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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rennya - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
Go ask the administrator to check my IP and they can verify that my IP comes from a SE Asia country. Are you accusing me of lying for claiming that I come from a nirvana where 5870 GPU is plentiful?Is that all you can do?
Fact - 5870 is not paper launch. You cannot even deny this.
Ah, BTW, English in SE Asia is the same as the ones used in America and Europe.
Totally - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
Seriously, what are you on? It has to be some good stuff. I want some.I like how you go on and on spouting nonsense about how GT300 has 50% more theoretical bandwith, but without clock speeds there is no way to gauge how much of it will be saturated. In plain speak: Without hard numbers BANDWIDTH ALONE MEANS NOTHING. Sure nvidia has tons of road but we have no idea what they are going to drive on it.
About the 5870 being a paper launch, my best friend had his since the 30th. Day the 5850 launched, took a look over at newegg at 7 in the evening they where there available to order. And still you can order/go to the store and purchase either right now!!! That's not a paper launch. Last time I checked a paper launch is when a product goes live and it's unavailable for over a month.
lyeoh - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
Doesn't look like good stuff to me. You'd probably get brain damage or worse.Should be banned in most countries.
SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
When anand posts the GD bit width and transistor count, and mem, then CLAIMS bandwith is NOT DOUBLE, it is CLEAR the very simple calculation you 3rd graders don't know is AVAILABLE.---
IT'S 240 GB !
4800x384/8 !
duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
It's not FUD, it's just you people are so ignorant it's EASY to have the wool pulled over your eyes.
Lightnix - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
4800mHz x 384 / 8 = 230400mB/s = 230.4GB/sOr 50% faster than 153GB/s - still a big gap but clearly not even nearly double.
It's not FUD, it's just you trolls are so bad at maths you can't even use a calculator to do basic arithmetic with it's EASY to have the wool pulled over your eyes.
SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
The author claimed not double the former GT200, sir.In the 5870 review just the other day, the 5870 had a disappointing 153+ bandwith, vs the 115 of the 4780 or 124 of the 4890.
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So you can see with the 5870 it went up by not much.
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In this review, the former GT200 referred to has a 112, 127, 141, or 159 bandwith, as compared to the MYSTERY # 240 for the GT300.
So the author claims in back reference to the ati card the nvidia card "also fails" to double it's predecesor.
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I have a problem with that - since this new GT300 is gonig to be 240 bandwith, nearly 100 GB/sec more than the card the author holds up higher and gioves a massive break to, the one not being reviewed, the ati 5870.
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It's bias, period. The author could fairly have mentioned how it will be far ahead of it's competition, and be much higher, as it's predecessor nvidia card was also much higher.
Instead, we get the cryptic BS that winds up praising ati instead of pointing out the massive LEAD this new GT300 will have in the bandiwth area.
I hope you can understand, but if you cannot, it's no wonder the author does such a thing, as it appears he can snowball plenty with it.
UNCjigga - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
STFU you stupid moron. There's no "bias". The 5870 has a full, in-depth, separate review with full benchmarks. The author didn't do direct comparisons because THERE IS NO CARD TO COMPARE IT WITH TODAY. FERMI ONLY EXISTS ON PAPER--the mere existence of engineering samples doesn't help this review. The author even indicated he wished he had more info to share but that's all Nvidia allowed. How about we wait until a GT300 ships before we start making final judgements, ok?SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Good job ignoramus.http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15762/1">http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15762/1
Oh, look at that, you're 100% INCORRECT.
Another loser idiot with insults and NOTHING ELSE but the sheepled parrot mind that was slammed into stupidity by the author of this piece.
Great job doofu.
ufon68 - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Wow, you must be the biggest fanboy i've ever seen. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad you're vasting so much energy on such insignificant issue and everyone around here just thought to themselves..."what a total failure".But hey, on the bright-side, you made me jump off that fence and register, so you might not be as useless as you seem.
monomer - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Wow, your proof that Fermi exists is a photo of Huang holding up a mock-up of what the new card is going to look like?If that was a real card, and engineering samples existed, why isn't it actually in a PCI-e slot running something? Why were no functioning Fermi cards actually shown at the conference? Why was the ray-tracing demo performed on a GT200?
Finally, why did Huang say that cards will be ready in "a few short months", if they are actually ready now?
You need to calm down a little. You also need to work on your reading skills and to stop making up controversies where none exist.
Yes, Anand pointed out that the memory bandwidth did not double, but in the very same sentence, he mentions that it did not double for the 5870 either.