NVIDIA Fermi: Architecture discussion

Like I said earlier, alternatives need not be better.

Not if you use 5900.

You are making it sound like those features are the only ones that made OR sign up for Fermi.

You guys are making too big of deal of this OR fallout. We do not know what were OR's internal processes that led to sign up and cancellations of the project.

 

No big deal at all. You are the one assuming that that "article" is even true

As for the features I mentioned, they most likely aren't the sole reasons for the OR deal, yes, but they definitely are part of the set.

 

Interesting:

http://www.legitreviews.com/news/6999/

 

It really is interesting, we have charlie's word against "some one" at OR. Lets get back to this when there is something really concrete, shall we?

 

Fun Fact of the Week: GF100 graphics cards will provide hardware support for GPU overvoltaging for extreme overclocking!

*yawn* but I guess they had no choice but to follow AMD to avoid losing their street cred.

 

Or clocking them slower to stay within PCI-E spec.

 

Yeah, I found the max power figure:

 

Screw it, I doubt any buyers except corporate care about that sticker ... and they can just buy the versions which do stay within the limits.

Neither the consumers nor the system builders who use these devices need hand holding by PCI-SIG in designing a system which can handle the load. Screwing about on the economical limit of PSUs and cooling is not important for the machines in which these cards go ... you can afford to just overdimension it a bit.

 

I wonder about that too. Maybe OEMs required it?

 

I'd guess OEM versions would disable overvolting with their card's BIOS by default.
That way they are covered if someone decides to fry the card, MB or PSU.

 

I'd take "someone's" word over charlies' word any day of the week.

 

Why would they? They don't do so for any other component with user adjustable voltages - RAM, chipset, CPU etc. In any case isn't this the big hyped feature of the 5970?

 

I would imagine that since PCI-SIG controls the specifications for PCI-E that they would have some say-so regarding the licensing of PCI-E devices.

 

Ginger Plastic Fermi is on pricey pre-order !

 

Creig, I don't think so ... from the bylaws ruling under which condition the cross-licensing deals work :

Power use of a product outside of the "compliant portion" is completely irrelevant to the patent license AFAICS. Only through the trademark licensing can they force any other kind of compliance.

 

I'm talking about a OEM system. Most have a very limited user feature BIOS for changing anything.

The OEM user might be able to flash the card's BIOS to accept voltage adjustment, but I doubt it would be as simple as download the tweak software and go.

 

No, not really, who said they were going to stick CPUs in there? I don't know where it goes from here.

-Charlie

 

And what else does Visual Studio compile for?

-Charlie

 

visual studio with plugins can compile for many different systems (mono is a linux and unix plugin)

 

Running a Cypress system would be an interesting experiment. I'd wonder if even a laboratory's HPC programmers would have the stomach to hack the assembly to get decent compilation.

The payoffs are potentially very good, though. Cypress can do a little over 2 TFLOPs single-precision matrix multiply and 500 GFLOPs DP with a bit of hacking.