[PLUG] Nvidia Geforce GPU presentation

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2007 at 09:34:35AM -0700, Jason Martin wrote:
> 
> Anyway, *THIS* is the video I was talking about, showing 1Tflop at
> just under 40 watts (the link above shows 60 watts from a much earlier
> demo).
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95fcdJPKp3o

That is exciting, though as a chip designer I should caution folks
that it is misleading to compare lab prototype results with delivered
product results.  The Intel chip is not a released product (and given
the die size, it is unlikely to be, as-is) while the Nvidia product
is available for purchase.  If Nvidia's trend line of 2x performance
per year improvement is accurate, then we can expect that they are
evaluating >1Tflop prototypes themselves, right now.

On the other hand, Intel will always have better manufacturing than
Nvidia, so I expect them to develop an advantage if they enter the
desktop supercomputer market.  

On the grippling hand, it is really AMD/ATI versus Intel and Nvidia,
and I would guess that Intel and Nvidia will develop a partnership in
this area .  I hope they agree to use the same parallel programming
source language ( CUDA? ) so that software is portable between products.
The most important message from the Nvidia presentation is that the
CUDA compiler produces object code that works on their entire product
line - no recompiles for low and high end, old and new products. 
While I don't expect Intel and Nvidia to be binary compatable, it
would be nice if they were source-code compatable.

It may be no coincidence that Nvidia gave their presentation at the
same time that Intel is holding big internal meetings about future
direction setting (which is why there were so many Intel folk in
town for that talk, from what I overheard).

Welcome to the Teraflop sweepstakes.  Start your engines ...

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs