NVidia has published most of the recordings from the recent GPU Technology Conference on their website. Head on over there to download the posters, watch the keynotes, or see the recordings of any of the sessions.
At the recent GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, NVidia’s Principal System Software Engineer Mark Kilgard spoke about what you can expect to see in the upcoming OpenGL3.2 and some of the other things NVidia has in development, such as:
And much much more.. The 84-slide presentation is available on SlideShare, and I’ve embedded it after the break for you to see.
In response to the big news about the breakdown of NVidia’s Fermi presentation at GTC, Nvidia has issued a format response confirming what I suspected: Fermi is real, and was running at GTC, but it’s still very much an “engineering prototype”:
Nvidia confirms Fermi that was running PhysX at Jensen’s GTC keynote was real but the one that we all took pictures of was a mock-up.
The real engineering sample card is full of dangling wires. Basically, it looks like an octopus of modules and wires and the top brass at Nvidia didn’t want to give that thing to Jensen. This was confirmed today by a top Nvidia VP president class chap, but the same person did confirm that the card is real and that it does exist.
via Fudzilla.
Be sure to read the followup to this, including comments from NVidia.
NVidia showed the GT300 (Fermi) board up on stage during the keynote of the GTC this week, but was it a real Fermi board? Or merely a prop? They were pretty positive about release and production schedules, but SemiAccurate takes a close-up look at the photos and PR material Nvidia gave out and paints a less rosy picture of the situation.
Some things to note on it. First is that the second set of digits on the first line says 0935A1. A1 is for first silicon, something that, when coupled with a direct quote from Jen-Hsun of, “You are currently looking at a few day old silicon” (from here select the video “See video of Jen-Hsun Huang announcing Fermi”) kind of blows the whole ’silicon in Santa Clara last spring’ story out of the water. I wonder if anyone will retract that, or just change the article retroactively?
To make matters worse, the other digits are a date code, 0935 means 2009, work week 35. If Nvidia starts its work week on the first full week of the year like everyone else, that would put WW35 at August 28 to September 5, 2009. Where have I heard that date before? Oh yeah, here. (edit: Referring to the 2% Yield number rumors).
While it’s no surprise that the boards were engineering prototypes (in reference to the author’s shock of finding common wood-screws holding it together), it is a bit disturbing if his analysis of the chip production numbers is correct. He also gets into amazing depth on some of the odd solder design and PCB layout issues, like this:
The 6-pin connector, on the other hand, lines up with, umm, nothing. There is a potential 4-pin floppy/sound/jumper block below it, but you can clearly see there is nothing in the vias, not even solder. The 6-pin connector connects to nothing, and nothing is holding it in. Except glue. Notice the connector is black and the hole below it shows white. The only real question now is, Elmers or glue stick?
To make matters worse, the mounting holes for the 8-pin connector, which should be between the 6-pin and 8-pin fakes if the card was real, are empty. Piss-poor fake job guys. Go read your fanboi forums, they do a better job, and work for much cheaper than your ‘geniuses’.
Unlike the original author, I do believe that Fermi was alive and well at the conference, but he does raise some interesting questions. Perhaps that was a “defective board” held up to show, or a very early engineering prototype (as all the functioning boards were in-use). Perhaps that was Huang’s personal “lucky presentation board” that he likes to use, but has long-since been obsoleted. Who knows.
Thoughts?
via SemiAccurate :: Nvidia fakes Fermi boards at GPU Technology Conference.
Nvidia has posted videos from the GTC all week long covering big stories, product demos, and a great wrapup at the end of each day. If you weren’t able to attend then these will serve double duty to keep you informed and make you feel guilty enough to attend next year :)
See some of the videos after the break, and check out the full NVidia Youtube channel for more.
The previously mentioned “Nexus” toolsuite for GPU/CPU Debugging inside of Visual Studio was formally announced today at the NVidia GTC to the attendees. Some new details:
NVIDIA Nexus radically improves productivity by enabling developers of GPU computing applications to use the popular Microsoft Visual Studio-based tools and workflow in a transparent manner, without having to create a separate version of the application that incorporates diagnostic software calls. (…)
It seems the GT300 news was actually under embargo until the GTC keynote was finished (guess BSN decided to ignore it, oh well), and now that it’s over the information is pouring out. One great resource is an article from John West over at InsideHPC touting the new HPC-centric features of the design. (…)
Read the full story.
That’s right, today is the first day of NVidia’s GPU Technology Conference. Unfortunately VizWorld wasn’t able to attend, but we’ll be doing our best to collect information from around the internet and present it here for you to view! First step of that is that the VizWorld sidebar now contains a life twitter-stream of events at the conference (tagged #gputechconf). Keep checking back regularly for more information, we’ll publish as we get it! (…)
Read the full story.The NVidia GPU Technology Conference starts tomorrow in San Jose, CA. If you’re one of the unfortunate people tethered to your desk and unavailable to attend the conference, then this post is for you! (…)
Read the full story.
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