New NVIDIA Tesla GPUs Reduce Cost Of Supercomputing By A Factor Of 10

[Benetanegia]

I know this is getting off topic, but what exactly is this?
It comes with CCC suite 9.10.
http://img.techpowerup.org/091116/Capture004.jpg

The free AMD video transcoding application, I guess. In it's first itterations was extremely buggy and useless, because it produced massive artifacts on videos. I have not heard since, so I don't know it it has improved.

PD. I don't even know for sure if it's that TBH.

 

[Zubasa]

The free AMD video transcoding application, I guess. In it's first itterations was extremely buggy and useless, because it produced massive artifacts on videos. I have not heard since, so I don't know it it has improved.

PD. I don't even know for sure if it's that TBH.

Its not that PoS.
I wouldn't touch that Avivo transcoder with a 10 foot pole, don't tempt me

Edit: you temped to download that thing lol
Interesting enough that PoS finally does what it claims to do, it actually loads the GPU @11~17% in pulses.

 

[[H]@RD5TUFF]

You better hope its not Q3 by the way the 40nm yeilds look :shadedshu

Your speaking of the laughable article written by the giant tool Charlie Demerjian ( http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/09/15/nvidia-gt300-yeilds-under-2/ ) even if it is true, it's far from uncommon for early fab results to be poor. It happen to all MC companies ( microcircuitry ) . Years back in 1995 I can remember hearing tell of AMD's K5 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K5 ) processors reaching a all time low fab rate of of 2 out of a 250 fab wafer! Let alone the fact they were basically just reengineered Pentiums . ZOMG that's less than 1% lets write an article about it! Lets continue to the complete lack of creditability and objectivity Charlie Demerjian has. The essence of what I am saying is, he write articles that rarely cite any fact, and contain little more than jaded, pessimistic, and unobjective opinion.

 

[Zubasa]

Your speaking of the laughable article written by the giant tool Charlie Demerjian ( http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/09/15/nvidia-gt300-yeilds-under-2/ ) even if it is true, it's far from uncommon for early fab results to be poor. It happen to all MC companies ( microcircuitry ) . Years back in 1995 I can remember hearing tell of AMD's K5 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K5 ) processors reaching a all time low fab rate of of 2 out of a 250 fab wafer! Let alone the fact they were basically just reengineered Pentiums . ZOMG that's less than 1% lets write an article about it! Lets continue to the complete lack of creditability and objectivity Charlie Demerjian has. The essence of what I am saying is, he write articles that rarely cite any fact, and contain little more than jaded, pessimistic, and unobjective opinion.

I have never read that site to be honest.
It is common sense to know that the 40nm yields are not good, simply by looking at the supply (or the lack) of the 5800 series.

 

[[H]@RD5TUFF]

I have never read that site to be honest.
It is common sense to know that the 40nm yields are not good, simply by looking at the supply (or the lack) of the 5800 series.

The lack of 5800's is due more to the fact AMD's fab / manufacturing, are separate entities / companies, and while it cuts costs, and kept AMD out of bankruptcy. But prevents them from producing their high end products in any large quantities. Hence their budget minded approach to sales, it really isn't a choice, it's all they can do, to keep money in their coffers, and hope to expand come 2012. Their other choice is to try to compete directly with intel, and fade even faster into irrelevance, well faster than they are now anyway.

 

[Zubasa]

The lack of 5800's is due more to the fact AMD's fab / manufacturing, are separate entities / companies, and while it cuts costs, and kept AMD out of bankruptcy. But prevents them from producing their high end products in any large quantities. Hence their budget minded approach to sales, it really isn't a choice, it's all they can do, to keep money in their coffers, and hope to expand come 2012. Their other choice is to try to compete directly with intel, and fade even faster into irrelevance, well faster than they are now anyway.

First of all, AMD don't own any Fabs anymore, and their Graphics were never manufactured in their Fabs.

It is TSMC that makes their graphics chips, and it is the same comapny that makes graphics chips for nVidia.
The actual cards are make by their AIBs, companies like Sapphire (PC Partner) are the ones that actually make the cards.

AMD is a fabless company just like nVidia is now.
Globalfoundries and their Fabs were never invloved.

What can be tell from this is, the Fermi's larger die size won't make their yields any better than the Cypress.
So unless TSMC gets their yields up, don't expect a sufficient supply of Fermi(s).

 

[W1zzard]

This is proof there is a gt300. So where is our desktop cards huh nvidia?

proof that they took a photo of something and wrote a press release
edit: it's not even a photo .. it's rendered not

The card can use up to 1TB of system memory?

afaik it means that the gpu architecture is able to address up to 1 tb of memory .. like 32-bit -> 64-bit

 

[PP Mguire]

I just read q2 and thats when most all of us are expecting 300. Guess i shoulda read a little more Me -><- me

 

[3volvedcombat]

wow they finnaly HAVE A WORKING MODEL OF THERE NEW CORE THIS MEANS THAT HOPEFULLY THE WORLD WILL SEE SOME FERMI SLAPED INTO THE WORLD >.<.

*ATI Lol's while they release HD 5870x2 and have all the shares on there highest end series while everybody goes broke for shiat*

 

[erocker]

The free AMD video transcoding application, I guess. In it's first itterations was extremely buggy and useless, because it produced massive artifacts on videos. I have not heard since, so I don't know it it has improved.

PD. I don't even know for sure if it's that TBH.

I use it all the time for YouTube stuff. MPEG-2 720p works great, since 9.8's anyways.

 

[kid41212003]

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showpost.php?p=1638012&postcount=14

The ratio between single and double precision performance is ~0.083
And :

• Double precision performance in the range of 520GFlops - 630 GFlops

No one surprise that this card single precision performance is ~4.7 TFLOPS!? (570GFLOPS*0.083)

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showpost.php?p=1638260&postcount=114

And HD5970 has the same compute performance!

>.>

 

[PP Mguire]

With 2 GPUs. I think somebody is BSing somewhere.

 

[Benetanegia]

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showpost.php?p=1638012&postcount=14

The ratio between single and double precision performance is ~0.083
And :

No one surprise that this card single precision performance is ~4.7 TFLOPS!? (570GFLOPS*0.083)

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showpost.php?p=1638260&postcount=114

And HD5970 has the same compute performance!

>.>

The ratio in Fermi is 0.5, so these Tesla cards will have 1040-1260 single precision Gflops. Don't let the "low" number fool you anyway, these Fermi cards will trounce the Ati cards when it comes to general computing.

Don't let the numbers fool you in comparison to GTX285 or Ati cards either, GTX285 numbers are based on dual-issue, something that was never usable, real FP was more like 650 Gflops on the GTX285. Nvidia/Ati Gflops numbers don't correlate either, if 650 Gflps GTX285 is still significantly faster than the 1360 Gflops HD4890, the Fermi with 1260 is going to be significantly faster than the 2700 GFlops HD5870. Tesla cards are usually underclocked in comparison to desktop GPUs AFAIK, so this 520-630 DP numbers on the teslas could be the testimony of the power of the GTX380.

 

[Zubasa]

The ratio in Fermi is 0.5, so these Tesla cards will have 1040-1260 single precision Gflops. Don't let the "low" number fool you anyway, these Fermi cards will trounce the Ati cards when it comes to general computing.

Don't let the numbers fool you in comparison to GTX285 or Ati cards either, GTX285 numbers are based on dual-issue, something that was never usable, real FP was more like 650 Gflops on the GTX285. Nvidia/Ati Gflops numbers don't correlate either, if 650 Gflps GTX285 is still significantly faster than the 1360 Gflops HD4890, the Fermi with 1260 is going to be significantly faster than the 2700 GFlops HD5870. Tesla cards are usually underclocked in comparison to desktop GPUs AFAIK, so this 520-630 DP numbers on the teslas could be the testimony of the power of the GTX380.

We don't know what kind of architechure the Fermi is built on anayways.
It is still too early to say before we even see a Engineering Sample in action.

If nVidia somehow and for some reason go for a SIMD architecture, the theoretical limit will sky rocket just like the RV7X0.
All we have are some vague numbers that doesn't mean too much yet.

It is well possible that the Fermi is more optimized in GPGPU than its predecessors, afterall this is where the big bucks are.
I am more interested in the Graphics performance of a GPU, but this thread is about the new Tesla so I guess I am off topic.

 

[@RaXxaa@]

Way too overpriced, sure its godd but for gaming seriously i would never pay couple of Gs for a GPU... Sure even in crysis some tesla gives maybe 350 fps but plzz i would buy a gpu that can just give me 35 fps thats it good enough gaming for me

 

[Yukikaze]

Way too overpriced, sure its godd but for gaming seriously i would never pay couple of Gs for a GPU... Sure even in crysis some tesla gives maybe 350 fps but plzz i would buy a gpu that can just give me 35 fps thats it good enough gaming for me

Of course, Tesla GPUs have nothing to do with gaming.

 

[Benetanegia]

We don't know what kind of architechure the Fermi is built on anayways.
It is still too early to say before we even see a Engineering Sample in action.
If nVidia somehow and for some reason go for a SIMD architecture, the theoretical limit will sky rocket just like the RV7X0.

We do know the architecture. White papers have been out for long, architecture is more scalar than it ever was. Nvidia has always used SIMD architecture anyway, but they have not used 5 ALU wide VLIW shader processors. That's the biggest lie AMD has ever made, they have really only 160 SPs on the RV770. That's the "problem" in Ati cards, the effective Gflops on the HD4870 ranges between 1200 and 240 Gflops single precision because of that, depending on how many ALUs-per-SP can be used in a certain scenario. In a general computing application you will be closer to the low end and that's why in F@H you can see Nvidia cards topping out Ati cards that are suposed to be much faster.

 

[Zubasa]

We do know the architecture. White papers have been out for long, architecture is more scalar than it ever was. Nvidia has always used SIMD architecture anyway, but they have not used 5 ALU wide VLIW shader processors. That's the biggest lie AMD has ever made, they have really only 160 SPs on the RV770. That's the "problem" in Ati cards, the effective Gflops on the HD4870 ranges between 1200 and 240 Gflops single precision because of that, depending on how many ALUs-per-SP can be used in a certain scenario. In a general computing application you will be closer to the low end and that's why in F@H you can see Nvidia cards topping out Ati cards that are suposed to be much faster.

Well the Shader processor count is more marketing than anything.
The thing is out of 100 people, how many know what a "5 ALU wide VLIW SP" means?
Very very few companies are totally honest in marketing.
White paper tells you what a product is suppose to do, but it won't tell you how exactly it executes them in the hardware level.
The specific design of the chip is worth millions if not billions of dollars.

Since you mentioned the GTX380, GPGPU performance don't directly transfers to gamming performance.

 

[HalfAHertz]

We do know the architecture. White papers have been out for long, architecture is more scalar than it ever was. Nvidia has always used SIMD architecture anyway, but they have not used 5 ALU wide VLIW shader processors. That's the biggest lie AMD has ever made, they have really only 160 SPs on the RV770. That's the "problem" in Ati cards, the effective Gflops on the HD4870 ranges between 1200 and 240 Gflops single precision because of that, depending on how many ALUs-per-SP can be used in a certain scenario. In a general computing application you will be closer to the low end and that's why in F@H you can see Nvidia cards topping out Ati cards that are suposed to be much faster.

You're trying to compare the SPs to x86 cores, and the two are obviously not compatible...If you do indeed want to do so, you must at least say that those 800 "cores" consist of 160 phisical and 640 logical ones. And that would still be wrong because you don't have a dedicated pipeline that has to be filled for a second or third tread to be inserted...You can still run 800 "threads" on them as long as your software is coded properly.

It's not Ati's fault the F@H team can't put their thinking caps on and write a half-decent client program...

 

[wolf]

Yum Yum Fermi, if this is going to be the length of the GeForce card, watch out ATi, 13.5 inches of Dual GPU to to toe to toe with this slim baby.

 

[vaiopup]

It's not Ati's fault the F@H team can't put their thinking caps on and write a half-decent client program...

They've had long enough

 

[Benetanegia]

You're trying to compare the SPs to x86 cores, and the two are obviously not compatible...If you do indeed want to do so, you must at least say that those 800 "cores" consist of 160 phisical and 640 logical ones. And that would still be wrong because you don't have a dedicated pipeline that has to be filled for a second or third tread to be inserted...You can still run 800 "threads" on them as long as your software is coded properly.

It's not Ati's fault the F@H team can't put their thinking caps on and write a half-decent client program...

Nope that's the case. There's only 160 pipelines, so you can have 160 threads feeding those 800 "cores" as long as the program can pack them together in an VLIW instruction, but it's not exactly the same and requires a lot of anticipation, not always posible. In fact almost never posible.

I'm not compating the SPs to x86 cores in any way, I don't know how did you come up to that conclusion.

Because of the VLIW nature of the SPs you could potentially make an engine that only works with 5 wide VLIW instructions and then you could potentially fill all the "cores", but that engine would not work on Nvidia cards or pre R600 Ati cards, not to mention it would not be profitable to do so and DirectX has no such functionality so you would have to make your engine entirely on HLSL. Still filling the 5 ALUs with something relevant to do would be very very difficult.

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/03/18/HeterogeneousComputingUsingGPGPUsAMDATIRV770.aspx

Unlike NVidia’s design which executes 1 instruction per thread, each SP on the RV770 executes packed 5-wide VLIW-style instructions. For graphics and visualization workloads, floating point intensity is high enough to average about 4.2 useful operations per cycle. On dense data parallel operations (ex. dense matrix multiply), all 5 ALUs can easily be used.

From this information, we can see that when people are talking about 800 “shader cores” or “threads” or “streaming processors”, they are actually referring to the 10*16*5 = 800 xyzwt ALUs. This can be confusing, because there are really only 160 simultaneous instruction pipelines.

On general computing you will not see that typical usage of 4.2 and will be closer to 1 most times than not and hence the real Gflops on the Ati cards with this design is 1/5th or 2/5th of the peak throughoutput.

Also when a special function must be calculated you loose one of those ALUs (the fat one) for many clocks (probably you loose the entire SP), whereas the Nvidia card can do both the SF and the ALU operation and this is not the famous dual-issue, it can always be done as long as the SF function and the thread being executed in the ALUs were issued in a different clock.

 

[Hayder_Master]

cheap

 

[HalfAHertz]

Nope that's the case. There's only 160 pipelines, so you can have 160 threads feeding those 800 "cores" as long as the program can pack them together in an VLIW instruction, but it's not exactly the same and requires a lot of anticipation, not always posible. In fact almost never posible.

I'm not compating the SPs to x86 cores in any way, I don't know how did you come up to that conclusion.

Because of the VLIW nature of the SPs you could potentially make an engine that only works with 5 wide VLIW instructions and then you could potentially fill all the "cores", but that engine would not work on Nvidia cards or pre R600 Ati cards, not to mention it would not be profitable to do so and DirectX has no such functionality so you would have to make your engine entirely on HLSL. Still filling the 5 ALUs with something relevant to do would be very very difficult.

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/03/18/HeterogeneousComputingUsingGPGPUsAMDATIRV770.aspx





On general computing you will not see that typical usage of 4.2 and will be closer to 1 most times than not and hence the real Gflops on the Ati cards with this design is 1/5th or 2/5th of the peak throughoutput.

Also when a special function must be calculated you loose one of those ALUs (the fat one) for many clocks (probably you loose the entire SP), whereas the Nvidia card can do both the SF and the ALU operation and this is not the famous dual-issue, it can always be done as long as the SF function and the thread being executed in the ALUs were issued in a different clock.

For graphics and visualization workloads, floating point intensity is high enough to average about 4.2 useful operations per cycle

I don't want to derail the toppic, but on general computing, you will see the benefit if you're using the simpler single precision calculations, you may not see the benefit if you are using double tho.

Also, both NVidia and AMD use symmetric single issue streaming multiprocessor architectures, so branches are handled very differently from CPUs.

You were right here tho. There is a single pipeline but it doesn't hve to be flooded for a second thread to be loaded!

That was a really insightful article, thanks. Still what I was trying to say was that if there's a will, there's always a way. As you said it yourself, you need to code specifically for ati's architecture and that could mean a seperate executable. I'm not saying that game companies should invest their own time and money to code a game specifically for ati users, no they shoudn't. If ati wants to have better support for their cards, they should sponsor game manufacturers just like nvidia does. Still there is nothing stopping a non-profit organisation like F@H to actually try and use all that computing power avaible to them...

 

[Benetanegia]

I don't want to derail the toppic, but on general computing, you will see the benefit if you're using the simpler single precision calculations, you may not see the benefit if you are using double tho.

That depends entirely on how linear* the code is. On graphics you can always use most of the shaders, because data is parallel enough as well as istruction type is parallel enough. In general computing is quite the oposite and although the chip might be able to run all that code in parallel in theory, aka there's no physical limitation onto it, there is a limitation in the code itself, and not because of the lack of optimization, but because of the nature of the code, because of the self dependencies. A lot has been discussed on the CPUs about this too, that the programers are lazy in not implemeting their code for multi-cores, but reality is that a lot of code simply can't be split into many threads.

A lot can be said about a bus with 50 seats being a more efficient and powerful way of transportation than a mini-bus with 12 seats, but if your working flow is go to town A -> take up 10 people -> go to B -> 10 people down/another 10 up -> go to C -> 10 leave/10 up and so on, your 50 seat bus is much less efficient than the mini-bus, and there's very little you can do about that. And there's very little the passengers (=software) can do on their front too.

* I'm talking about the ILP (Instruction Level Parallelism) and TLP (Thread level) both at the same time. Ati architecture needs both to be effective (because SIMD+VLIW) and that's a luxury you will not find in general computing quite often.