Nvidia has been talking about Fermi all week and keeps talking about the power of GPGPU on it, but they haven’t really said anything about the graphics capabilities. Why is that? Here’s a response on the hpc-focus from NVidia CEO Bill Dally:
He also explained why the chip was billed as a supercomputer chip initially and not a gaming chip. “It’s a zero-sum game. You have a certain amount of die (chip) area, a certain power budget. It is the case that we put a bunch of die area into double-precision floating point, a bunch of die area into ECC. And for gaming graphics applications, those give less returns than they do for the scientific applications,” he said. Double-precision floating point operations are used heavily in scientific computing. ECC, or error correcting code, is a technology that can correct data errors on the fly.
Of course, it’s not really for HPC-only, it will run graphics as well. However, give a user the choice of a minor increase in graphics quality (bump mapping or better shadows) and better physics (via GPU-accelerated systems like PhysX) and I bet they’ll take the physics, and that’s exactly what Fermi brings.
via Nvidia ‘Fermi’ chip for Mac, Windows too | Nanotech – The Circuits Blog – CNET News.
