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
ECC Support
AMD's Radeon HD 5870 can detect errors on the memory bus, but it can't correct them. The register file, L1 cache, L2 cache and DRAM all have full ECC support in Fermi. This is one of those Tesla-specific features.
Many Tesla customers won't even talk to NVIDIA about moving their algorithms to GPUs unless NVIDIA can deliver ECC support. The scale of their installations is so large that ECC is absolutely necessary (or at least perceived to be).
Unified 64-bit Memory Addressing
In previous architectures there was a different load instruction depending on the type of memory: local (per thread), shared (per group of threads) or global (per kernel). This created issues with pointers and generally made a mess that programmers had to clean up.
Fermi unifies the address space so that there's only one instruction and the address of the memory is what determines where it's stored. The lowest bits are for local memory, the next set is for shared and then the remainder of the address space is global.
The unified address space is apparently necessary to enable C++ support for NVIDIA GPUs, which Fermi is designed to do.
The other big change to memory addressability is in the size of the address space. G80 and GT200 had a 32-bit address space, but next year NVIDIA expects to see Tesla boards with over 4GB of GDDR5 on board. Fermi now supports 64-bit addresses but the chip can physically address 40-bits of memory, or 1TB. That should be enough for now.
Both the unified address space and 64-bit addressing are almost exclusively for the compute space at this point. Consumer graphics cards won't need more than 4GB of memory for at least another couple of years. These changes were painful for NVIDIA to implement, and ultimately contributed to Fermi's delay, but necessary in NVIDIA's eyes.
New ISA Changes Enable DX11, OpenCL and C++, Visual Studio Support
Now this is cool. NVIDIA is announcing Nexus (no, not the thing from Star Trek Generations) a visual studio plugin that enables hardware debugging for CUDA code in visual studio. You can treat the GPU like a CPU, step into functions, look at the state of the GPU all in visual studio with Nexus. This is a huge step forward for CUDA developers.
Nexus running in Visual Studio on a CUDA GPU
Simply enabling DX11 support is a big enough change for a GPU - AMD had to go through that with RV870. Fermi implements a wide set of changes to its ISA, primarily designed at enabling C++ support. Virtual functions, new/delete, try/catch are all parts of C++ and enabled on Fermi.
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SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Nice consolation speech.I guess you expected " you're right ", but somehow lying to make you feel good is not in my playbook.
Now, next time you don't take it so seriously as to reply, and then still, be pathetic enough to get it wrong. Hows that for a fun deal ?
Maian - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Where's snakeoil when you need him... I don't give a shit about vendor, but the flame wars here are hilarious :DLifted - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
What flame war? It's just a single nut barking at everyone for no reason. If he has a problem with the article he's sure making it difficult to figure out what it is with all his carrying on and red rooster nonsense.Does anyone (besides the nut) actually care what is said in this article? It's simply something to pass the time with, and certainly not worth getting upset over. Is the nut part of the nvidia marketing machine or merely a troll? It almost seems as if he's writing in a manner as to cover up his true identity. Yes silicondoc, it IS that obvious.
SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Wow, a conspiracist.Well, for your edification, you didn't score any points, since the readers here get all uppity about what's in the articles, so they have shown a propensity to care, even if you're just here to pass the time, or lie your yapper off for the convenient line it provides you for this momment.
Usually, the last stab of the sinking pirate goes something it like: " It doesn't matter !"
Then Davey Jones proves to 'em it does.
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Nice try, but the worst problem for you is, it matters so much to you, you think I'm not me. NOW THAT's FUNNY !
ahhahahahaaha
ClownPuncher - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Aspbergers.Kaleid - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
No, most people with Asperger's are highly functional. This is something else.Finally - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
It's Rain Man?tamalero - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
its assburgers, google it.redpriest_ - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
I can't help but note for the record that um, the card isn't out yet, so how can they win when no one knows when you can actually buy one yet? And for the record, I have a 5870 in my system, right now, that can play games....right now. I went to a retail store and bought it. That's how simple it was. I know you've been posting tons of FUD in the other review forums about how it's unavailable etc etc but the fact is, it IS available, and multiple people can own one.Also, let me state for the record that I have owned nvidia GPUs in the past so that I'm vendor agnostic. I buy whatever solution is available and better. KEY POINTS: AVAILABLE. BETTER.
SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Here's how they can win, here the NVidia master holds FERMI up for all to see !http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15762/1/">http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15762/1/
Aww, dat too bad for the wittle wed woosters. It really is real, little red lying hoods.