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Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

blogs.nvidia.com

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Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#321

Post by [deleted] »

sabalaba wrote: post #274
Keyframe wrote: post #42

5 petaflops in DGX? That alone would put one of those babies into TOP500 top 50, and a superPOD would make no. 1, no? Well, if it could do that performance on Linpack/Rmax.

No, the A100 has a 19.5 TFLOP theoretical peak for SGEMM[1], real world benchmarks will likely achieve 93% of that, and so the DGX A100 will be 145 TFlops of FP32 SGEMM performance or 0.145 FP32 PFLOPS. Maybe in 72 FP64 TFLOPS. FP64 is what the TOP500 benchmaks count.[2] The 5 "petaflops" number is a creatively constructed marketing number based on FP16 TensorCore "flops", sparse matrix calculations, and then multipl…

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#322

Post by rrss »

sabalaba wrote: post #274
Keyframe wrote: post #42

5 petaflops in DGX? That alone would put one of those babies into TOP500 top 50, and a superPOD would make no. 1, no? Well, if it could do that performance on Linpack/Rmax.

No, the A100 has a 19.5 TFLOP theoretical peak for SGEMM[1], real world benchmarks will likely achieve 93% of that, and so the DGX A100 will be 145 TFlops of FP32 SGEMM performance or 0.145 FP32 PFLOPS. Maybe in 72 FP64 TFLOPS. FP64 is what the TOP500 benchmaks count.[2] The 5 "petaflops" number is a creatively constructed marketing number based on FP16 TensorCore "flops", sparse matrix calculations, and then multipl…

> 8x from somewhere else that I have no idea.

8 GPUs in the box.

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#323

Post by fluffything »

wegs wrote: post #317
fluffything wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What technology would you bet your business on then? Today, you can write numpy code, and that runs on pretty much all CPUs from all vendors, with different levels of quality. A one line change allows you to run all numpy code you write on nvidia GPUs, which at least today, are probably the only GPUs you want to buy anyways. In practice, you would probably be also running your whole software stack on CPUs, at least f…

shrug I'll bet my business on waiting an extra 15 minutes for analytics code to run. Seriously. There's little most businesses really needs that I couldn't do on a nice 486 running at 33MHz. Now, if a $5000 workstations gives even 5% improvement to employee productivity, that's an obvious business decision. That doesn't mean it's necessary for a business to work. So dropping $1000 on an NVidia graphics card, if thing…

Please, show us how to train Alexa or BERT on a 486. That'll definitely win you the Turing and Gordon Bell prices, and probably the Peace Nobel price for all those power savings!

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#324

Post by rodburns »

BeetleB wrote: post #263
adev_ wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AMD could release a 2x powerful GPGPU tomorrow for half the price and most current NVIDIA users wouldn't care because what good is that if you can't program it?. Correction: Nobody will be able to use the AMD hardware (outside of computer graphics) because everybody has been locked-in with CUDA on Nvidia. They can not even change even if they want to: it is pure madness to reprogram an entire GPGPU software stack e…

>> ARM and Intel make great software [..] doesn't open-source any of that either for the same reasons as NVIDIA. > That's propaganda and it's wrong. Very convenient of you to have omitted what was in the square brackets: > Intel MKL, Intel SVML, ... libraries, icc, ifort, ... compiler Show me the open source MKL, Intel SVML, icc and ifort. Some (all?) of it may be free, but it's not open source.

I don't necessarily have an opinion either way in this discussion but wanted to point out that Intel's latest MKL library does seem to be done as an open source project https://github.com/oneapi-src/oneMKL

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#325

Post by shubuZ »

sk0g wrote: post #29
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #19

7 times V100 performance for BERT. That is insane!

Mind you, this is an optimised version of BERT, from what I could see in their blog post.

The network topology is the same, no modules are removed, etc. Of course it will be optimized to run on Ampere

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#326

Post by QuixoticQuibit »

w0utert wrote: post #299
fluffything wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They make good hardware, but there's a lot of lock-in, and not a lot of transparency. This sounds like you'd like NVIDIA to open-source all their software. I see this type of request a lot, but I don't see it happening. NVIDIA's main competitive advantage over AMD and Intel is its software stack. AMD could release a 2x powerful GPGPU tomorrow for half the price and most current NVIDIA users wouldn't care because wh…

>> NVIDIA's main competitive advantage over AMD and Intel is its software stack. AMD could release a 2x powerful GPGPU tomorrow for half the price and most current NVIDIA users wouldn't care because what good is that if you can't program it? I always wonder why it is so hard for AMD to develop a true competitor to CUDA, but for AMD hardware? Not try to solve GPGPU programming through open standards like OpenCL, just…

Two thoughts that come to mind:

1. AMD has struggled in the past and even today on being profitable with their GPUs. Makes it difficult to entice an army of knowledgeable devs without consistent cash flow. Granted, the tide is turning with their profitable CPU business and equity has shot up.

2. More importantly I think that, being the underdog, AMD has to have a cheaper, open solution to compete. Why would a customer choose to go with AMD’s nascent and proprietary stack over Nvidia’s well established and nearly ubiquitous proprietary stack?

To be clear, I don’t think the problems are insurmountable. AMD won a couple HPC deals recently which should afford them the opportunity to build up their software and invest in a competitive hardware solution.

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#327

Post by partingshots »

xvilka wrote: post #16

Probably even more closed than ever. They tend to become more and more restrictive with every new hardware generation. I wonder where their promised open source announcement they preannounced before.

Do you have a link for their open source announcement?

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#328

Post by BobbyJo »

tylerhou wrote: post #234
BobbyJo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ampere has been on NVidia's roadmap for the better part of a decade.

> Ampere has been on NVidia's roadmap for the better part of a decade. Not publicly, at least, since rumors of the "Ampere" naming surfaced around late 2017. https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/matthew-wil...

Ah, I thought I remembered seeing the name on their roadmap earlier than that, but I must have been mistaken. In any case I think it's safe to say the name wasn't ripped off anyone give the names of pervious products and the timing of those rumors.

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#329

Post by wegs »

fluffything wrote: post #323
wegs wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

shrug I'll bet my business on waiting an extra 15 minutes for analytics code to run. Seriously. There's little most businesses really needs that I couldn't do on a nice 486 running at 33MHz. Now, if a $5000 workstations gives even 5% improvement to employee productivity, that's an obvious business decision. That doesn't mean it's necessary for a business to work. So dropping $1000 on an NVidia graphics card, if thing…

Please, show us how to train Alexa or BERT on a 486. That'll definitely win you the Turing and Gordon Bell prices, and probably the Peace Nobel price for all those power savings!

Please show me a business (aside from Amazon, obviously) who needs Alexa.

Most businesses need a word processor, a spreadsheet, and some kind of database for managing employees and inventory. A 486 does that just fine.

Most businesses derive additional value from having more, but that's always an ROI calculation. ROI has two pieces: return, and investment. Basic business analytics (regressions, hard-coded rules, and similar) have high return on low investment. Successively complex models typically have exponentially-growing complexity in return for diminishing returns. At some point, there's a breakpoint, but that breakpoint varies for each business.

If the goal is to limit GPGPU to businesses whose core value-add is ML (the ones building things like Alexa), NVidia has done an amazing job. If the goal is to have GPGPU as common as x86, NVidia has failed.

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#330

Post by Sebb767 »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #286
Sebb767 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPU passthrough is also doable pretty easily on NVidia nowadays. See here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM... /r/VFIO on Reddit is also pretty helpful. That being said, I fully support you buying and using AMD. But no need to throw out perfectly fine hardware in case you still have NVidia lying arround.

> GPU passthrough is also doable pretty easily on NVidia nowadays. By actively working against Nvidia who could break it again at any time if they wanted to: > Starting with QEMU 2.5.0 and libvirt 1.3.3, the vendor_id for the hypervisor can be spoofed, which is enough to fool the Nvidia drivers into loading anyway. If you already have Nvidia, fine, but to me this reads as a strong reason to not buy Nvidia if you can…

Oh, don't get me wrong, I surely don't want to encourage you to buy Nvidia.

To be fair here, AMD also has some gripes with VFIO: Namely, the reset bug on Navi (which I personally didn't experience, but read about quite a few times) and disabled vGPU support on their smaller cards, which is, as far as I know, only a software solution and not really something that would steal their business customers either.

Still, I'm rooting for AMD, if only for the fact that they're the reason it doesn't take six CPU generations any more to have a 50% performance bump.

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