News Nvidia CEO reveals Fermi architecture

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/09/30/huang-reveals-fermi-architecture/1

GTC 2009: Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed the company's next generation GPU architecture, codenamed Fermi.

 

hhmmm Games are definitely not going to need THIS much power. The ATI 5870 is already well overpowered for anything now, that's why AMD are pushing using Many multiple displays as this is the only thing that actually pushes the hardware!

Isitari.

 

There really isn't any thing as too much power. This much power is great for other areas besides games: offline computing, scientific visualization, etc.

 

How do people ever buy hardware for their pc?? Every time I come close to buying a part there's a new one just over the horizon!

 

It seems strange to position yourself in the market of co-processors that do double duty as graphics cards. It's expensive and there are hundreds of millions of transistors that will inevitably be useless to the majority of their market...

Do they really think that selling millions of co-processors to people will keep their company afloat against more dedicated solutions? It seems a bit hard to imagine that this will work out for them. Oh well, its an interesting thing to see.

 

One of the demos they've shown is speeding up early tumour detection for breast cancer... going from approx 9 hours to less than 30 mins. Nvidia's moving beyond just graphics and has been for some time... it looks like this time they've not forgotten about graphics like they seemed to with GT200.

 

This is looking good particular for CUDA programming close to metal. This is definitely geared more towards compute than gaming which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Folding anyone???

 

Anand put up a relatively in-depth look at the new architecture earlier today, including why they're emphasizing compute. Interesting stuff.

 

lol, it's a long time ago since NVIDIA was purely a graphics company. They are into CPUs (ARM), GPUs, CUDA, and all that now.
This way they can have a foot in more markets and that will make them stay afloat.

ATI can ride the cheap graphics bandwagon as long as they want of course (we like cheap graphics).

 

The sad thing is that they aren't focusing on Graphics which is pretty much the focus of the GPU industry.

 

Ever since the 3Dfx Voodoo, GPU development has always been about making games run faster with better graphics.
Reading this, this is the first time I've felt that's not true any more.
I think Nvidia can see future profits coming from large business rather than PC gaming.

 

Makes sense, although I want GPUs to be like the 6800GT ---> 7800GTX. Or the 7800GTX ---> 8800GTX.

I mean the evolution was incredible. Now it's still a bit dissapointing. I mean the 8800GTS 640/320MB was almost 2x the performance of the previous generation, and remember this was a midrange card.

 

I'm guessing that Fermi will be 10-20% faster than Evergreen, but nVidia will make ~30% less money per gpu than AMD (2x10^9 vs. 3x10^9 transistors at 40 nm TSMC). Also that the capability to execute code written in c++ is through LLVM.

 

Confused..

When you will decide to buy a device the next day you will find another better than that...just confusing..

 

huang said he's going to start offering suki suki with each nvidia card.. this reminds me so much of when the g80 was released- everyone was like holy cow waiting for ati's response

ati and that guy at the inquirer were hyping up ati's phantom card for the longest time.. it released and everyone who was waiting like myself was like wtf- it was just a bunch chicken ****

I'm not holding my breath.. real time ray tracing.. smoke up my ass

 

I always take Charlie's nVidia predictions with a grain of salt, but I'm starting to think he may be right about a Q1 2010 launch for "GT300" this time.
The rumours floating around is that the GT300 is floating around developers and so on. To quote Johnny Rotten: "Horses, Horses, Horses**t!"
Do we all seriously think that Jen-Hsun "Whoop-Ass" Huang would present Fermi to the public and NOT show it in action? Especially when he is attempting to dull the Evergreen launch?
And no, I don't count an image of it supposedly ray-tracing a Bugatti (are we to take nVidia's word on this?) and holding a black card in his hand that does nothing.
The problem I have at the moment is that I don't trust nVidia even when they may be telling me the truth.
Too much FUD, not enough action.

 

Have you guys checked out the comments of the Anandtech Fermi article? There's the biggest Internet troll raging insanely I've ever seen called SiliconDoc. He's hilarious, and so incredibly sad. Is this the same SiliconDoc banned here? I can't help but notice a similarity.

Article comments: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3651#comments
Bit-Tech profile: http://forums.bit-tech.net/member.php?u=41666

 

I don't think you can put much stock in those figures. First, a very large portion of the unit cost of a GPU, especially in its early production phases, must relate to amortisation of research and development costs.

Secondly, I would expect the cost to produce a 3bn transistor chip will be significantly more than 50% more than the cost to produce a 2bn transistor chip - if yields were perfect, that might be the case, but remember that even one dud transistor can spoil a chip entirely, and the likelihood of a 3bn transistor chip having at least one dud is substantially greater than for a 2bn transistor chip.

Finally, even if your assumptions on cost of production were right, that is simply cost of production. It has to be assumed that nVidia will charge a premium for its GPU if it is faster than AMD's offering, so revenue per unit will be higher. This higher price would be expected to have a knock on effect on volumes.

There are too many unknowns in this for you or me to make any kind of estimate as to which architecture will be more profitable.

 

Screw crap x86 CPU garbage from AMD and Intel.

Fermi and Cypress are beautiful works of art and mark the start of the GPU age. Kudos to ATI and Nvidia for keeping well ahead of Moores Law and giving developers and programmers new toys to play with!

 

Well they seemed to have slightly more than doubled the compute power so for games so it should end up reasonably faster than the 5870. Too bad its still a little while off. Hopefully NVIDIA aren't being completely stupid and abandoning performance in 3D Graphics since that is basically 99% of their revenue.

I also read somewhere that the demo fermi card shown was just a mock up so I'm guessing a release will not happen this year.