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
The RV770 Lesson (or The GT200 Story)
It took NVIDIA a while to give us an honest response to the RV770. At first it was all about CUDA and PhsyX. RV770 didn't have it, so we shouldn't be recommending it; that was NVIDIA's stance.
Today, it's much more humble.
Ujesh is wiling to take total blame for GT200. As manager of GeForce at the time, Ujesh admitted that he priced GT200 wrong. NVIDIA looked at RV670 (Radeon HD 3870) and extrapolated from that to predict what RV770's performance would be. Obviously, RV770 caught NVIDIA off guard and GT200 was priced much too high.
Ujesh doesn't believe NVIDIA will make the same mistake with Fermi.
Jonah, unwilling to let Ujesh take all of the blame, admitted that engineering was partially at fault as well. GT200 was the last chip NVIDIA ever built at 65nm - there's no excuse for that. The chip needed to be at 55nm from the get-go, but NVIDIA had been extremely conservative about moving to new manufacturing processes too early.
It all dates back to NV30, the GeForce FX. It was a brand new architecture on a bleeding edge manufacturing process, 130nm at the time, which ultimately lead to its delay. ATI pulled ahead with the 150nm Radeon 9700 Pro and NVIDIA vowed never to make that mistake again.
With NV30, NVIDIA was too eager to move to new processes. Jonah believes that GT200 was an example of NVIDIA swinging too far in the other direction; NVIDIA was too conservative.
The biggest lesson RV770 taught NVIDIA was to be quicker to migrate to new manufacturing processes. Not NV30 quick, but definitely not as slow as GT200. Internal policies are now in place to ensure this.
Architecturally, there aren't huge lessons to be learned from RV770. It was a good chip in NVIDIA's eyes, but NVIDIA isn't adjusting their architecture in response to it. NVIDIA will continue to build beefy GPUs and AMD appears committed to building more affordable ones. Both companies are focused on building more efficiently.
Of Die Sizes and Transitions
Fermi and Cypress are both built on the same 40nm TSMC process, yet they differ by nearly 1 billion transistors. Even the first generation Larrabee will be closer in size to Cypress than Fermi, and it's made at Intel's state of the art 45nm facilities.
What you're seeing is a significant divergence between the graphics companies, one that I expect will continue to grow in the near term.
NVIDIA's architecture is designed to address its primary deficiency: the company's lack of a general purpose microprocessor. As such, Fermi's enhancements over GT200 address that issue. While Fermi will play games, and NVIDIA claims it will do so better than the Radeon HD 5870, it is designed to be a general purpose compute machine.
ATI's approach is much more cautious. While Cypress can run DirectX Compute and OpenCL applications (the former faster than any NVIDIA GPU on the market today), ATI's use of transistors was specifically targeted to run the GPU's killer app today: 3D games.
Intel's take is the most unique. Both ATI and NVIDIA have to support their existing businesses, so they can't simply introduce a revolutionary product that sacrifices performance on existing applications for some lofty, longer term goal. Intel however has no discrete GPU business today, so it can.
Larrabee is in rough shape right now. The chip is buggy, the first time we met it it wasn't healthy enough to even run a 3D game. Intel has 6 - 9 months to get it ready for launch. By then, the Radeon HD 5870 will be priced between $299 - $349, and Larrabee will most likely slot in $100 - $150 cheaper. Fermi is going to be aiming for the top of the price brackets.
The motivation behind AMD's "sweet spot" strategy wasn't just die size, it was price. AMD believed that by building large, $600+ GPUs, it didn't service the needs of the majority of its customers quickly enough. It took far too long to make a $199 GPU from a $600 one - quickly approaching a year.
Clearly Fermi is going to be huge. NVIDIA isn't disclosing die sizes, but if we estimate that a 40% higher transistor count results in a 40% larger die area then we're looking at over 467mm^2 for Fermi. That's smaller than GT200 and about the size of G80; it's still big.
I asked Jonah if that meant Fermi would take a while to move down to more mainstream pricepoints. Ujesh stepped in and said that he thought I'd be pleasantly surprised once NVIDIA is ready to announce Fermi configurations and price points. If you were NVIDIA, would you say anything else?
Jonah did step in to clarify. He believes that AMD's strategy simply boils down to targeting a different price point. He believes that the correct answer isn't to target a lower price point first, but rather build big chips efficiently. And build them so that you can scale to different sizes/configurations without having to redo a bunch of stuff. Putting on his marketing hat for a bit, Jonah said that NVIDIA is actively making investments in that direction. Perhaps Fermi will be different and it'll scale down to $199 and $299 price points with little effort? It seems doubtful, but we'll find out next year.
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SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
No they did not post earnings, other than in the sense IN THE RED LOSSES called sales.shotage - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
I'm not sure what your argument is SiliconDuck..But maybe you should stop typing and go into hybernation to await the GT300's holy ascension from heaven! FYI: It's unhealthy to have shrines dedicated to silicon dude. Get off the GPU cr@ck!!!
On a more serious note: Nvidia are good, ATI has gotten a lot better though.
I just bought a GTX260 recently, so I'm in no hurry to buy at the moment. I'll be eagerly awaiting to see what happens when Nvidia actually have the product launch and not just some lame paper/promo launch.
SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
My aregument is I've heard the EXACT SAME geekfoot whine before, twice in fact. Once for G80, once for GT200, and NOW, again....Here is what the guy said I responded to:
" Nvidia is painting itself into a corner in terms of engineering and direction. As a graphical engine, ATI's architecture is both smaller, cheaper to manufacture and scales better simply by combining chips or expanding # of units as mfg tech improves.. As a compute engine, Intel's Larabee will have unmatched parallel thread processing horsepower. What is Nvidia thinking trying to pass on this huge, monolithic albatross? It will lose on both fronts. "
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MY ARGUMENT IS : A red raging rooster who just got their last two nvidia destruction calls WRONG for G80 and GT200 (the giant brute force non-profit expensive blah blah blah), are likely to the tune of 100% - TO BE GETTING THIS CRYING SPASM WRONG AS WELL.
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When there is clear evidence Nvidia has been a markleting genius (it's called REBRANDING by the bashing red rooster crybabies) and has a billion bucks to burn a year on R&D, the argument HAS ALREADY BEEN MADE FOR ME.
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The person you should be questioning is the opinionated raging nvidia disser, who by all standards jives out an arrogant WHACK JOB on nvidia, declaring DUAL defeat...
QUOTETH ! "What is Nvidia thinking trying to pass on this huge, monolithic albatross? It will lose on both fronts. "
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LOL that huge monolithic albatross COMMANDS $475,000.00 for 4 of them in some TESLA server for the collegiate geeks and freaks all over the world- I don't suppose there is " loss on that front" do you ?
ROFLMAO
Who are you questioning and WHY ? Why aren't you seeing clearly ? Did the reds already brainwash you ? Have the last two gigantic expensive cores "destroyed nvidia" as they predicted?
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In closing "GET A CLUE".
shotage - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Found my clue.. I hope you get help in time: http://www.physorg.com/news171819640.html">http://www.physorg.com/news171819640.htmlSiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
You are your clue, and here is your buddy, your duplicate:" What is Nvidia thinking trying to pass on this huge, monolithic albatross? It will lose on both fronts."
Now, I quite understand denial is a favorite pasttime of losers, and you've effectively joined the red club. Let me convert for you.
" What is Ati thinking trying to pass on this over length, heat soaked, barely better afterthought? It will lose on it's only front."
-there you are schmucko, a fine example of real misbehavior you pass-
AaronJD - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
While I definitely prefer the $200-$300 space that ATI released 48xx at, It seems like $400 is the magic number for single GPUs. Anything much higher than that is in multi-GPU space where you can get away with a higher price to performance ratio.If Nvidia can hit the market with well engineered $400 or so card that is easily pared down, then they can hit a market ATI would have trouble scaling to while being able to easily re-badge gimped silicon to meet whatever market segment they can best compete in with whatever quality yield they get.
Regarding Larabee, I think Nvidia's strategy is to just get in the door first. To compete against Intel's first offering they don't need to do something special, they just need to get the right feature set out there. If they can get developers writing for their hardware asap Tesla will have done its job.
Zingam - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Until that thing from NVIDIA comes out AMD has time to work on a response and if they are not lazy or stupid they'll have a match for it.So in any way I believe that things are going to get more interesting than ever in the next 3 years!!!
:D ?an't wait to hear what DirectX 12 will be like!!!
My guess is that in 5 years we will have a truly new CPUs - that would do what GPUs + CPUs are doing together today.
Perhaps will come to the point where we'll get blade like home PCs. If you want more power you just shove in another board. Perhaps PC architecture will change completely once software gets ready for SMP.
chizow - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Nvidia is also launching Nexus at their GDC this week, a plug-in for Visual Studio that will basically integrate all of these various API under an industry standard IDE. That's the launching point imo for cGPU, Tesla and everything else Nvidia is hoping to accompolish outside of the 3D Gaming space with Fermi.Making their hardware more accessible to create those next killer apps is what's been missing in the past with GPGPU and CUDA. Now it'll all be cGPU and transparent in your workflow within Visual Studio.
As for the news of Fermi as a gaming GPU, very excited on that front, but not all that surprised really. Nvidia was due for another home run and it looks like Fermi might just clear the ball park completely. Tough times ahead for AMD, but at least they'll be able to enjoy the 5850/5870 success for a few months.
ilkhan - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
If it plays games faster/prettier at the same or better price, who cares what the architecture looks like?On a similar note, if the die looks like that first image (which is likely) chopping it to smaller price points looks incredibly easy.
papapapapapapapababy - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
"Architecturally, there aren't huge lessons to be learned from RV770"SNIF SNIF BS!
"ATI's approach is much more cautious"
more like "ATI's approach is much more FOCUSED"
( eyes on the ball people)
"While Fermi will play games, it is designed to be a general purpose compute machine."
nvidia, is starting to sound like Sony " the ps3 is not a console its a supercomputer @ HD movie player, it only does everything" guess what? people wanted to play games, nintendo ( the focused company, did that > games, not movies, not hd graphics, games, motion control) Sony - like nvidia here- didn't have the eyes on the ball.