Posted on 10/01/2009 1:46:49 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Graphics processor vendor Nvidia on Wednesday announced its next-generation CUDA graphics processor unit (GPU) architecture, code-named "Fermi."
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Department of Energy's largest science and energy laboratory, has announced it will build a new supercomputer More about supercomputer based on Fermi.
The new architecture has also garnered support from Cray (Nasdaq: CRAY) More about Cray, IBM (NYSE: IBM) More about IBM, HP (NYSE: HPQ) More about Hewlett-Packard, Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) More about Dell and other companies.
Enter the Fermi
Nvidia announced the Fermi architecture at its inaugural GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday.
In unveiling the architecture, Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jen-Hsun Huang said GPUs have gone beyond being just graphics chips and are now general purpose parallel computing processors with "amazing" graphics.
Fermi will be the foundation for Nvidia's next generation of GeForce, Quadro and Tesla processors.
"Fermi differs from ordinary GPUs, as it's the first to be designed from the ground up for general-purpose computation with features like ECC, support for C++, a true cache hierarchy and concurrent kernel execution that are critical requirements for the computing space," Nvidia spokesperson Andrew Humber told TechNewsWorld.
(Excerpt) Read more at technewsworld.com ...
Yeah, but will it run Duke Nukem without hanging?
People haven’t even begun to imagine how common place super massive n-dim processing will become. It will become our best weapon against cancer, with each case being modeled and treated by a portable n-dim processing unit.
Nvidia gives first look at next-gen Fermi GPU
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October 1, 2009 5:49 AM PDT
We wish we could provide you with information like clock speeds, shipping dates, and prices for 3D cards using Nvidia's new graphics architecture, code-named "Fermi." Instead, all we've been able to garner from the various reports around the Web from Nvidia's preview event is that Nvidia is pushing the parallel computing capabilities of its new chip harder than ever.
If you really want to get into the dirty architectural details, Anandtech, PC Perspective, and the Tech Report each have multipage stories that dig into the information Nvidia unveiled so far. From a gaming perspective, the most significant features Nvidia mentioned are that Fermi will indeed support DirectX 11, and that it will use GDDR5 memory. Those features answer two of AMD's most obvious advantages with its new Radeon HD 5800-series cards, but Nvidia hasn't provided information on availability, which remains AMD's most important edge.
Gaming was not the primary topic of the day with Fermi, however. Instead Nvidia focused most heavily on its CUDA GPU computing technology as it relates to its Tesla, enterprise-class product family. AnandTech reports that Nvidia cited one bragging point about a company using its previous generation GT200 chips to migrate "a cluster of 2000 servers to 32 Tesla S1070s, bringing total costs down from $8M to $400K, and total power from 1200kW down to 45kW." Nvidia hasn't mentioned clock speed figures for Fermi, so we can't predict its performance just yet, but as PC Perspective reports, Fermi "is made up of 3.0 billion transistors and features 512 CUDA processing cores organized into 16 streaming multiprocessors of 32 cores each." That's more than twice the core count in the 240-core GT200, so expectations are reasonably high.
What is that?
n-dimensional.
NVIDIA Takes GPU Computing to the Next Level
And:
NVIDIA's Fermi: Architected for Tesla, 3 Billion Transistors in 2010
Oak Ridge seems to have signed up.
I bet i’d get about 17,975 FPS on my Battlefield 2142 game with this.
AWESOME!!!!!
No really, This sounds sweet.
Sounds like Intel should be a little worried.
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