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
Final Words
Today's launch is strange. I tried to convince NVIDIA to release more information about Fermi but was met with staunch resistance from the company. NVIDIA claims that by pre-announcing Fermi's performance levels it would seriously hurt its existing business. It's up to you whether or not you want to believe that.
Last quarter the Tesla business unit made $10M. That's not a whole lot of money for a company that, at its peak, grossed $1B in a single quarter. NVIDIA believes that Fermi is when that will all change. To borrow a horrendously overused phrase, Fermi is the inflection point for NVIDIA's Tesla sales.
By adding support for ECC, enabling C++ and easier Visual Studio integration, NVIDIA believes that Fermi will open its Tesla business up to a group of clients that would previously not so much as speak to NVIDIA. ECC is the killer feature there.
While the bulk of NVIDIA's revenue today comes from 3D graphics, NVIDIA believes that Tegra (mobile) and Tesla are the future growth segments for the company. This hints at a very troubling future for GPU makers - are we soon approaching the Atom-ization of graphics cards?
Will 2010 be the beginning of good enough performance in PC games? Display resolutions have pretty much stagnated, PC games are first developed on consoles which have inferior hardware and thus don't have as high the GPU requirements. The fact that NVIDIA is looking to Tegra and Tesla to grow the company is very telling. Then again, perhaps a brand new approach to graphics is what we'll need for the re-invigoration of PC game development. Larrabee.
If the TAM for GPUs in HPC is so big, why did NVIDIA only make $10M last quarter? If you ask NVIDIA it has to do with focus and sales.
According to NVIDIA, over the past couple of years NVIDIA's Tesla sales efforts have been scattered. The focus was on selling to any customers that could potentially see a speedup, trying to gain some traction for the Tesla business.
Jen-Hsun did some yelling and now NVIDIA is a bit more focused in that department. If Tesla revenues increase linearly from this point, that's simply not going to be enough. I asked NVIDIA if exponential growth for Tesla was in the cards and if so, when would it happen. The answer was yes and with Fermi.
We'll see how that plays out, but if Fermi doesn't significantly increase Tesla revenues then we know that NVIDIA is in serious trouble.
The architecture looks good, Fermi just needs to be priced right. Oh and the chip needs to hurry up and come out.
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shotage - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
lol*shakes head*
palladium - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Ahh, he said a 9800 GTX + GDDR5 = 4870 !blindbox - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Ooops, I think I need to speak something on topic at least. Anyone could tell me if OpenCL SDK is out yet? Or DirectCompute too? It has been over a year since GPU computing was announced and nothing useful for the consumers (I don't call folding for consumers).habibo - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Yes, both OpenCL and DirectCompute are available for development. It will take time for developers to release applications that use these APIs.There are already consumer applications that use CUDA, although these are mostly video encoding, Folding@Home/SETI@home, and PhysX-based games. Possibly not too exciting to you, but hopefully more will be coming as GPU computing gains traction.
PorscheRacer - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Does anyone know if the 5000 series support hardware virtualisation? I think this will be the killer feature once AMD's 800 series chipsets debut here shortly. Being able to virtualise the GPU and other hardware with your virtual machines is the last stop to pure bliss.dgz - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
I am also curious. Right now only nVidia's Quadro cards support this.The thing is, though, that your CPU and chipset also have to support what Intel calls VT-d.
Being able to play 3D games in virtual OS with little to no performance would be great and useful.
Not going to happen soon, though. It's also funny that virtually no one Lynnfield mentioned the lack of VT-d in 750 in his "deep" review. Huge disappointment.
wifiwolf - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
If there's any technology that seams to scratch that virtualization, i think this new gt300 is the one. When reading about nvidia making the card compute oriented it just drove my mind to that thought. Hope i'm right. To be fair with amd, i think their doubled stream processors could be a step forward in that direction too, coupled with dx11 direct compute. Virtual machines just need to acknowledge the cards and capabilities.dgz - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
They already do. vmware and vbox have such capabilities. Not everything is possible atm, though.dgz - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
oops, I meant "little to no performance penalty" :)sigmatau - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
According to the super troll who keeps screeching about bandwidth, then the GT300 must be a lesser card since it doesn't have 512 bit connection like the GT200.LOL @ Trolls.