NVIDIA GTC 2015 Keynote Live Blog

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• psyq321 - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link

  I am quite sure NVIDIA will follow-up with the full FP64 SKU for their Tesla line of products. I doubt they would design "big Maxwell" just for the highest-end enthusiast market. The size of that market is literally nothing compared to the scientific / HPC / finance markets which have no problem shelling $5K per card in batches of dozens / hundreds per order.
  
  I do hope AMD gains market share, though - simply because more competition is good for the consumer. If NVIDIA remains being Intel of the GPGPU market, it is going to become the same kind of market as mature x86 market, with mobile/entry desktop on one extreme and four-digit enterprise range on the other extreme (soon five probably for the highest end Xeon EX 8xxx v5 or whatever).

• ExarKun333 - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link

  Interestingly-enough, NV's own slides don't show Tesla getting updated until Pascal. It doesn't seem that Maxwell is getting DP at all. Not set in stone, but that was the word just last month. Not surprising this Titan doesn't have that...

• psyq321 - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link

  I think it is simply down to the process - GM200 is simply exhausting what the TSMC 28nm process can offer. Even without FP64, the die is >huge<.
  
  Maybe NVIDIA will retire Tesla as a brand (though this would sound to me like a strange decision taking into account Tesla's brand recognition in HPC field), but they would be crazy to abandon the HPC and enterprise markets which require FP64.
  
  I would rather suspect that GM200 is, simply, a short-term answer to AMD R390X - a mere necessity due to the market situation. Without that, I doubt NVIDIA would even release "Big Maxwell" as a consumer product before doing a process shrink and launching it as an professional product first. This "high end enthusiast" market is very small - this is the same reason why Intel is simply wrapping Xeon EP rejects as "-E" HEDT "enthusiast" parts, it is merely a by-product of the R&D done for the professional markets where the margins and volumes are.
  
  After the process shrink, I am almost 100% sure NVIDIA will release GM210 or whatever, which will have proper FP64 support and feature in the Tesla products. GM210 might even be exclusively reserved for the pro/enterprise market in the same way GK210 was.
  
  Kepler-based K80, with 24 GB of RAM is still quite competitive if one needs such power and FP64 support and I suppose NVIDIA launched GK210 late last year precisely because they would need to wait for a process shrink before "Big Maxwell" will be ready for the pro market.
  
  While this situation with GM200 launch is clearly suboptimal for NVIDIA, since pro market commands the highest margins and volumes, I suppose they could not avoid this situation due to the 16nm process maturity and availability from TSMC.
  
  I suppose the best that could happen for the consumer (consumer as in non-pro market) would be some kind of Maxwell version of 780Ti - maybe 980Ti or whatever, something which would give Titan X performance but for the $500-$600 mark. I suppose at this very moment NVIDIA has no reasons to release such product and the fate of such part depends firmly on AMD's next-gen performance.

• testbug00 - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link

  50% more CUDA cores and 50% larger bus shouldn't take ~43% more of the die. Given 600mm^2 die. Either Nvidia didn't max the die size, Nvidia spread out the transistors to lower power usage, or Nvidia disabled the units.
  
  I think the latter 2 are the most likely, I hope that it's the 2nd, not the 3rd option. While I don't like Nvidia's pricing, being able to get access to FP64 CUDA high performance for less than 4-5 thousand dollars is good.

• Yojimbo - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link

  There already are Maxwell-bases Quadro cards, and many of the Kepler-based Quadros have 1/24 double precision.

• hammer256 - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link

  If AMD is also using 28nm, there isn't a whole lot that can be done I would imagine. I'm would also guess that FP64 units are going to take more transistors than their equivalent FP32 units (if both are running at the same IPC). Argh, need smaller processes.

• testbug00 - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link

  GCN is good at FP64 to start. You don't need dedicated units. That's what Nvidia used in Kepler GK110 and, well... Personally I assumed they would use them in GM200.
  
  The 390(x) silicon will have a FP64 rate of 1/2. AMD will probably lock it down to 1/8, like Hawaii.
  
  NVidia's architectural choices allow for other "advantages" but, personally. I think a huge GPU like this really needs FP64 to sell a at high margins and pay itself off. But, I assume Nvidia does far more market research than me when it comes to this kind of stuff.

• Yojimbo - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link

  I don't think AMD has the same level of support in terms of compute-oriented development tools as NVIDIA has. Also, AMD hasn't released any new architecture, so how will AMD gain market share? The old situation of NVIDIA having preferable offerings still exists. Plus, market share in HPC seems like it shouldn't shift around as quickly as gaming GPU market share. One can buy a new card from a competitor of one's old gaming card and drop it in and gain benefits as easily as one can buy a new card from the same manufacturer as one's old gaming card to gain benefits. If one buys a new compute GPU with a different architecture, one must re-optimize one's code for the new architecture. People aren't likely to switch to AMD even if AMD released a compute card in July that was superior to Tesla cards. Some time later, say 9 months, after that, NVIDIA would be releasing Pascal and presumably take the lead again. It probably doesn't make sense to re-optimize all code for 9 months of better performance. Perhaps for new entrants, it might make sense, but one is still more likely to choose the ecosystem which has demonstrated ambition and service in the sector.

• eanazag - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link

  This live blog could use some iPhone panorama pictures. Nvidia has a wide format presentation.

• mdriftmeyer - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link

  ``DIGITS DevBox: $15,000, available May 2015''
  
  Suddenly I'm back to 1996 and SGI is rolling out a new Octane System with a cheap shell.