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
ECC Support
AMD's Radeon HD 5870 can detect errors on the memory bus, but it can't correct them. The register file, L1 cache, L2 cache and DRAM all have full ECC support in Fermi. This is one of those Tesla-specific features.
Many Tesla customers won't even talk to NVIDIA about moving their algorithms to GPUs unless NVIDIA can deliver ECC support. The scale of their installations is so large that ECC is absolutely necessary (or at least perceived to be).
Unified 64-bit Memory Addressing
In previous architectures there was a different load instruction depending on the type of memory: local (per thread), shared (per group of threads) or global (per kernel). This created issues with pointers and generally made a mess that programmers had to clean up.
Fermi unifies the address space so that there's only one instruction and the address of the memory is what determines where it's stored. The lowest bits are for local memory, the next set is for shared and then the remainder of the address space is global.
The unified address space is apparently necessary to enable C++ support for NVIDIA GPUs, which Fermi is designed to do.
The other big change to memory addressability is in the size of the address space. G80 and GT200 had a 32-bit address space, but next year NVIDIA expects to see Tesla boards with over 4GB of GDDR5 on board. Fermi now supports 64-bit addresses but the chip can physically address 40-bits of memory, or 1TB. That should be enough for now.
Both the unified address space and 64-bit addressing are almost exclusively for the compute space at this point. Consumer graphics cards won't need more than 4GB of memory for at least another couple of years. These changes were painful for NVIDIA to implement, and ultimately contributed to Fermi's delay, but necessary in NVIDIA's eyes.
New ISA Changes Enable DX11, OpenCL and C++, Visual Studio Support
Now this is cool. NVIDIA is announcing Nexus (no, not the thing from Star Trek Generations) a visual studio plugin that enables hardware debugging for CUDA code in visual studio. You can treat the GPU like a CPU, step into functions, look at the state of the GPU all in visual studio with Nexus. This is a huge step forward for CUDA developers.
Nexus running in Visual Studio on a CUDA GPU
Simply enabling DX11 support is a big enough change for a GPU - AMD had to go through that with RV870. Fermi implements a wide set of changes to its ISA, primarily designed at enabling C++ support. Virtual functions, new/delete, try/catch are all parts of C++ and enabled on Fermi.
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SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Plenty hard, but they GOT HER DONE, and here is the pic of herhttp://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15762/1/">http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15762/1/
Yes, now about that fantasy paper anand was spewing on - yes he won't get one for two months, but AS I SAID, WE ALREADY KNOW IT BEATS the ati epic failure.
rennya - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Where can I get that GPU? At least at my place I can get a 5870 GPU if I want to, but not so for this GPU.SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Well go get one.Now were down to the launch and paper lies in this article, were lies, as I've said. Bigger lies by the red texters. If I were Anand I'd be giggling at you fools.
rennya - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Newegg link please. Or any other online retailer websites for the matter.Did I already said to stop it with the paper launch already? That only exists in your dreams you know. Or maybe America. But such thing is not true here. Just because America doesn't have enough unit it doesn't mean it is true everywhere else.
SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Oh, so sorry mi' lady, here is your newegg link, you'll see 2 greyted out 5850's and THAT'S IT.http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Sub...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi...10679497...
Can't buy em. Paper, e-paper in this case, digital nothing.
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Now if we only could send you some money, and you could trot over to your imaginary shops.... gee if only someone gave you some money, you could HAVE A PICTURE, because veryone knows handy little cameras are BANNED there, huh.
Gee, all those walks to work.. and not ten seconds to take a pic, and now it's really, too late LOL
ahhahahahahaaa
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More of that wonderful "red rooster evidence".
ClownPuncher - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
I bought one, 5850 that is. They are popular, so they sell out. The same thing happened to me when the 8800GT's launched, bought 2 and they were sold out 15 minutes later.If people can buy them, it isn't a paper launch. Give it up. There were cards for sale from many etailers on launch day for the 5870 as well.
You're saying the 8800GT and 8800GTS g92 were paper launches also? They were selling out in minutes.
SiliconDoc - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
Funny how you wait for the perfect post to claim your lie is true.You're a pure troll, nothing more, in every single post you've made here.
Of course I know you're lying.
rennya - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
You are the one who are lying by claiming that 5870 is a paper launch, when availability at my place is pretty good. Then you claim that I do not actually come from a SE Asia country, but admins in this site can easily verify my IP and see where I come from. Accusing people of lying will not make you look good.SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Neither does europe, nor africa, nor SA, nor the ME, apparently the only spot is your walk to work. Congratulations, you're at ground zero. Just think how lucky you are.rennya - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
I am not the who claims GT300 is available, you do with your fudzilla link. And that picture may only have mock-ups because nVidia doesn't have any working demo.At least Intel with its Larabee did showcase their unimpressive raytracing demo with Larabee in IDF.