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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Voo - Saturday, October 3, 2009 - link
You may overseen it, but there was a edit by an administrator to one of his posts which did exactly what you want ;)james jwb - Sunday, October 4, 2009 - link
that's good to hear :)Hxx - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
By the looks of it, Nvidia doesn't have much going on for this year. If they loose the DX11 boat against ATI then I will pity their stockholders. About the only thing that makes those green cards attractive is their Physics spiel. Now if ATI would hurry up and do somethin with that Havoc, then dark days will await Nvidia. One way or the other, its a win-win for the consumer. I just wish their AMD division would fare just as well against intel.Zool - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
I dont wont to be too pesimistic but availability in Q1 2010 is lame late. Windows 7 will come out soon so people will surely want to upgrade to dx11 till christmas. Also OEM market which is actualy the most profitable. Dell, HP and others will hawe windows 7 systems and they will of course need dx11 cards till christmas.(amd will hawe hopefully all models out till that time)Than of course dx11 games that will come out in future can be optimized for radeon 5K now while for gt300 we dont even know the graphic specs and the only working silicon dont even resemble to a card.
Very bad timing for nvidia this time that will give amd a huge advantage.
Zool - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
Actualy this could hapen if u merge a super gpgpu tesla card and a GPU and want to sell it as one("because designing GPUs this big is "fucking hard"). Average people (maybe 95% of all) dont even know what Megabyte or bit is not even GPGPU. They will want to buy a graphic card not cuda card.If amd and microsoft will make heawy DX11 pr than even the rest of nvidias gpus wont sell.
PorscheRacer - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
As with anything hardware, you need the killer software to have consumers want it. DX11 is out now, so we have Windows 7 (which most people are taking a liking to, even gamers) and you have a few upcoming games that people look to be interested in. For GPGPU and all that, well... What do we have as a seriously awesome application that consumers want and feel they need to go out and buy a GPU for? Some do that for F@H and the like, and a few for transcoding video, but what else is there? Until we see that, it's going to be ahrd to convince consumers to buy that GPU. As it is, most feel IGP is good enough for them...PorscheRacer - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
Actually, thinking about this... Maybe if they were able to put a small portion of this into IGP, and include some good software with it, maybe the average consumer could see the benefits easier and quicker and be inclined to go for that step up to a dedicated GPU?RXR - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
DocSilicon, you are one funny as hell mental patient to be!. I really hope you dont get banned. You just made reading the comments a whole lot more fun. Plus, it's win win. You get to satisfy your need to go completely postal at everyone, and we get a funny sideshow.- Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
Great words but nothing behind! Fermis is Nvidias Prescott or should I say much like the last Voodoo chip that never really appeared on the market? Too many transistors are not good ...ioannis - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
Although the Star Trek TNG reference is ok, 'Nexus' should have been accompanied by a Blade Runner reference instead, Nexus-6 :)