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NVidia’s General Manager of MCP Business Drew Henry held an interview with Digitimes magazine in which they discuss the absence of a 512-core Fermi card, the results of the initial benchmarks, and if DRAM price inflation will impact upcoming produce prices. Along the way, they push for details on the reports of poor yields out of TSMC.
TSMC’s yields for its 40nm process has met our expectations and market rumors about the yields being lower than 20% are completely untrue. We currently have everything under control.
via China to become the driver of future revenues growth: Q&A with Nvidia general manager of MCP business Drew Henry.
Hardware fermi, interview, nvidia
If
you thought the 3-Way SLI GTX480 benchmark was a bit extreme, then check out this impressive 4-way SLI GTX480 review from Hardware.info . At least they don’t have any quams about stating up front that the entire test if a bit frivolous.
To date, no publication in the world is a 4-way GTX 480 SLI arrangement tested. EVGA assistant Peter “Shamino” Tan improved earlier this week have any 3DMark records and ASUS has on his Facebook page a Rampage III Extreme motherboard with four GTX 480 cards to show , but a comprehensive analysis of the performance of quad-SLI with The GeForce GTX 480 is not yet come.
No sensible person is likely a setup like this ever, but that should not spoil the fun: In this article you can read what benefits you’re actually in 4-way SLI GTX 480 expect!
The end result isn’t all that surprising either. The performance boost in most applications is negligible, with the CPU and bus bandwidth being the limiting factors. In certain (Very extreme) configurations, there is a boost, such as this gain from 53 to 57fps. Otherwise, I’ld save the money.
via 4-way SLI GeForce GTX 480 review | Hardware.Info Netherlands.
Hardware extreme, fermi, nvidia, sli
Stock analysts have gotten some information on the inner workings of NVidia, and evidently didn’t like what they saw. Claiming chip yields of 20-30% for the Fermi processors, and a backlog inventory of only 10,000, they’ve downgraded from “Strong Buy” to “Hold” and expect them to lose market share in upcoming quarters.
Needham analyst says “We are downgrading NVIDIA to a Hold and removing our 12-month price target was $22 after a series of channel checks indicating that Fermi is not ramping well and there could be further product delays. Based on our findings NVIDIA has very limited supply of Fermi desktop notebook parts and yields remain poor at around 20-30 %”
Of course, this could be a big win for AMD who might find themselves with another 6-12 months of effectively no competition.
via StreetInsider.com – Update – Needham & Company Downgrades NVIDIA (NVDA) to Hold; Concerns of Fermi Ramp and Gross Margin Risk. via XBitLabs and ExPreview
Hardware fermi, nvidia
The developers of CULATools, a linear algebra library specifically designed and optimized for CUDA architectures, got their hands on the Fermi-based NVidia Tesla C2050 and put it through the paces. With almost no changes to the code (only a few compiler flags, no code changes), they got huge performance gains.
As you can see, Fermi is no slouch! We’re reporting performance gains for doubles up to 3x over the previous generation of Tesla GPUs. It’s also very important to note that these gains are achieved with no Fermi-specific optimizations added — these are practically plug-and-play performance enhancements. We have every expectation that with a little time and effort we can improve significantly upon these already impressive numbers.
via CULAtools – Initial Fermi Performance.
Hardware, Science benchmark, culatools, fermi, gpgpu, nvidia
Hardware.Info managed to get three of the new NVidia GTX480′s in a 3-way SLI rig, and put it through it’s paces against athe Radeon 5970′s and 5870′s. While there are some impressive discoveries, such as the failure of a 1KW power supply to keep the rig operational, the 3-way SLI rig seems to win in all of the most extreme cases. However, that brings to mind the big question: Is it worth the extreme cost? (translated from the original Dutch site)
But there is another side of the coin three GeForce GTX 480 cards asking nearly 1000 watts of power at full load. That is to swallow: four hours per day you can play at the end of the year around 300 euros. In addition there is the purchase of the cards, although the recommended 480 euros, the GeForce GTX 480 for an average of 550 euros over the counter. Three times you come out on Euro 1650, and then that we are still waiting for expensive processor. Opposite are three Radeon HD 5870 may be about 1140 euros in total cost and a maximum of consumption of around 640 watts yield. Although ATI scores in absolute performance can not match Nvidia, Crossfire appears to have three cards scale better than SLI. With ATI cards provide two additional 151.8% extra performance, with nVidia 128.2%. In contrast, two cards in SLI just scales better. Four GPUs combine, in the form of two Radeon HD 5970′s, according to our tests show an unholy plan. Three 5870′s is almost always faster.
Clash of the Titans: 3-way SLI GTX 480 test | Hardware.Info Nederland. (English Translation via Google Translate)
Hardware benchmark, fermi, nvidia
We have posted rumors about the yields for the GTX480 and GTX470 in the past. One rumor was that the GF100 yields are below 50% at TSMC. This is an improvement over the 2% yields reported last year. 50% yields are in line with what was reported for ATI last year.
Nvidia recently held the Nvidia Game Festival (NGF) in Shanghai, China. This festival was to promote the launch of its GeForce GTX 480 and 470 graphics cards. Digitimes is reporting that NVidia is happy with the yields that they are getting. Of course, they do not say what those yields actually are.
Commenting on recent market rumors the Nvidia’s GTX 480 and 470 GPU yields are only about 20%, Drew Henry, Nvidia general manager of MCP business, refuted the rumors saying yields have met company expectations.
via Nvidia holds gaming festival in China to promote GeForce GTX480/470.
Hardware fermi, geforce, gf100, gtx470, gtx480, nvidia
Expreview.com is reporting that the GeForce GTX 460 will be arriving on June 1st. The timing is about right since COMPUTEX runs from June 1st to June 5th. The GTX 460 is rumored to have 384 shader cores running at 500 to 600 MHz. The memory bus would be 256 bits wide, run at about 850 MHz, and support 1 GB of GDDR5 memory.
Previously we reported that the GeForce GTS 450, 440, and 430 would be arriving in June. The GTS 440 and 450 would have a 40nm GF104 core. This core has 256 shader cores and a 256-bit memory bus. The GTS 440 would have 20% slower clock speeds than the GTS 450. The GTS 430, using a cut-down version of the GF104, will have 192 shader cores and have a 192-bit memory bus. These video cards are reportedly due in June 2010.
Hardware fermi, gtx460, nvidia
Guru3d has some pictures from EVGA running a setup of four, count them, four GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards running in quad-SLI. Can you imagine the power supply that would be needed to drive that thing? Let’s see here. Four GeForce GTX 480′s at 250 Watts apiece equals one kilowatt of power. And that does not include the rest of the system. While they can and do make power supplies up to 1400 Watts, I imagine that they actually used two different power supplies. That is just sketched out using a back-of-the-napkin approach. Click through the link below to see another image of the setup.
As you can see the setup is up and running, but no benchmarks are shared just yet. It certainly will be very interesting to see how well the scores scale. The motherboard used was a eVGA 4-Way SLI classified motherboard. Anyway have a look at some photo’s.
via EVGA teases with GTX 480 4 Way SLI.
Hardware fermi, gtx480, nvidia, sli
Since the GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla products are all based on the same graphics chip from Nvidia, one of the things that people have done is to buy the lower cost product (GeForce) and use it like a higher cost product (Quadro and Tesla). Sure you may have to give up on a few features, but not everyone needs them. Sure you may have to give up some of the extra memory, but it may be worth the price. This is a trade-off that purchasers have to make. Hexus has found yet another trade-off, and one that I had not heard of yet. The GeForce GTX 480 will have 1/8th of the speed as it does in single precision. That may not be a deal breaker to some people. After all, the GeForce GTX 285 had a similar problem. But for those expecting the double precision speed to have increased to ½ that of single precision, it does make a difference.
As much of a general-purpose computer as a GPU, the parallel architecture is also designed for the high-performance computing segment in mind. The enhanced cache structure, detailed above, helps with general computations, and GF100’s adherence to the IEEE 754-2008 floating-point standard means that it can run high-accuracy tests (double-precision support) at an increased rate when compared to anything NVIDIA has designed before.
Delve a little deeper, handily not mentioned in any briefing, and NVIDIA is limiting the double-precision speed of the desktop GF100 part to one-eighth of single-precision throughput, rather than the one-fifth speed of the Radeon HD 5000-series. We’ll have to wait for the Tesla parts before that’s restored to the one-half speed the GF100 is capable of.
via HEXUS.net – Review :: NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 480 finally unleashed. Reviewed and rated. : Page – 3/17.
Hardware fermi, gf100, gtx470, gtx480, nvidia
Over at Nvidia’s nTersect blog, Drew Henry has written a nice short post acknowledging some of the public’s comments about the incredible power consumption and heat dissipation of the GTX470 and GTX480.
We wanted to let you know that we’ve also heard your concerns about GTX 480 with respect to power and heat. When you build a high performance GPU like the GTX 480 it will consume a lot of power to enable the performance and features I listed above. It was a tradeoff for us, but we wanted it to be fast. The chip is designed to run at high temperature so there is no effect on quality or longevity. We think the tradeoff is right.
Nothing too impressive there, but if you read down in the comments, Drew responds directly to user’s comments with more interesting details:
When asked about Denmark release:
When asked about why the new architecture:
When asked about the missing 512 core card:
And lots more.. go check it out.
via nTersect Blog – GTX 480: A Passion for the Future of PC Gaming.
Hardware fermi, nvidia
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