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
A Different Sort of Launch
Fermi will support DirectX 11 and NVIDIA believes it'll be faster than the Radeon HD 5870 in 3D games. With 3 billion transistors, it had better be. But that's the extent of what NVIDIA is willing to talk about with regards to Fermi as a gaming GPU. Sorry folks, today's launch is targeted entirely at Tesla.
A GeForce GTX 280 with 4GB of memory is the foundation for the Tesla C1060 cards
Tesla is NVIDIA's High Performance Computing (HPC) business. NVIDIA takes its consumer GPUs, equips them with a ton of memory, and sells them in personal or datacenter supercomputers called Tesla supercomputers or computing clusters. If you have an application that can run well on a GPU, the upside is tremendous.
Four of those C1060 cards in a 1U chassis make the Tesla S1070. PCIe connects the S1070 to the host server.
NVIDIA loves to cite examples of where algorithms ported to GPUs work so much better than CPUs. One such example is a seismic processing application that HESS found ran very well on NVIDIA GPUs. It migrated a cluster of 2000 servers to 32 Tesla S1070s, bringing total costs down from $8M to $400K, and total power from 1200kW down to 45kW.
| HESS Seismic Processing Example | Tesla | CPU |
| Performance | 1 | 1 |
| # of Machines | 32 Tesla S1070s | 2000 x86 servers |
| Total Cost | ~$400K | ~$8M |
| Total Power | 45kW | 1200kW |
Obviously this doesn't include the servers needed to drive the Teslas, but presumably that's not a significant cost. Either way the potential is there, it's just a matter of how many similar applications exist in the world.
According to NVIDIA, there are many more cases like this in the market. The table below shows what NVIDIA believes is the total available market in the next 18 months for these various HPC segments:
| Processor | Seismic | Supercomputing | Universities | Defence | Finance |
| GPU TAM | $300M | $200M | $150M | $250M | $230M |
These figures were calculated by looking at the algorithms used in each segment, the number of Hess-like Tesla installations that can be done, and the current budget for non-GPU based computing in those markets. If NVIDIA met its goals here, the Tesla business could be bigger than the GeForce one. There's just one problem:
As you'll soon see, many of the architectural features of Fermi are targeted specifically for Tesla markets. The same could be said about GT200, albeit to a lesser degree. Yet Tesla accounted for less than 1.3% of NVIDIA's total revenue last quarter.
Given these numbers it looks like NVIDIA is building GPUs for a world that doesn't exist. NVIDIA doesn't agree.
The Evolution of GPU Computing
When matched with the right algorithms and programming efforts, GPU computing can provide some real speedups. Much of Fermi's architecture is designed to improve performance in these HPC and other GPU compute applications.
Ever since G80, NVIDIA has been on this path to bring GPU computing to reality. I rarely get the opportunity to get a non-marketing answer out of NVIDIA, but in talking to Jonah Alben (VP of GPU Engineering) I had an unusually frank discussion.
From the outside, G80 looks to be a GPU architected for compute. Internally, NVIDIA viewed it as an opportunistic way to enable more general purpose computing on its GPUs. The transition to a unified shader architecture gave NVIDIA the chance to, relatively easily, turn G80 into more than just a GPU. NVIDIA viewed GPU computing as a future strength for the company, so G80 led a dual life. Awesome graphics chip by day, the foundation for CUDA by night.
Remember that G80 was hashed out back in 2002 - 2003. NVIDIA had some ideas of where it wanted to take GPU computing, but it wasn't until G80 hit that customers started providing feedback that ultimately shaped the way GT200 and Fermi turned out.
One key example was support for double precision floating point. The feature wasn't added until GT200 and even then, it was only added based on computing customer feedback from G80. Fermi kicks double precision performance up another notch as it now executes FP64 ops at half of its FP32 rate (more on this later).
While G80 and GT200 were still primarily graphics chips, NVIDIA views Fermi as a processor that makes compute just as serious as graphics. NVIDIA believes it's on a different course, at least for the short term, than AMD. And you'll see this in many of the architectural features of Fermi.
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LawRecordings - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Buwahahaha!!!What a sad, lonely little life this Silicon Doc must lead. I struggle to see how this guy can have any friends, not to mention a significant other. Or even people that can stand being in a room with him for long. Prolly the stereotypical fat boy in his mom's basement.
Careful SD, the "red roosters" are out to get you! Its all a conspiracy to overthrow the universe, and you're the only one that knows!
Great article Anand, as always.
Regards,
Law
Vendor agnostic buyer of the best price / performance GPU at the time
SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
They can't get me, they've gotten themselves, and I've just mashed their face in it.And you're stupid enough to only be able to repeat the more than thousandth time repeated internet insult cleche's, and by your ignorant post, it appears you are an audiophile who sits bouncing around like a retard with headphones on, before after and during getting cooked on some weird dope, a HouseHead, right ? And that of course does not mean a family, doper.
So you giggle like a little girl and repeat what you read since that's all the stoned gourd can muster, then you kiss that rear nice and tight, brown nose.
Don't forget your personal claim to utter innocence, either, mr unbiased.
LOL
Yep there we have it, a househead music doused doped up butt kisser with a lame cleche'd brain and a giggly girl tude.
Golly, what were you saying about wifeless and friendless ?
ClownPuncher - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
What exactly is a cleche?Is it anything like a cliche?
Your spelling, grammar, and general lack of communication skill lead me to think that you are actually a double agent, it's an act if you will...an ATI guy posing as a really socially stunted Nvidia fan in an attempt to turn people off of Nvidia products solely by the ineptitude of your rhetoric.
UNCjigga - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
I'd hate to have a political conversation with SiliconDoc, but I digress...Some very interesting information came out in today's previews. Will Fermi be a bigger chip than Cypress? Certainly. Will it be more *powerful* than Cypress? Possibly. Will it be more expensive than Cypress? Probably. Will it have more memory bandwidth than Cypress? Yes.
Will it *play games* better than Cypress? Remains to be seen. Too many factors at play here. We don't know clock speeds. We have no idea if "midrange" Fermi cards will retain the 384-bit memory interface. We have
For all we know, all of Fermi's optimizations will mean great things for OpenCL and DirectCompute, but how many *games* make use of these APIs today? How can we compare DirectX 11 performance with few games and no Fermi silicon available for testing? Most of the people here will care about game performance, not Tesla or GPGPU. Hell, its been years since CUDA and Stream arrived and I'm still waiting for a decent video encoding/transcoding solution.
Calin - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Even between current cards (NVIDIA and AMD/ATI) the performance crown moves from one game to another - one card could do very well in one game and much worse in another (compared to the competition). As for not yet released cards, performance numbers in games can only be divined, not predictedBull Dog - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
So how much in NVIDIA's focus group partner paying you to post this stuff?dzoni2k2 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
You seriously need to take your medicine. And call your shrink.dragonsqrrl - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
I know it seems like SiliconDoc is going on a ranting rage, because he kinda is, but the fact remains that this was a fairly biased article on the part of Anandtech. I've been reading reviews and articles here for a long time, and recently there has been a certain level of prejudice against Nvidia and its products that I haven't noticed on other legitimate review cites. This seems to have been the result of Anandtech getting left out of the loop last year. Throughout the article there is a pretty obvious sarcastic undertone towards what the Nvidia representatives say, and their newly announced GPU. I can only hope that this stops, so that anandtech can return to its former days of relatively balanced and fair reporting, which is all anyone can ask of any legitimate review cite. Articles of this manner and tone serve no purpose but to enrage people like SiliconDoc, and hurt Anandtech's image and reputation as a balanced a legitimate tech cite.Keeir - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Curious in where you see the Bias.I see a little bit of the tone, but it seems warranted for a company that has for the last few years over-promised and under delivered. Very similar to how AMD/ATI was treated upto the release of the 4 series. Nvidia needs to prove (again) that it can deliever a real innovative product priced at an affordable level for the core audience of graphics cards.
Here we are, 7 days after 5870 launch and Egg has 5870s for ~375 to GTX 295s at 500. Yet again, ATI/AMD has made it a puzzling choice to buy any Nvida product more than 200 dollars.... for months at a time.
SiliconDoc - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
What's puzzling is you are so out of touch, you don't realize the GTX295's were $406 before ati launched it's epic failure, then the gtx295 rose to $469 and the 5870 author edsxplained in text the pre launch price, and now you say the GTX295 is at $500.Clearly, the market has decided the 5870 is epic failure, and instead of bringing down the GTX295, it has increased it's value !
ROFLMAO
Awwww, the poor ati failure card drove up the price of the GTX295.
Awww, poor little red roosters, sorry I had to explain it to you, it's better if you tell yourself some imaginary delusion and spew it everywhere.