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
Final Words
Today's launch is strange. I tried to convince NVIDIA to release more information about Fermi but was met with staunch resistance from the company. NVIDIA claims that by pre-announcing Fermi's performance levels it would seriously hurt its existing business. It's up to you whether or not you want to believe that.
Last quarter the Tesla business unit made $10M. That's not a whole lot of money for a company that, at its peak, grossed $1B in a single quarter. NVIDIA believes that Fermi is when that will all change. To borrow a horrendously overused phrase, Fermi is the inflection point for NVIDIA's Tesla sales.
By adding support for ECC, enabling C++ and easier Visual Studio integration, NVIDIA believes that Fermi will open its Tesla business up to a group of clients that would previously not so much as speak to NVIDIA. ECC is the killer feature there.
While the bulk of NVIDIA's revenue today comes from 3D graphics, NVIDIA believes that Tegra (mobile) and Tesla are the future growth segments for the company. This hints at a very troubling future for GPU makers - are we soon approaching the Atom-ization of graphics cards?
Will 2010 be the beginning of good enough performance in PC games? Display resolutions have pretty much stagnated, PC games are first developed on consoles which have inferior hardware and thus don't have as high the GPU requirements. The fact that NVIDIA is looking to Tegra and Tesla to grow the company is very telling. Then again, perhaps a brand new approach to graphics is what we'll need for the re-invigoration of PC game development. Larrabee.
If the TAM for GPUs in HPC is so big, why did NVIDIA only make $10M last quarter? If you ask NVIDIA it has to do with focus and sales.
According to NVIDIA, over the past couple of years NVIDIA's Tesla sales efforts have been scattered. The focus was on selling to any customers that could potentially see a speedup, trying to gain some traction for the Tesla business.
Jen-Hsun did some yelling and now NVIDIA is a bit more focused in that department. If Tesla revenues increase linearly from this point, that's simply not going to be enough. I asked NVIDIA if exponential growth for Tesla was in the cards and if so, when would it happen. The answer was yes and with Fermi.
We'll see how that plays out, but if Fermi doesn't significantly increase Tesla revenues then we know that NVIDIA is in serious trouble.
The architecture looks good, Fermi just needs to be priced right. Oh and the chip needs to hurry up and come out.
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yacoub - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
uh-oh, boys, he's foaming at the mouth. time to put him down.SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Ah, another coward defeated. No surprise.yacoub - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
"The motivation behind AMD's "sweet spot" strategy wasn't just die size, it was price."LOL, no it wasn't. Not when everyone, even Anandtech staff, anticipated the pricing for the two Cypress chips to be closer to $199 and $259, not the $299 and $399 they MSRP'd at.
This return to high GPU prices is disheartening, particularly in this economy. We had better prices for cutting edge GPUs two years ago at the peak of the economic bubble. Today in the midst of the burst, they're coming out with high-priced chips again. But that's okay, they'll have to come down when they don't get enough sales.
SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
It was fun for half a year as the red fans were strung along with the pricing fantasy here.Now of course, well the bitter disappointment, not as fast as expected and much more costly. "low yields" - you know, that problem that makles ati "smaller dies" price like "big green monsters" (that have good yields on the GT300).
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But, no "nothing is wrong, this is great!" Anyone not agreeing is "a problem". A paid agent, too, of that evil money bloated you know who.
the zorro - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
silicon duck, please take a valium i'm worried about you.SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Another lie, no worry, you're no physician, but I am SiliconDoc, so grab your gallon red water bottle reserve for your overheating ati card and bend over and self administer you enema, as usual.araczynski - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
sounds like ati will win the bang for the buck war this time as well. at least it makes the choice easier for me.marc1000 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Some time ago I heard that the nex gen of consoles would run DX11 (Playstation2 and Xbox were DX7, PS3 and X360 DX9. So PS4 and X720 could perfectly be DX11). If this is the case, we are about to see new consoles with really awesome graphics - and then the GPU race would need to start over to more and more performance.Do you guys have any news on those new consoles development? It could complete the figure in the new GPU articles this year.
Penti - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
I think you mean DX9 class hardware, PS3 who has zero DX9 support and XBOX360 has DX9c class support but a console specific version. PS3 was using OpenGL ES 1.0 with shaders and other feature from 2.0 as it was release pre OpenGL ES 2.0 spec. The game engines don't need the DX API. It doesn't matter to game content developers any way.Xbox was actually DirectX 8.1 equivalent. As said next gen consoles are years away. Larrabee and fermi will have been long out by then.
haukionkannel - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Rumours says that next generation consoles are releaset around 2013-2014...But who can say...