NVIDIA's Fermi: Architected for Tesla, 3 Billion Transistors in 2010

Anandtech ^ | September 30th, 2009 | Anand Lal Shimpi

[mamelukesabre]

HOLY MOLY!!!!

That’s insane.

3 billion transistors seems a little low for that many cores though. A current quad core i7 CPU from intel has almost a billion transistors. The six and eight core i9 CPUs will probably have 2 billion or more transistors. I would think.

I’m having a hard time imagining what software an average joe is going to run that will make full use of computer power 5 years from now.

[M Kehoe]

How are they going to cool the thing when processing the calculation for pi?

5.56mm

[SunkenCiv]

When I read (last year I guess) that the Folding@Home software had been ported to the GPUs, and that they were smokin’ all the other categories combined (including the PS/3, which had already previously smoked all the previous categories combined in about seven months’ time), I wondered how long before the GPU-makers parlayed that into success with mobile devices and whatnot. This is some cool whatnot, eh? ;’)

[Gene Eric]

>> Can programs such as Photoshop CSx or Gimp be easily recompiled to run under CUDA or will special versions have to be written?.

Not really. But computationally intensive algorithms could be cast off to the GPU while the CPU is handling other aspects of application processing.

Although Photoshop would not run from the GPU, things like filter effects, video encoding, and image scaling subsystems and plugins could leverage the GPU’s parallel processing technology resulting in total performance improvement. In other words, certain blocks of application functionality could execute on the GPU while the CPU services the bulk of the application’s general I/O and GUI requirements.

[Marine_Uncle]

Interesting talks on the new generation GPUs. As you noticed I do not keep abreast on new developments in the IC world or computers in general. But find it interesting reading.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

HardOCP has a white paper from Nvidia that is very interesting...particularly from software side....that are rolling out programming tools....

NVIDIA's "Fermi" Architecture White Paper

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For those of you that are wanting a better look inside of Fermi, we have republished NVIDIA's Fermi white paper here for your reading pleasure.

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NVIDIA has told us today that it will be a "few short months" before we see Fermi GPUs on retail video cards for gaming. They have also told us that Fermi will be close to the same power envelope as its current GPUs.

There are HardForums threads raging in the Video Card section for those of you wishing to jump into the fray.

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This is not going to be just a higher powered video card.....

Jump to the White paper....and .... the conclusion.....

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[Marine_Uncle]

Perhaps I’ just purchase a new super high end computer loaded with one of these GPU cards and replace the oil filled space heater in my basement with it. Talk about carbon foot prints. heheh.