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
Efficiency Gets Another Boon: Parallel Kernel Support
In GPU programming, a kernel is the function or small program running across the GPU hardware. Kernels are parallel in nature and perform the same task(s) on a very large dataset.
Typically, companies like NVIDIA don't disclose their hardware limitations until a developer bumps into one of them. In GT200/G80, the entire chip could only be working on one kernel at a time.
When dealing with graphics this isn't usually a problem. There are millions of pixels to render. The problem is wider than the machine. But as you start to do more general purpose computing, not all kernels are going to be wide enough to fill the entire machine. If a single kernel couldn't fill every SM with threads/instructions, then those SMs just went idle. That's bad.
GT200 (left) vs. Fermi (right)
Fermi, once again, fixes this. Fermi's global dispatch logic can now issue multiple kernels in parallel to the entire system. At more than twice the size of GT200, the likelihood of idle SMs went up tremendously. NVIDIA needs to be able to dispatch multiple kernels in parallel to keep Fermi fed.
Application switch time (moving between GPU and CUDA mode) is also much faster on Fermi. NVIDIA says the transition is now 10x faster than GT200, and fast enough to be performed multiple times within a single frame. This is very important for implementing more elaborate GPU accelerated physics (or PhysX, great ;)…).
The connections to the outside world have also been improved. Fermi now supports parallel transfers to/from the CPU. Previously CPU->GPU and GPU->CPU transfers had to happen serially.
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yacoub - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
uh-oh, boys, he's foaming at the mouth. time to put him down.SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Ah, another coward defeated. No surprise.yacoub - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
"The motivation behind AMD's "sweet spot" strategy wasn't just die size, it was price."LOL, no it wasn't. Not when everyone, even Anandtech staff, anticipated the pricing for the two Cypress chips to be closer to $199 and $259, not the $299 and $399 they MSRP'd at.
This return to high GPU prices is disheartening, particularly in this economy. We had better prices for cutting edge GPUs two years ago at the peak of the economic bubble. Today in the midst of the burst, they're coming out with high-priced chips again. But that's okay, they'll have to come down when they don't get enough sales.
SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
It was fun for half a year as the red fans were strung along with the pricing fantasy here.Now of course, well the bitter disappointment, not as fast as expected and much more costly. "low yields" - you know, that problem that makles ati "smaller dies" price like "big green monsters" (that have good yields on the GT300).
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But, no "nothing is wrong, this is great!" Anyone not agreeing is "a problem". A paid agent, too, of that evil money bloated you know who.
the zorro - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
silicon duck, please take a valium i'm worried about you.SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Another lie, no worry, you're no physician, but I am SiliconDoc, so grab your gallon red water bottle reserve for your overheating ati card and bend over and self administer you enema, as usual.araczynski - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
sounds like ati will win the bang for the buck war this time as well. at least it makes the choice easier for me.marc1000 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Some time ago I heard that the nex gen of consoles would run DX11 (Playstation2 and Xbox were DX7, PS3 and X360 DX9. So PS4 and X720 could perfectly be DX11). If this is the case, we are about to see new consoles with really awesome graphics - and then the GPU race would need to start over to more and more performance.Do you guys have any news on those new consoles development? It could complete the figure in the new GPU articles this year.
Penti - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
I think you mean DX9 class hardware, PS3 who has zero DX9 support and XBOX360 has DX9c class support but a console specific version. PS3 was using OpenGL ES 1.0 with shaders and other feature from 2.0 as it was release pre OpenGL ES 2.0 spec. The game engines don't need the DX API. It doesn't matter to game content developers any way.Xbox was actually DirectX 8.1 equivalent. As said next gen consoles are years away. Larrabee and fermi will have been long out by then.
haukionkannel - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Rumours says that next generation consoles are releaset around 2013-2014...But who can say...