Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

Post by macksd » Thu, May 14, 2020, 2:52 PM UTC

Post by KenoFischer » Thu, May 14, 2020, 2:56 PM UTC

macksd wrote: post #71

The numbers for their SATURNV supercomputer are either untrue or absolutely staggering. 4.6 exaflops? #1 on the Top 500 list of supercomputers just barely passed 200 petaflops at peak performance. If you add up the entire list you only get 1.65 exaflops. And LINPACK isn't usually network-bound. How can this possibly be true?

Post by chupasaurus » Thu, May 14, 2020, 2:57 PM UTC

__alexs wrote: post #63

notact wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So wait, the GTC keynote which was scheduled weeks/months ago, happens to follow news that Epic dropped with absolutely no warning, and apparently that counts as stealing thunder. Is that really what you are saying?

Nvidia probably collaborated on the Epic demo but also they are aimed at two entirely different sets of customers. Nvidia's news cycle is data center updates in May, consumers/gamer updates in September.

Post by dahart » Thu, May 14, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #53

tasogare wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He seemed like an excited engineer Is this a bad thing? I personally avoid presentations made by CEO of big corporations as it’s usually a Bingo of all the trendy buzzwords that as in fine no meaning.

Yes and no. When a kludged together demo fails and there's an awkward moment, sometimes a little more prep might be nice. But on the other hand, I feel better about a company focused on doing actual work rather than polishing demos.

Post by pjmlp » Thu, May 14, 2020, 3:03 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #47

wegs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's irrelevant to researchers. Research operates on rapid cycles: prototype, publish, move on. It does impact businesses. It doesn't prevent adoption for e.g. deep learning, but I haven't seen e.g. GPU-based databases reach broad adoption, or many other places where MIMD/SIMD would reduce costs or improve performance. Using classical hardware is clearly cheaper than the business risk and engineering time of relying…

Hypothetically, from an ISA perspective, why couldn't Intel and AMD extend x86-64 more fully with SIMD / MIMD instructions? (as in, way more fully than MMX / SSE / AVX) Naive question, because I literally don't know the link between CPU instruction stream and GPGPU instruction stream. But it seems like there would be an opportunity to seize the higher (open) ground at the ISA level, and then force Nvidia to implement…