Although the ratio is artificially restricted in the 290 series to 8:1. Although the ratio has been artificially restricted on the 780 and 780 Ti cards to 16:1.įor AMD the ratio is a more aggressive 2:1 in its latest enthusiast class GPU Hawaii which powers the company's flagship FirePro W9100 and Radeon R9 290 series products. This is true for Nvidia's GK110 GPU which powers the Quadro K6000, Titan and GTX 780/780 Ti graphics cards among others. In the latest enthusiast class chip from Nvidia the ratio between FP32 and FP64 peak performance sits at 3:1. This ratio varies between different GPU architectures and different GPUs within the same architecture as well. Normally there's a fixed ratio between the peak single and double precision floating point capability of a given GPU. As such this added precision in turn requires more capable hardware which would net higher costs by increasing the size of the chip while simultaneously increasing power consumption.ĭouble precision (FP64) compute performance has always been lower than single precision (FP32) in GPUs for that reason. Even though FP64 is used in games in a very limited subset of functions, the bulk of video game and graphics code relies on FP32. This added precision in the results is crucial for scientific research, professional applications and servers. FP64 results are significantly more precise than FP32. You can deduce the difference between double precision floating point (FP64) and single precision floating point (FP32) from the name. Now that we got that out of the way, to fully understand what this development means for consumers we must understand how FP64 compute has traditionally been added and why it's important. What Nvidia's GM200 Weak Double Precision Performance Could Mean For Pro Graphicsīefore going into the ramifications of this potential decision by Nvidia we must remind you again that we couldn't verify this report by 3DCenter ourselves and thus will treat it as a rumor for the time being. This will perhaps be the first time ever that Nvidia will introduce a 500mm² GPU flagship that lacks proper FP64 compute capability. As a result, they claim, GM200 will be significantly down on FP64 performance compared to what we used to seeing from Nvidia's enthusiast class GPUs.Ī reduced emphasis on double precision compute (FP64) performance in a compute class card marks an anomaly in Nvidia's strategy, historically speaking. According to their sources, GM200 lacks specific chip-level FP64 hardware that's necessary for maintaining adequate double precision compute throughput. This report comes via who claim to have confirmed this particular tidbit of information. Instead it will focus on pursuing single precision compute performance improvements. This is mainly due to its limited FP64 capability. About a month ago a similar report surfaced, which claimed that NVIDIA would not be utilizing GM200 for HPC purposes. Ampere), the compute chip itself is a totally separate silicon GA100 vs GeForce and Quadro chips based on GA102, 104, 106, etc.Nvidia's GM200 will reportedly feature only partial double precision compute performance and will be single precision optimized like GM204, its younger sibling residing in the GeForce GTX 980 and 970 gaming cards. Of course H100 has many other compute specific capabilities that doesn't exist in Ada.Įven in generation where Nvidia uses the same name for their compute chip (e.g. Hence the 1/32 FP64 capabilities in Ada based cards. They are different architecture where Hopper does not have any RT cores and Ada does not have FP64 cores beyond simple compatibility. A100, H100).įor the current generation, the compute chip is based on Hopper architecture (GH100) and everything else (gaming, pro viz) are based on Ada architecture (AD102, 103, 104, etc). I suspect this is due to Nvidia is targeting Pro Viz market for people who want to use RTX to speed up their workload and RT cores do not exist in the compute chips (e.g. Sometimes Quadro does end up using the compute chip (Quadro GP100 and GV100) but Nvidia hasn't put their compute chip in Quadro since Volta. GP100 is only used for their compute related product while GP102, 104, and others are used for their GeForce product. Over time, Nvidia has carved out their compute chip into its own silicon. This leads to product like the OG TITAN where it has 1/2 FP64 capabilities. Product segmentation via different silicon.īack in the days before GPGPU workload was "less" specialized, Nvidia used to use the same chip for their entire portfolio.
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