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Nvidia Pascal GPU to Feature 17B Transistors and 32GB HBM2 VRAM

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Re: Nvidia Pascal GPU to Feature 17B Transistors and 32GB HBM2 VRAM

#51
post #49
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to get lost in the noise of the "enthusiast" webring with their semiliterate "benchmarks" and overly paginated "reviews". They punch well above their actual purchasing weight and thus think they're a lot more important then they actually are.

Versus the data scientists and HPC communities that buy hundreds of Nvidia GPUs for CUDA and associated applications.

Well right, but compared to the number of units bought by IT departments, the "enthusiast" market is nothing but decimal dust.

Re: Nvidia Pascal GPU to Feature 17B Transistors and 32GB HBM2 VRAM

#52

I'm waiting for the comparisons between NVidia's offerings and Xeon Phi in real benchmarks

I believe the Xeon Phi is doing quite bad in that comparison, so you don't see much benchmark trumpeting from Intel. Here's one from Nvidia though (so add a pinch of salt or two), showing a 2x - 5x advantage of Tesla K80 over Knights Corner:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/justthefacts.html

Re: Nvidia Pascal GPU to Feature 17B Transistors and 32GB HBM2 VRAM

#53
post #50

Now, if only I could get a MackBook Pro with 32GB of system memory... Does anybody happen to know why that is such a difficult thing to achieve? It's amazing that, starting next year, there will be mainstream graphics cards with more memory than top-of-the-line laptops.

Do you need 32GB of RAM in a laptop? 16GB ought to be enough for anybody ;).

Sarcasm aside, this is probably purely business driven decision. The tech is there and it's nearly zero difference for the manufacturer to put either 8GB or 16GB dies on the board. It's the same as with SSD's - companies have to milk existing capacity tier to offer users next ones, otherwise they will have lower profits.

Re: Nvidia Pascal GPU to Feature 17B Transistors and 32GB HBM2 VRAM

#54
post #50

Now, if only I could get a MackBook Pro with 32GB of system memory... Does anybody happen to know why that is such a difficult thing to achieve? It's amazing that, starting next year, there will be mainstream graphics cards with more memory than top-of-the-line laptops.

I don't think you could get 16GB SO-DIMMs until earlier this year could you? I know you can get 32GB in a W550s which is probably the thinnest/lightest laptop capable of 32GB.

Re: Nvidia Pascal GPU to Feature 17B Transistors and 32GB HBM2 VRAM

#55
post #38
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2011: GTX 580, 1.5 TFLOPS 2012: GTX 680, 3.0 TFLOPS (~2.0 attainable) 2013: GTX Titan, 4.4 TFLOPS (~3.2 attainable) 2014: GTX 980, 4.6 TFLOPS 2015: GTX Titan X, 6.7 TFLOPS Looks to me like they're doubling perf roughly every 2 years. Meanwhle, my Core i7-5930k's SOL is <1/2 of 2011's GTX 580 at 672 GFLOPS and it still doesn't have fast approximate transcendentals. Skylake begins to fix this, but c'mon, GPUs have had…

Moore's law isn't about performance, it's the number of transistors on a single IC. Perf is related but irrelevant to the discussion.

GTX 580: 585M transistors

GTX 680: 3.5B transistors

GTX Titan: 7.1B transistors

GTX 980: 5.2B transistors

GTX Titan X: 8B transistors

Core i7-5930k: 2.6B transistors

What the data above suggests to me is that relying solely on Moore's Law to predict performance is a fool's errand. Going forward, process transitions are obviously slowing down and IMO victory will go to those who make the best use of the available transistors. Just like programmers who make the best use of the caches and registers in these processors get dramatically better performance than those who can't be bothered to even think about such things.

Intel's business strategy of backwards-compatibility is a giant albatross for them here in that they spend a lot of transistors on this, but clearly otherwise profitable. In contrast, while GPUs are mostly backwards-compatible, they usually oops I meant nearly always oops I meant always need some refactoring to hit close to peak performance. But that usually leads to ~2x performance improvements per generation so far.

Whenever someone complains about having to do this I ask them if they prefer this over hand-coded assembler inner loops for maximally exploiting SSE/SSE2/SSE3/SSE4/AVX2/AVX512? Usually, I get some dismissive remark about leaving that to the compiler. Good luck with that plan IMO.

Re: Nvidia Pascal GPU to Feature 17B Transistors and 32GB HBM2 VRAM

#56

> The 17 Billion transistors on the Pascal GPU are twice the transistors found on the GM200 Maxwell and the Fiji XT GPU core which is literally insane Seems like Moore's law is alive and well in the graphics/attached processor space.

That's because GPUs were frozen at the 28nm node since like 2011. It'll be ~4 years of no die shrinks at the top end of GPUs when they finally transition to 16nm. If anything, Moore's law is behind schedule in the GPU space. Note, that both NVidia and AMD rely on TSMC to manufacture their chips, so they're completely constrained by TSMC's ability to implement new process nodes.

My mistake, I don't follow it very closely anymore, so I made my statement with only 2 datapoints :). Have an upvote.

Re: Nvidia Pascal GPU to Feature 17B Transistors and 32GB HBM2 VRAM

#57
post #51
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Versus the data scientists and HPC communities that buy hundreds of Nvidia GPUs for CUDA and associated applications.

Well right, but compared to the number of units bought by IT departments, the "enthusiast" market is nothing but decimal dust.

IT departments are not buying Titans and they are not going to be buying Pascals.

IT departments aren't even buying Nvidia at all, they are buying Intel integrated.

Re: Nvidia Pascal GPU to Feature 17B Transistors and 32GB HBM2 VRAM

#58
post #31
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, this is exactly the marketing angle Nvidia CEO was using in his GPU Technology Conference presentation (10x speed-up on deep-learning vs their current Maxwell architecture): http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/03/17/pascal/

This also seems to be the motivation behind the already available Titan X with its 12GB of RAM. Some of the gaming hardware reviewers are scratching their heads as to why anyone would need 12GB attached to one die. I chuckled when I saw those reviews that were totally oblivious to the deep learning applications.

No, you are just totally oblivious to Nvidia's product segments.

The deep learning applications and those that want massive amount of RAM buy Teslas, which have exactly that. Titan X is a gaming card and it's marketed as such.

Re: Nvidia Pascal GPU to Feature 17B Transistors and 32GB HBM2 VRAM

#59
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also seems to be the motivation behind the already available Titan X with its 12GB of RAM. Some of the gaming hardware reviewers are scratching their heads as to why anyone would need 12GB attached to one die. I chuckled when I saw those reviews that were totally oblivious to the deep learning applications.

No, you are just totally oblivious to Nvidia's product segments. The deep learning applications and those that want massive amount of RAM buy Teslas, which have exactly that. Titan X is a gaming card and it's marketed as such.

We do SP GPU development requiring big memories and Titan X features heavily in nVidia's marketing towards us. Tesla is nowhere to be found.

Re: Nvidia Pascal GPU to Feature 17B Transistors and 32GB HBM2 VRAM

#60
post #26

> With 8Gb per DRAM die and 2 Gbps speed per pin, we get approximately 256 GB/s bandwidth per HBM2 stack. With four stacks in total, we will get 1 TB/s bandwidth on NVIDIA’s GP100 flagship Pascal which is twice compared to the 512 GB/s on AMD’s Fiji cards and three times that of the 980 Ti’s 334GB/s. > The Pascal GPU would also introduce NVLINK which is the next generation Unified Virtual Memory link with Gen 2.0 Cac…

Yes.. with the current deep dreaming fad, this could attract quite a few hobbyists eager to get near-real time video processing through large nn.
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