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 graph below is one of transistor count, not die size. Inevitably, on the same manufacturing process, a significantly higher transistor count translates into a larger die size. But for the purposes of this article, all I need to show you is a representation of transistor count.
See that big circle on the right? That's Fermi. NVIDIA's next-generation architecture.
NVIDIA astonished us with GT200 tipping the scales at 1.4 billion transistors. Fermi is more than twice that at 3 billion. And literally, that's what Fermi is - more than twice a GT200.
At the high level the specs are simple. Fermi has a 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface and 512 cores. That's more than twice the processing power of GT200 but, just like RV870 (Cypress), it's not twice the memory bandwidth.
The architecture goes much further than that, but NVIDIA believes that AMD has shown its cards (literally) and is very confident that Fermi will be faster. The questions are at what price and when.
The price is a valid concern. Fermi is a 40nm GPU just like RV870 but it has a 40% higher transistor count. Both are built at TSMC, so you can expect that Fermi will cost NVIDIA more to make than ATI's Radeon HD 5870.
Then timing is just as valid, because while Fermi currently exists on paper, it's not a product yet. Fermi is late. Clock speeds, configurations and price points have yet to be finalized. NVIDIA just recently got working chips back and it's going to be at least two months before I see the first samples. Widespread availability won't be until at least Q1 2010.
I asked two people at NVIDIA why Fermi is late; NVIDIA's VP of Product Marketing, Ujesh Desai and NVIDIA's VP of GPU Engineering, Jonah Alben. Ujesh responded: because designing GPUs this big is "fucking hard".
Jonah elaborated, as I will attempt to do here today.
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shotage - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
lol*shakes head*
palladium - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Ahh, he said a 9800 GTX + GDDR5 = 4870 !blindbox - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Ooops, I think I need to speak something on topic at least. Anyone could tell me if OpenCL SDK is out yet? Or DirectCompute too? It has been over a year since GPU computing was announced and nothing useful for the consumers (I don't call folding for consumers).habibo - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Yes, both OpenCL and DirectCompute are available for development. It will take time for developers to release applications that use these APIs.There are already consumer applications that use CUDA, although these are mostly video encoding, Folding@Home/SETI@home, and PhysX-based games. Possibly not too exciting to you, but hopefully more will be coming as GPU computing gains traction.
PorscheRacer - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Does anyone know if the 5000 series support hardware virtualisation? I think this will be the killer feature once AMD's 800 series chipsets debut here shortly. Being able to virtualise the GPU and other hardware with your virtual machines is the last stop to pure bliss.dgz - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
I am also curious. Right now only nVidia's Quadro cards support this.The thing is, though, that your CPU and chipset also have to support what Intel calls VT-d.
Being able to play 3D games in virtual OS with little to no performance would be great and useful.
Not going to happen soon, though. It's also funny that virtually no one Lynnfield mentioned the lack of VT-d in 750 in his "deep" review. Huge disappointment.
wifiwolf - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
If there's any technology that seams to scratch that virtualization, i think this new gt300 is the one. When reading about nvidia making the card compute oriented it just drove my mind to that thought. Hope i'm right. To be fair with amd, i think their doubled stream processors could be a step forward in that direction too, coupled with dx11 direct compute. Virtual machines just need to acknowledge the cards and capabilities.dgz - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
They already do. vmware and vbox have such capabilities. Not everything is possible atm, though.dgz - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
oops, I meant "little to no performance penalty" :)sigmatau - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
According to the super troll who keeps screeching about bandwidth, then the GT300 must be a lesser card since it doesn't have 512 bit connection like the GT200.LOL @ Trolls.