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Nvidia cuts Tesla's performance
DESIGNER OF WARM GPUS Nvidia has cut the performance of its Fermi based Tesla GPGPU aimed at the high performance computing (HPC) market.
The server vendors Appro and Supermicro recently announced 1U servers featuring up to four Tesla cards. We marvelled at the engineering brilliance of the two firms as they had to overcome the associated power and heat issues that come with graphics cards that use the Green Goblin's Fermi architecture.
It seems those engineering feats were helped, in a manner of speaking, by Nvidia itself, through a decrease in the shader count and clock speeds. The latest specifications detail a 18 per cent clock decrease, coupled with a previously announced 12.5 per cent cut in the number of "stream processors" from 512 to 448, and the board tipped up drawing 10 per cent more power than previous vague estimates that had been bandied about by the firm late last year.
Given that server vendors flog their units by stressing the performance per watt per square foot metric, Nvidia's cuts in performance and increase in power won't help Appro or Supermicro shift too many of their boxes kitted out with Tesla cards.
This is perhaps not surprising given the months of delays that Nvidia has had trying to get its Fermi GPUs out the door. Regardless of who you believe (though we do tend to agree with Charlie Demerjian's analysis over at SemiAccurate), even the most fortuitous yield reports are abysmal and Nvidia's repeated attempts to rein in the power consumption of a chip that has the same thirst for power as a tinpot dictator seem to have failed, with the firm even having admitted that its Fermi GTX480 GPU chip runs hot.
The whole sorry saga is set to hurt Nvidia in its latest push into the HPC market where it has previously done well against its competition. The problem is, with the power requirements being so high and the scale of the performance decrease, the numbers of extra servers that will be required to overcome the shortfall might be too much for prospective customers.
All of this could make Nvidia's efforts to become a big player in the HPC market go up in smoke like an insufficiently cooled Fermi chip. µ
Tags: Nvidia
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Oh boo hoo!
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/NVIDIA-Tesla-GPUs-Power-New-iw-398279399.html?x=0&.v=1
Now, where is Larrabee?
LoL!
Fermi sports 3GB or 6GB of GDDR5 clocked at 1.5Ghz. That is about as stable as Amy Winehouse alone in a chemist's shop. (pharmacy).
The fact that it is "ECC" is about as useful as duck s_it on a doorknob as it will fix a single bit error, flag a two bit error and completely miss a multi-bit error. In a video or game app, who cares if a single frame has munged pixels.
Huang and company got too high on the smell of their own flatulence.
still, as an end consumer, the best single gpu solution is still nvidia. good drivers, physx, and they constantly work with game developers.
i love ati hardware, but hate their drivers even more (x1950pro, 4870). new drivers shouldnt result in lower performance and new problems with existing games.
sure nvidia doesnt have a perfect history, but so what. ati drivers dont even come close. id be content using older drivers and being cautiously optimistic about new ati drivers, IF i could reliably force aa/af, and theyve had this problem for years, its a little pathetic. and even ati tray tools is wonky.
c'mon ati.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/blog-post/1595223/nvidia-overcooks-driver-update
like that? show me when amd / ati went so bad with a driver it started killing cards in multiple digits.
get a grip ? cos nvidia aint got one, overpriced, overrated. mebe intel should take a hint.
So, where are the rabid defenders of Nvidia ? Why aren't there tons of comments here questioning the objectiveness (and the masculinity) of the writer ?
Where are the eternal "Inq biais" comments ?
Come on guys, at least make a show of it.
No ?
Ok I wouldn't really wish for nVidia's demise, but I can't help but having one side of me yelling: DIE!!.
And why? well over and over again nVidia seems to screw people over, first there was the whole 3DFX thing.. ok the company was dead and it was a natural part of "life" but it still felt a bit like a kick in the balls that they bought the company they defeated :P.
ULI.. I don't know if many people remember this but back when DDR memory was still attractive and we had a lot of fun with Socket 939 ATI was showing potential, nVidia was going strong with nForce, Via sucked, and along came ULI with a cheap alternative that was pretty ok, well I was foolish enough to buy a ULI based Asrock board for my parents computer, well thank you nVidia for buying Uli directly after and stopping all development, thank you because they wanted to Install Windows 7 and there was no Sata drivers for ULI chipset.. Wankers.
And for buying PhysX a project I was really excited about, I even bought the first PhysX card when they released it, well if I want physx now I need to buy one of nVidias powerhungry beasts.
So yeah would be nice to see them pay for all their crap! But I also want to see someone compete with ATI, preferebly as vicious as ATI competed with nVidia when they were ahead.
As much as I enjoy seeing nvidia fail, I do sort of want them to succeed, even if its just for competition's sake; They have had a few golden moments, its a shame they haven't got the engineering down these days. Last good one I remember was the one fabed by ibm...
Fermi was always a bit of a gamble(too early), Intel decided to bail on the concept(compute oriented graphics), at least for the moment, and ATI has stuck with what works. Makes me wonder what a fusion as a compute graphics card could do.
But give fermi a generation or three, then it's come into its own.
Spose nvidia is kicking it's self for not acquiring that real-time ray-tracing guy though...
Look. We all knew that Huang's Nvidia and company WOULD face it's due justice. These people have LIED to the public and KNOWINGLY sold defective product for 2+ years. DELL, Apple, HP and others as well as the public have had to return and pay for defectively designed manufactured chipsets. It is WELL chronicled (even in this site) Nvidia's LIBELOUS conduct. So I say. "GOOD FOR THEM!" Now if we can just get the word out. They have ( this is also documented) cost the above companies and the public MILLIONS and MILLIONS, in rework and in lost man-hours.
It's the bad mojo coming back at them for blackmailing/money crushing 3DFX out of business and not even using the technology that they ended up with.
An eye for an eye.
uh, AMD video cards and drivers are many times more *predictable* than nvidia cards? uh, what does this mean exactly? If my nvidia cards don't act as *expected*, it means they are defective and they get sent back. and that happens to *all* pc components.
now what hasn't changed, is the *unpredictability* of ATI drivers. The recent ones are better but I cringe at every new update wondering if my card will work with it.
Nvidia drivers are still more *predictable*... whatever that means.
Charlie Demerjian over at SemiAccurate nailed this one to the wall months ago.
But, don't worry, his dream is going to be a reality from GPUs whose come from his first employer, AMD.
Of course nVidia get beat up, because they deserve it. They have over-hyped their products for far too long. They are a preditor company that buys technology only to bury it so they don't have competition. Fortunately ATI still stands strong, and produces products that are many times more stable and predictable.
Nvidia = Jen-Hsun Huang = Fermi = Tesla = FAIL
Do you see the problem in this equation?
Nvidia share on NASDAQ dropped 25% since December 2009. Amazingly, a good chunk of that drop coincide with the launch of the GF100! There was a little spike on April 12 and then, crash since then!
The striking thing is, only 30 months ago, Nvidia stock was at 250% of the present value! LOL
With this devastating news about Tesla on top of everything else that can now can be called the Fermi Fiasco, their stock is going nowhere but down. Way down.
What a joke Nvidia has become. I'm almost sad for them, except of course Jen-Hsun Huang...
Ramon