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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rennya - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Here in SE Asia, 5870 GPU is available in abundance in retail channels. If you PayPal me USD450, I can go straight to any of the computer shops I passed when I go to work, so that I can buy the card (and a casing that will fit the full length card), then I can take pictures and show it to you.Stop it with the claims that the 5870 launch is just a paper launch. That patently isn't true, and will only make you look stupid.
SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
I'm sure your email box is overflowing with requests, and I'm sure your walk to work will serve all the customers around the world.Thanks for that great bit of information for those walking to work with you in SE asia, I bet they're really happy.
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Maybe you should get a Reseller ID, and make that millionaire dream of yours come true, and soon when rooster central flaps it up again, you can prove to the world dry as a bone ain't rice paper.
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No, one cannot really fathom the insanity, and red rooster doesn't describe the thickness of skull properly at all, merely the size of it's contents.
rennya - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
Nope, my inbox is not overflowing with requests, because after all, anyone who wants a 5870 GPU, will be able to get it.If you cannot prove that 5870 is a paper launch, maybe you should shut up your shop?
Sozo - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
If we are "red roosters" what does that make you? The green grizzly?SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Actually the first person to offer any thought on the matter suggested green goblin, which was a decent attempt, since grizzly bears aren't green, and goblins have a much better chance of being so.Howver, if you'd the actual nvidia equivalence of what you ati red roosters are, I'd be happy to provide some examples for you, which I have not done as of yet, and of course you're all too stupid rah-rah to even fathom that. That's pretty sad, and only confirms the problem. I'm certain you can't understand, so don't bother yourself.
http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15762/1">http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15762/1
silverblue - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
What sort of rooster are we talking? I mean, a Sussex rooster is almost exclusively not red. Can I be that one, please?Now THAT's trolling.
Natfly - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
I'm thinking a green goober.SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
If you even believed your own pile of fud, you'd go to page 2 I believe it is in the article and see where anand says " sorry that's all we know about the GT300 the game card, nvidia won't tell us anymore"What he was told is IT'S FASTER THAN 5870, and the cores have already been cut, and the cards already under test.
So we already know, if we aren't a raging red doofus, and of course, that is very difficult for almost everyone here.
Also, this was not an official launch date for NVidia, they never declared it as such, just Anand delcared it in his article.
The official launch date for GT300 already spoken about multiple times by the aithors of this website is !!! > THE RELEASE DATE OF WINDOWS 7...
Now, wether nvidia changes their official launch date before then or not, or where the authors got that former information, one can surmise, but changing their AT tune about nvidia in an article title, for a conference and a web video atttendance, in order to appease the shamed and embarrased 3rd time in a row paper launching ati, 4870,4770, 5870, is not "unbiased" nor is it honest, no matter how much you want it to be.
If a person wants to claim it's a planned LEAK to showcase upcoming tech ( nvidia did this AFTER the GT300 gpu cores reported GOOD YIELD) - and combat fools purchasing the epic failure 5870 instead of waiting for the gold, ok.
siyabongazulu - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
WOw wow wow!! You sir must be the most ignorant, manipulative, underappreciating, bastard.. sorry for tearing your world but you deserve such credentials and a lot more that can be given to people who display your kind of behaviour.You have been crying bias for no reason at all. If Anand says its paper launch, and if tgdaily says its paper launch (http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/44157/135/)">http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/44157/135/) and fudzilla (http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15762/1/)">http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15762/1/) which seems to be your favourite source so far doesn't even speak of anything but a display model that only confirms that GT300 is under construction.
So the only source you can come up with is yourself and you said it here and I quote "If you even believed your own pile of fud, you'd go to page 2 I believe it is in the article and see where anand says " sorry that's all we know about the GT300 the game card, nvidia won't tell us anymore"
What he was told is IT'S FASTER THAN 5870, and the cores have already been cut, and the cards already under test. " Those are your words, not NVIDIAs, no Anand, not Fudzilla, not from any other reviwers but yours.
Therefore, can you please STFU and stop trying to label everyone a red nosed rooster or whatever the f*** u call them.
P.S Not everyone appreciate your level of stupidity and before you can go and say geez there goes another one, FIY I'm running my system on Nvidia card and will buy ATI and snould NVIDIA "Physically Launch" GT300 and prove it to be better then already launched and benchamrked 5870 then you can come back and start your ranting. Until then plug that sh** hole of yours
MonkeyPaw - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Dude, you take this way too personally. Do you have the same burning passion for real problems?