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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sandwiches - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Just created an account to say that I've never seen this kind of sycophantic, schizophrenic blathering as Silicondoc. I have been an Nvidia user for the past 7 years or so (simply out of habit) and before that a Voodoo user and I cannot even begin to relate to this buffoon.Oh and to incense him even more, I'd like to add that I bought a HD5870 from newegg a couple nights ago since I needed to upgrade my old 8800 GTS card, NOW... not in a few months or next year. Now. Seeing as how the HD 5870 is the fastest for my buck, I went with that. Forget treating brands like religions. Get whatever's good and you can afford and forget brands. The end.
SiliconDoc - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
LOL - another lifelong nobody who hasdn't a clue and was a green goblin by habit self reported, made another account, and came in just to "incense" "the debater".Really, you couldn't have done a better job of calling yourself a piece of trash.
Congratulations for that.
You admitted your goal was trolling and fanning the flames.
LOL
That was your goal, and so bright you are, that "sandwiches" came to mind as your name, a complimentary imitation, indicating you hoped to be equal to "Silicon" and decided to take a "tech part" styled name, or, perhaps as likely, it was haphazard chance cause buckey was hungry when he got here, and that's all he could think of.
I think you're another pile of stupid with the C and below crowd, basically.
So, that sort of explains your purchase, doesn't it ?
LOL
Yes, you can't possibly relate, you need more MHZ a lot bigger powr supply "sandwiches".
LOL
sandwiches!
CptTripps - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
Reading your comments makes me think you are about 12 and in need of serious evaluation. I have never seen someone so out of control on Anand for 30+ pages. Seriously, get your brain checked out, there is some sort of imbalance going on when everyone in the whole world is a liar except you, the only beacon of truth.sandwiches - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
LMAOThis has to be an online persona for you, Brian. Are you seriously like this in real life?
Voo - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
We really need a "ignore this idiot" button :/Anyways, is there any reason why this has to be a "one size fits them all" chip? I mean according to the article there's a lot of stuff in it, which only a minority of gamers would ever need (ECC memory? That's more expensive than normal memory and usually has a performance impact).
I mean there's already a workstation chip, why not a third one for GPU computing?
neomocos - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
You know when someone says you are drunk/stupid/drugged/crazy/etc... then you might question him but when 2 or 3 people say it then it`s most than probably true but when all the people at anand say it then SiliconDoc should just stfu, go right now and buy an ati 5870 and smash it on the ground and maby he will feel better and let us be.I vote for ban also :) and i donate 10$ for the 5870 we anand users will give him as a present for christmas.Happy new red year Silicon...
andrihb - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
I'm excited about this but I wish it was ready sooner. It looks like we'll have to wait 2-3 months for benchmarks, right?I hope it'll blow 5870 away because that's what is best for us, the consumers. We'll have an even faster GPU available to us which is all that really matters.
I've noticed that a person here has been criticizing this article for belittling the fact that nVidia's upcoming GPU is likely going to have a vastly suerior memory bandwidth to ATI's current flagship. Anand gave us the very limited data that exists at the moment and left most of the speculation to us. He doesn't emphasize that Fermi (which won't even be available for months) has far more bandwidth than ATI's current flagship. I contend that most people already suspected as much.
The vastly superior memmory bandwidth suggests that nVidia might just have a 5870 killer up it's sleeve. See what I just did there? This is called engaging in speculation. Anand could have done more of that, I agree, but saying that this is proof of Anand's supposed bias towards ATI? That is totally unreasonable.
Hey, Doc, do you want to see a real life, batshit crazy, foaming at the mouth fanboy? All you need is a mirror.
JonnyDough - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
"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."FOOL!
So nVidia is going to make this for Tesla. That's great that they're innovating but you mentioned that those sales are only a small percentage. AMD went from competing strongly in the CPU market to dominating the GPU market. Good move. But if there's no existing market for the GPGPU...do you really want to be switching gears and trying to create one? Hmm. Crazy!
SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Admin: You've overstayed your welcome, goodbye.I'm not sure where you got your red rooster lies information. AMD/ati has NO DOMINATION in the GPU market.
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One moment please to blow away your fantasy...
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http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/amd-so...">http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/det...ntel-and...
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Just in case you're ready to scream I cooked up a pure grteen biased link, check back a few pages and you'll see the liar who claimed ati is now profitable and holding up AMD because of it provided the REAL empty rhetoric fanboy link http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/07/intel...">http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/20...-graphic...
which states
" The actual numbers that JPR gives are worth looking at,
which show INTEL dominates the GPU market !
Wow, what a surprise for you. I've just expanded your world, to something called "honest".
So:
INTEL 50.30%
NVIDIA 28.74%
AMD 18.13%
others below 1% each.
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Gee, now you know who dominates, and for our discussions here, who is IN LAST PLACE! AND THAT WOULD BE ATI THE LAST PLACE LOSER!
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Now, I wouldn't mind something like ati is competitive, but that DOMINATES thing says it's #1, and ati is :
************* ATI IS IN LAST PLACE ! LAST PLACE! **************
Now please whine about the 3 listed at the link less than 1% each, so you can "pump up ati" by claiming "it's not last, which of course I would welcome, since it's much better than lying and claiming it's number one.
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I suspect all you crying ban babies are ready to claim to have found absolutely zero information or contributioon in this post.
tamalero - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
huge difference between INTEGRATED GRAPHIC SEGMENT, wich is almost every laptop there and a lot of business computers.versus the DISCRETE MARKET, wich is the GAMING section... where AMD-ATI and NVIDIA are 100%.
get your facts and see a doctor, your delusional attitude is getting annoying.