Nvidia Ampere Discussion [2020-05-14]

Aside from restricting number sold, sales only to country or region where product is shipped might be another option.

 

Fun fact: The "8" in 3080 is upside down (verified on actual card, too)

 

8 is correct. The other numbers and letters are upside down XD
Tbf, some fonts do write 8 like that, but on 2080 it is a normal 8.

 

GeForce font doesn't, double checked (also you can see it on the product pages text proper way up)
Here's the same from actual card that can be shared

 

Ampere is an evolutionary architecture over Turing. Such architectures are usually highly concentrated on perf/mm and perf/watt improvements.
If something was included in Ampere, it likely boosts perf per area and watt. Does it matter whether it's balanced or not?
IMO it doesn't. If 2x FP32 improves perf per mm - add it, people don't care less about the "balanced" metric, they care about perf per $, which is derevative of perf/area and watt.

 

So has the "world computer" actually accomplish anything of real, tangible value since its creation, or just bootstrapped a bunch of energy-burning shitcoins?

 

miners are eyeing the new Ampere cards

https://www.hardwaretimes.com/ether...x-3080-offers-3-4x-better-performance-in-eth/

 

Same link 8 posts above ; )

 

It's more Flops because the trend in graphics is "moar compute": For a great many things, there's a more or less costly version available via compute shader. From micropolygons to post-FX.

Kepler was bad in that regard, yes. But here, I think it's a sensible choice, even though Gaming-Ampere probably cannot keep all its units busy at the same time. But then - it's power draw is high enough as it is, judging from TDP numbers.

 

For real, geez.

 

How stupid are those miners? thats only about 10% better than a Radeon VII!

 

Indeed. Ampere looks to be an excellent compute GPU for a lot of things and a fairly great gaming card too. I'm looking at 3d rendering first for my use (Octane, Vray maybe Redshift - all CUDA) and some other OpenCL compute, so I'm beyond tempted.

Edit: as the Octane guys are saying: "Yes, we have Octane 2020.1.5 (our next) fully optimized for 3090/Ampere and the results are pretty crazy. I can’t share more until NVIDIA shares the OB scores themselves or the cards are public."

 

Perf/area maybe in this case. It’s interesting that Nvidia didn’t showcase specific workloads or games that benefit from the change. They had a slide or 3 during the Turing launch showcasing the speed up from the separate INT pipeline.

Strangely Nvidia didn’t talk about raw shader flops much at all. You would think the first consumer GPUS to break 20 and 30 Tflops would be a big deal from a marketing standpoint. That leads me to believe that even Nvidia doesn’t think the inflated numbers are worth talking about.

 

The benchmark may not being able to take advantage of GA102's new FP32 unit if it has not been recompiled with new arch/sm options, so the performance gain here may come from higher boost clock.

 

Wouldn't that be the task of the drivers and not the software application?

 

Well, if Volta's TDR is of any indiction, the higher TDR may already take the extra FP32 unit into consideration.

For instance, despite of whatever computing load (large sgemm and Tensor-based hgemm included), the real power draw of my volta rarely reach more than 80% of its TDR unless you do FP64 extensively.

 

Yes, the application doesn't know anything about the hardware configuration of the ALUs. Also it's not like the application/warp/thread sees multiple FP32 ALUs anyway. It's just now the dispatcher has a 2nd FP32 slot to issue warps to each clock cycle.

 

The application may not know the hardware configuration much (well, unless you are an informed programmer), but the compiler sure does...

 

Yeah, the compiler knows for sure but I'm not sure it matters. The compiler's job is to statically schedule math instructions within a warp. It can do so because it knows how many cycles each math operation will take and when the output of that operation will be available for input to the next math op. The dispatcher then has a bunch of ready warps to choose from each cycle based on hints from the compiler. Presumably, none of that changes with Ampere.

The only thing that changes is that now there are more opportunities for a ready FP32 instruction to be issued each clock by the dispatcher. With Turing those instructions could be blocked because the lone FP32 pipeline was busy.