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
ECC Support
AMD's Radeon HD 5870 can detect errors on the memory bus, but it can't correct them. The register file, L1 cache, L2 cache and DRAM all have full ECC support in Fermi. This is one of those Tesla-specific features.
Many Tesla customers won't even talk to NVIDIA about moving their algorithms to GPUs unless NVIDIA can deliver ECC support. The scale of their installations is so large that ECC is absolutely necessary (or at least perceived to be).
Unified 64-bit Memory Addressing
In previous architectures there was a different load instruction depending on the type of memory: local (per thread), shared (per group of threads) or global (per kernel). This created issues with pointers and generally made a mess that programmers had to clean up.
Fermi unifies the address space so that there's only one instruction and the address of the memory is what determines where it's stored. The lowest bits are for local memory, the next set is for shared and then the remainder of the address space is global.
The unified address space is apparently necessary to enable C++ support for NVIDIA GPUs, which Fermi is designed to do.
The other big change to memory addressability is in the size of the address space. G80 and GT200 had a 32-bit address space, but next year NVIDIA expects to see Tesla boards with over 4GB of GDDR5 on board. Fermi now supports 64-bit addresses but the chip can physically address 40-bits of memory, or 1TB. That should be enough for now.
Both the unified address space and 64-bit addressing are almost exclusively for the compute space at this point. Consumer graphics cards won't need more than 4GB of memory for at least another couple of years. These changes were painful for NVIDIA to implement, and ultimately contributed to Fermi's delay, but necessary in NVIDIA's eyes.
New ISA Changes Enable DX11, OpenCL and C++, Visual Studio Support
Now this is cool. NVIDIA is announcing Nexus (no, not the thing from Star Trek Generations) a visual studio plugin that enables hardware debugging for CUDA code in visual studio. You can treat the GPU like a CPU, step into functions, look at the state of the GPU all in visual studio with Nexus. This is a huge step forward for CUDA developers.
Nexus running in Visual Studio on a CUDA GPU
Simply enabling DX11 support is a big enough change for a GPU - AMD had to go through that with RV870. Fermi implements a wide set of changes to its ISA, primarily designed at enabling C++ support. Virtual functions, new/delete, try/catch are all parts of C++ and enabled on Fermi.
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SiliconDoc - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
Yeah, of course, 3 million T core, and it doesn't need much bandiwth, and it won't be used, perhaps, or probably, because the GPU designers haven't a clue, and of course, you do.---
Another amazing clown with a red nose. You people really should stop typing stupid stuff like that.
Calin - Sunday, October 4, 2009 - link
There was no performance improvement from increasing the bandwidth of the Athlon64 processors due to the move to DDR2 memory (a theoretical doubling of performance, with about one and a half more measured bandwidth in the first generation of the processor).I might not have a clue, but do you?
SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Very interesting of course, and so with your theory, it could also be LOWER, with slower ddr5, but the fact REMAINS, 240 has ALREADY BEEN LEAKED.so we know what it is, and Anand KNOWS IT'S MORE, BUT NOT DOUBLE AND SAYS SO !
---
SO WHAT WE HAVE IS A CONVENIENT COVER UP. PERIOD!
--
JUST NOT AS STUPID AS YOU, THAT'S ALL.
dragunover - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
"SO WHAT WE HAVE IS A CONVENIENT COVER UP. PERIOD!--
JUST NOT AS STUPID AS YOU, THAT'S ALL. "
I disregarded anything you said before and after that.
SiliconDoc - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
I'm certain you attempted it, as you no doubt love to wallow in blissful ignorance and denial just by mere unchangeable habit.But having read it, you have nowhere to go. Your mind is already irreparably altered. Congratulations.
jonGhast - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
True, you seem to be a whole new level of stupid.mapesdhs - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
I have a theory on that one: faulty keyboard. Every time he hits Shift
to get upper case, his keyboard is zapping out brain cells with EMF bursts. :D
Best to just ignore & not reply IMO.
Ian.
SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Well you can't ignore the discussion, and as far as that goes, you want everyone else to do your will, as you beg for it, with your empty advice, which is by the way, all you provided in the last thread.So you quack around telling others not to participate. That's your whole gig mary.
I find the stupidity level amazing, as most of you can only spew in and beg eachother not to comment, and by the quality of the comments that actually try a counter, I certainly cannot blame you, for begging others to surrender ahead of time.
You notice how many new names are here ? lol
It's clear who and what it is that responds, and what level of conduct they are all about.
Now let's see the Sybillic mapes sign off on his/her own glorious advice, which she/he failed to follow already.
Silverel - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Hey buddy. Take a pill and relax.Your product isn't on the market yet. There's no recommendation to be heeded. It doesn't matter how fast it is, you can't have one. No one can. If someone wants to get their next-gen performance on now, ATI is what you'll buy.
It's okay though. Not everyone is going to run out and grab an ATI card. There's plenty of people that will wait for hell to freeze over for nVidia to release a new card. Personally, I'll take the Q1 2010 release date as semi-fact, but hell freezing over is my fallback date.
So feel free to continue ranting like you've run out of meds. Insult anyone who has made a comment contrary to your own. It's not really doing you any favors, but that's okay. I'm sure it's having an effect on the opinions of people sitting on the fence. Ah, and just to dig the finger in the wound, you can consider me an ATI shill, just for good measure.
SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Gosh you';re a sweetheart, too, and wrong ! WRONG ! WRONG !the red bloviator> " . If someone wants to get their next-gen performance on now, ATI is what you'll buy. "
Gee, did you lose it that easily, was your heart beating so hard, were you sweaty, and upset, and out of control, and decided it was great to tell me to settle down, when your brain was on FART ?
Please see the GTX295 that BEATS the 5870. The 5870 is PRIOR GEN performance - as ati's own 4870x2/or CF is equal.
Golly, what a deal, another red rooster massive ruse.