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15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern
31–40 of 93 posts
Re: 15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern
#32I'm not sure why the article dismisses cost. Let's say X=10% of the GPU area (~75mm^2) is dedicated to FP32 SIMD units. Assume FP64 units are ~2-4x bigger. That would be 150-300mm^2, a huge amount of area that would increase the price per GPU. You may not agree with these assumptions. Feel free to change them. It is an overhead that is replicated per core. Why would gamers want to pay for any features they don't use?…
> Assume FP64 units are ~2-4x bigger.
From the top of my head, overhead is around 10% or so.
> Why would gamers want to pay for any features they don't use?
Apparently FP80, which is even wider than FP64, is beneficial for pathfinding algorithms in games.
Pathfinding for hundredths of units is a task worth putting on GPU.
Re: 15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was definitely luck, greg. And Nvidia didn't invent deep learning, deep learning found nvidias investment in CUDA.
I remember it differently. CUDA was built with the intention of finding/enabling something like deep learning. I thought it was unrealistic too and took it on faith in people more experienced than me, until I saw deep learning work. Some of the near misses I remember included bitcoin. Many of the other attempts didn't ever see the light of day. Luck in english often means success by chance rather than one's own effor…
Nobody cared about deep learning back in 2007, when CUDA released. It wasn't until the 2012 AlexNet milestone that deep neural nets start to become en vogue again.
Re: 15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern
#34To me it is crazy that NVIDIA somehow got away with telling owners of consumer grade hardware.that they cannot be used in datacenters.
My understanding is this was not enforceable in Europe, and maybe elsewhere
Re: 15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember it differently. CUDA was built with the intention of finding/enabling something like deep learning. I thought it was unrealistic too and took it on faith in people more experienced than me, until I saw deep learning work. Some of the near misses I remember included bitcoin. Many of the other attempts didn't ever see the light of day. Luck in english often means success by chance rather than one's own effor…
Nobody cared about deep learning back in 2007, when CUDA released. It wasn't until the 2012 AlexNet milestone that deep neural nets start to become en vogue again.
I clearly remember Cuda being made for HPC and scientific applications. They added actual operations for neural nets years after it was already a boom. Both instances were reactions, people already used graphics shaders for scientific purposes and cuda for neural nets, in both cases Nvidia was like oh cool money to be made.
Re: 15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern
#36I hope for their fall. I invest in their success
Re: 15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern
#37To me it is crazy that NVIDIA somehow got away with telling owners of consumer grade hardware.that they cannot be used in datacenters.
My understanding is this was not enforceable in Europe, and maybe elsewhere
> My understanding is this was not enforceable in Europe, and maybe elsewhere
"Not enforceable" just means they can't sue you. It doesn't mean they can't say "We won't sell to you anymore".
Re: 15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern
#38A question that has been bugging me for a while is what will NVIDIA do with its HPC business? By HPC I mean clusters intended for non-AI related workloads. Are they going to cater to them separetely, or are they going to tell them to just emulate FP64?
Re: 15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern
#39[dead]
Re: 15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern
#40It's amazing to step back and look at how much of NVIDIA's success has come from unforeseen directions. For their original purpose of making graphics chips, the consumer vs pro divide was all about CAD support and optional OpenGL features that games didn't use. Programmable shaders were added for the sake of graphics rendering needs, but ended up spawning the whole GPGPU concept, which NVIDIA reacted to very well wit…
I don't think it was luck. I think it was inevitable.
They positioned the company on high performance computing, even if maybe they didn't think they were a HPC company, and something was bound to happen in that market because everybody was doing more and more computing. Then they executed well with the usual amount of greed that every company has.
The only risk for well positioned companies is being too ahead of times: being in the right market but not surviving long enough to see a killer app happen.