NVIDIA's Fermi: Architected for Tesla, 3 Billion Transistors in 2010
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
ECC Support
AMD's Radeon HD 5870 can detect errors on the memory bus, but it can't correct them. The register file, L1 cache, L2 cache and DRAM all have full ECC support in Fermi. This is one of those Tesla-specific features.
Many Tesla customers won't even talk to NVIDIA about moving their algorithms to GPUs unless NVIDIA can deliver ECC support. The scale of their installations is so large that ECC is absolutely necessary (or at least perceived to be).
Unified 64-bit Memory Addressing
In previous architectures there was a different load instruction depending on the type of memory: local (per thread), shared (per group of threads) or global (per kernel). This created issues with pointers and generally made a mess that programmers had to clean up.
Fermi unifies the address space so that there's only one instruction and the address of the memory is what determines where it's stored. The lowest bits are for local memory, the next set is for shared and then the remainder of the address space is global.
The unified address space is apparently necessary to enable C++ support for NVIDIA GPUs, which Fermi is designed to do.
The other big change to memory addressability is in the size of the address space. G80 and GT200 had a 32-bit address space, but next year NVIDIA expects to see Tesla boards with over 4GB of GDDR5 on board. Fermi now supports 64-bit addresses but the chip can physically address 40-bits of memory, or 1TB. That should be enough for now.
Both the unified address space and 64-bit addressing are almost exclusively for the compute space at this point. Consumer graphics cards won't need more than 4GB of memory for at least another couple of years. These changes were painful for NVIDIA to implement, and ultimately contributed to Fermi's delay, but necessary in NVIDIA's eyes.
New ISA Changes Enable DX11, OpenCL and C++, Visual Studio Support
Now this is cool. NVIDIA is announcing Nexus (no, not the thing from Star Trek Generations) a visual studio plugin that enables hardware debugging for CUDA code in visual studio. You can treat the GPU like a CPU, step into functions, look at the state of the GPU all in visual studio with Nexus. This is a huge step forward for CUDA developers.
Nexus running in Visual Studio on a CUDA GPU
Simply enabling DX11 support is a big enough change for a GPU - AMD had to go through that with RV870. Fermi implements a wide set of changes to its ISA, primarily designed at enabling C++ support. Virtual functions, new/delete, try/catch are all parts of C++ and enabled on Fermi.
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SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Nice rebuttal to page 2: " Another kind of LAUNCH "--
write it down, nvidia launched today....(according to lunatic lying red roosters)
tamalero - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
weird.. they still said its "coming soon", I dont see any GF300 firm chips.when ATI said "we present the 5870" they were already on newegg.com
Silicon, let's face it, you're the biggest pro-nvidia troll I've ever seen.
SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
You are also the person that went into a tirade about nvidia not replacing laptop gpu's with the faulty substrate and instead puttig on a heftier fan.You waxed on about how much you hate nvidia, and how they harmed the children (you claimed to be a teacher of some sort) then you screeched about nvidia reps, wished violence upon them, and claimed you'd love to show them how to do their jobs correctly.
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That's YOU tamalero.
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Now it's pretty amazing I tell the simple plain truth, you deny it a week late, lying for ati, have you public hate and rage on this board for nvidia, and yet claim it is I that is a fanboy.
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One Q, has your raging hatred for nvidia receded, or does lying about the 5870 release give you a sense of vengeful pleasure ?
tamalero - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
what truth?you're just inventing random crap your brain somehow imagines in illusions.
and what the hell are you talking about?
I never claimed to be a "teacher", wished violence? what the hell are you smoking?
harmed the children.. jesuchrist... are you on some sort of scientologist brainwashing group ?
SiliconDoc - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
Since you have lied, I will get the link and your quotes.SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
no they wre not already on newegg - listed and greyed out- the first one available in a trickle -and only today have those listed appeared available, before that it was on for a few seconds, card gone - all GREYED OUT again.---
Sept. 23rd was launch, this is 7 days later.
They were a WEEK of paper. (no one can fairly count a sickly 1,2 or half dozen trickle)
tamalero - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
they were grey, because they sold out, note..., there were on amazon and tigerdirect.com as well. I woudlnt be surprised if newwave and other sites had the 5870 as well.you're just a person with mental problems who cant really accept anything outside your tiny world.
SiliconDoc - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
TigerDirect was pre-order, as well as Amazon was reserve - you just haven't got clue one.fikimiki - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
In Poland, (it is Europe cause you don't know for sure)it is available in shops.
Also you can grab one from newegg.com
bobvodka - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
I woke up on HD5870 launch day.I logged onto a website in the UK.
I ordered an HD5870.
It shipped the same day.
I had it the next day and have been enjoying it ever since.
Looks like a non-paper launch to me.