[Beowulf] Nvidia FERMI/gt300 GPU

[Tiago Marques]

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:01 AM, Igor Kozin <i.n.kozin at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Not only CUDA and OpenCL, but also DirectX, DirectCompute, C++, and
>> Fortran. From a programmer's point of view, it could be a major
>> improvement, and the only thing which still kept people from using
>> GPUs to run their code.
>
> all of the above but C++ can be used on the current hardware.
> CUDA Fortran is already available in PGI 9.0-4 (public beta).
>
>> On a side note, it's funny to notice that this is probably the first
>> GPU in history to be introduced by its manufacturer as a
>> "supercomputer on a chip", rather than a graphics engine which will
>> allow gamers to play their favorite RPS at never-reached resolutions
>> and framerates. Reading some reviews, it seemed that the traditional
>> audience of such events (gamers) were quite disappointed by not really
>> seeing what the announcements could mean to them.
>> After all, HPC is still a niche compared to the worldwide video games
>> market, and it's impressive that NVIDIA decided to focus on this tiny
>> fraction of its prospective buyers, rather than go for the usual
>> my-vertex-pipeline-is-longer-than-yours. :)
>
> yes, indeed and such a strong skew towards HPC worries me. there is
> almost no word how gamers are going to benefit from Fermi apart from
> C++ support. in the mean time RV770 offers 2.7 TFlops SP and 1/4 of
> that in DP which positions it pretty close to Fermi in that respect.
> in RV770, quick integer operations are in 24-bit and i wonder if the
> same still holds true for Fermi.

Integers are 32 in 64 bit in Fermi. AMD just wants to trick you,
running programs that try to reach those 2.7TFLOPs(like Furmark, which
AMD calls power viruses) results in the card throttling itself down to
perserve a healthy function of the VRM. This has been also the case
with the RV770 but in the RV870 it's done on hardware. When you
reached top processing speed on the RV770 the cards would frequently
shutdown. It remains to be seen what they will do with Firestream
cards, as for that I known not if it happens. It will if they quote
similar TDPs.

Best regards,
Tiago Marques

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