D. has struggled for two years to return to profitability, losing billions of dollars in the process.
A.M.D., the No. 2 maker of computer microprocessors after Intel, lost $330 million, or 49 cents a share, in the second quarter. In the same period last year, it lost $1.2 billion, or $1.97 a share.
Excluding one-time gains, A.M.D. says its loss was 62 cents a share. On that basis, analysts had predicted a loss of 47 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters. Sales fell to $1.18 billion, down 13 percent. Analysts were expecting $1.13 billion."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/technology/compa...">http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/technology/compa...
ATI card sales did increase a bit, but LOST MONEY anyway. More than expected.
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PS I'm not sorry I've ruined your fantasy and expsoed your lie. If you keep lying, should you be banned for it ?
PorscheRacer - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/07/intel...">http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/20...-graphic...Again, the graphics group of AMD turned a profit (albeit a small one after R&D and costs) while the other divisions lost money.
SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
LOL- YOU'VE SIMPLY LIED AGAIN, AND PROVIDED A LINK, THAT CONFIRMS YOU LIED.It must be tough being such a slumbag.
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" After the channel stopped ordering GPUs and depleted inventory in anticipation of a long drawn out worldwide recession in Q3 and Q4 of 2008, expectations were hopeful, if not high that Q1’09 would change for the better. In fact, Q1 showed improvement but it was less than expected, or hoped. Instead, Q2 was a very good quarter for vendors – counter to normal seasonality – but then these are hardly normal times.
Things probably aren't going to get back to the normal seasonality till Q3 or Q4 this year, and we won't hit the levels of 2008 until 2010."
As you should have a clue, noting, 2008 was bad, and they can't even reach that pathetic crash until 2010.
An increase in sales from a recent prior full on disaster decrease, is still less than the past, is low in the present, and is " A LOSS " PERIOD.
You don't provide text because NOTHING at your link claims what you've said, you are simply a big fat LIAR.
Thanks for the link anyway, that links my link:
http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/amd-so...">http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/det...ntel-and...
This is a great quote: " We still believe there will be an impact from the stimulus programs worldwide "
LOL
hahahhha - just as I kept supposing.
" -Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry's research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia"
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NOTHING, AT either link, describes a profit for ati graphics, PERIOD.
Try again mr liar.