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NVIDIA Announces the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Graphics Card at $699

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Now imagine a lopsided memory chip with just 3 locations. You will still need to build the infrastructure for 4 addresses into the chip, since the top bit is still being set, ie value 2 (10 binary) with the top address of 3 (11 binary) pointing nowhere and likely having to be masked off to avoid a crash. Hence the chip will still take the same number of transistors as if it had 4 locations, but not actually have that extra location in it and therefore the chip will not be an optimal design. Of course, what you get back is that the extra circuitry for the 4th location is missing, saving space, hence making for a compromise.
No memory controller works the way you describes.
For starters, the memory controllers on GPUs have all power of 2 address space as I've said a number of times already, how hard is this to understand?
But for the hypothetical scenario where 3 out of 4 memory slots i occupied, the memory controller will never check if a memory address is inside the range on read/write, that would be too costly anyway. The whole "problem" is solved on allocation of memory (which is costly anyway, and done very rarely compared to read/write), and the only thing to check then is whether the memory address is above the maximum size, so the problem you describes doesn't exist.

Just to illustrate how wrong you are, I checked two of the machines I'm running here;
i7-3930K, 46-bit controller, 65536 GB (64 TB) theoretical physical address space, but the CPU is "limited" to 64 GB.
i5-4690K, 39-bit controller, 512 GB theoretical physical address space, but the CPU is "limited" to 32 GB.
(This is fetched directly from the CPU's cpuid instruction, so it's what the OS sees and is guaranteed to be correct)

You have a similar situation regardless of what you're addressing, whether it's CUDA units and the number of bits they each handle in a GPU, or the number of CUDA units in the GPU, or whatever aspect of a digital circuit.
Number of bits of what? Data bus? Memory bus? Register width?
If you look at GPU architectures you'll see that most of then don't have a core count which adds up to a power of 2, like 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, etc. Just scroll through here and here, that power of 2 is more the exception than the rule.

The problem in the real world of course, is that building a perfect power of 2 chip causes the number of transistors and physical size of that chip to double each time it's expanded, ie to grow exponentially which is unsustainable.
The term "a perfect power of 2 chip" doesn't make any sense.

The 970 memory issue came about, because NVIDIA nibbled a bit off the GPU, giving rise to a compartmentalized memory addressing design, where they chose to use slow RAM for that last 500MB, but didn't declare it, leading to this scandal.

When I saw that the 1080 Ti with its weird 11GB RAM and crippled GPU, it brought back to me that NVIDIA could potentially have the same design issue…
The GTX 970 "issue" was that two memory chips shared one 32-bit controller, while the others didn't, creating an address space where some of it was slower without the allocator taking this into account. Power of 2 had absolutely nothing to do with it.

If GTX 1080 Ti were to do the same thing it would have to do 12 memory chips on 11 controllers, which we know it doesn't, so we know it can't happen. If you still think it's a problem, then you're having a problem understanding how processors and memory work.

Oh and you asked for it - check my sig! :p
Your avatar is cool though.
 
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We've seen 1.5GB, 3GB, and 6GB but, yeah, that 11GB still looks especially odd. Maybe because it's doesn't follow any previous multiple, power of two or otherwise; 1.5GB was an odd configuration back when Nvidia's 5xx line came out but we're used to it and its multiples now. I'm pretty that some other manufacturer (Palit, MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS, etc.) will release a GTX 1080 Ti 12GB version sooner or later since it's one of the few things they can muck around with (maybe even a 16GB version but that's probably pushing it). Regardless of VRAM configuration, I wonder if the performance of the GTX 1080 Ti over that of Titan X Pascal will affect the Titan line down the road. Maybe we'd all get used to it like Intel's top-of-the-line HEDT CPUs that cost 1K USD since I see parallels with it.

Now that the Pascal line is more or less done, is it too soon to enthuse about Vega and/or Volta? Especially among those disappointed the 1080 Ti.
 
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We've seen 1.5GB, 3GB, and 6GB but, yeah, that 11GB still looks especially odd. Maybe because it's doesn't follow any previous multiple, power of two or otherwise; 1.5GB was an odd configuration back when Nvidia's 5xx line came out but we're used to it and its multiples now. I'm pretty that some other manufacturer (Palit, MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS, etc.) will release a GTX 1080 Ti 12GB version sooner or later since it's one of the few things they can muck around with (maybe even a 16GB version but that's probably pushing it). Regardless of VRAM configuration, I wonder if the performance of the GTX 1080 Ti over that of Titan X Pascal will affect the Titan line down the road. Maybe we'd all get used to it like Intel's top-of-the-line HEDT CPUs that cost 1K USD since I see parallels with it.

Now that the Pascal line is more or less done, is it too soon to enthuse about Vega and/or Volta? Especially among those disappointed the 1080 Ti.


Question: How can anyone really be disappointed in the 1080 Ti with the price and performance it's offering relative to the current market?
 
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...relative to the current market?
This is the key here.
The only reason 314mm^2 chip was sold for 700$ is lack of competition in mid/high end.

To see, why Huang has decided to cannibalize Titan's, one needs to wait until Vega (likely early May).
 
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Now that the Pascal line is more or less done, is it too soon to enthuse about Vega and/or Volta? Especially among those disappointed the 1080 Ti.
For anyone disappointed with GTX 1080 Ti, what are you disappointed about?
And then how is Vega going to be any more exciting when it's not going to be better?
 
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For anyone disappointed with GTX 1080 Ti, what are you disappointed about?
And then how is Vega going to be any more exciting when it's not going to be better?

We have already seen what Pascal can do, so there is nothing that can surprise us with 1080 Ti.

We however don't know a lot about Vega, and it will be exciting to see what performance will they be able to squeeze out of it. Of course, fanboys really don't care about the new tech from the opposition, they will buy and defend their favorite brand no matter what ...
 
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Benchmark Scores Faster than yours... I'd bet on it. :)
Well, they have plenty of time to tweak it's performance in response anyway.

If they can't bin enough to adjust and beat the ti, then it was never meant to be. :)
 
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We have already seen what Pascal can do, so there is nothing that can surprise us with 1080 Ti.

We however don't know a lot about Vega, and it will be exciting to see what performance will they be able to squeeze out of it. Of course, fanboys really don't care about the new tech from the opposition, they will buy and defend their favorite brand no matter what ...
So performance per dollar, performance per watt, lowering ther price of the product range etc. is not any exciting?
AMD has demonstrated what we can expect from Vega, and since we know they'll have to almost double their efficiency to beat GP102 we can pretty safely assume it's not going to happen.
 
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So performance per dollar, performance per watt, lowering ther price of the product range etc. is not any exciting?
AMD has demonstrated what we can expect from Vega, and since we know they'll have to almost double their efficiency to beat GP102 we can pretty safely assume it's not going to happen.

We will see about first two in the benchmarks, but lower prices for 1080 are ok. I'm just saying that we have seen the Titan X Pascal review months ago, but the Vega is still a mystery ...
 
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Using your own rational, the increase in performance from a 390X to Fury X was only 30%. Vega has the same core count as Fiji. So the arch tweaks and clockspeeds will be the difference. I can't see Vega being 100% faster than Fury X. Not even 75% faster. I'd love to be wrong but the history doesn't back it up.

It goes 290X - Fury X, first of all; and the Fury X is 40% stronger than the 290X. Also keep in mind that is the 3rd gen on the same process node, so also an unfair comparison (980 Ti is only about 40% stronger than the 780 Ti as well).



Comparing Fury X to Vega 10 has the following differences (At least):

-~50% higher clockspeeds
-~50%+ higher memory compression
-2x the geometry IPC
-Massively streamlined memory system (Hard to quantify yet, but we know games need half the RAM now)
-Dozens of architectural tweaks, improvements, and just straight up changes.


I'm sorry but I see those as big enhancements. But I never said this would be twice as strong as the Fury X, and it doesn't have to be considering the Titan X is only ~60% stronger than the Fury X. Overall though Polaris is the newest (Released) arch from AMD, and so comparing Vega to the Fury is stupid if we can compare it to Polaris instead.
 
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