NVIDIA Kepler speculation thread

CarstenS said:
Nvidia could have opted to stay with the design, clocks, # of functional units but only improve double precision throughput from, say one fourth (physically, Geforce products would be throttled down to 1/12th I expect) to one-half or - heavens forbid - even full rate and only attach a wider memory bus in order to enable larger data set buffers on professional products..
Such a decision makes zero business sense financially.

CarstenS said:
They could have come to the conclusion that the professional market would be growing large enough to justify it's very own ASIC from which gamers would only profit in the way of wider memory busses.
If HPC warrants its own ASIC, then why bother with texturing at all, or for that matter tessellation or even DX compliance.
 
Such a decision makes zero business sense financially.

It does if the they expect to make greater inroads to the high margin HPC market. Not saying this is the case or that they would do this, of course. But this whole line is a "hypothetical" thought exercise anyway. :)

If HPC warrants its own ASIC, then why bother with texturing at all, or for that matter tessellation or even DX compliance.

There's likely a minimum run of wafers for any order if they wish to be profitable keep per chip costs down. Only Nvidia knows where that breakeven point is where additional wafers don't significantly lower the per chip cost.

I'd imagine even with greater penetration into the HPC market it's still going to represent a low percentage of product compared to the professional market which could also benefit from this. And any remaining product can be sold to the consumer/prosumer market.

In other words, to prevent the per chip cost from being astronomical, it would make sense to have a chip capable of being sold in other markets than just HPC.

Enthusiasts have shown they are more than willing to spend a 200-700 USD price premium for 10-20% more performance (video cards and CPUs), so even if it's extremely large compared to the performance gain, it could still be priced such that there's some margin.

It may be counterintuitive from a consumer standpoint but it's business as usual for corporations which also sell product to business/professional customers.

Heck just look at IVB-E or SB-E. Both products offer extremely minimal gain for the consumer market (almost everything added is mainly of benefit in the professional/business market), yet it is still available to consumers and as you can see even on this forum, Enthusiasts are more than willing to pay that price premium.

Regards,
SB
 
Silent_Buddha said:
It does if the they expect to make greater inroads to the high margin HPC market.
No it does not, but you probably did not understand what I meant in the first place...

Silent_Buddha said:
Heck just look at IVB-E or SB-E. Both products offer extremely minimal gain for the consumer market (almost everything added is mainly of benefit in the professional/business market), yet it is still available to consumers and as you can see even on this forum, Enthusiasts are more than willing to pay that price premium.
Exactly, you just made my point for me. Thanks. Or did you not read my initial statement?

ninelven said:
Doesn't really matter... people have always paid a premium for highest performance available regardless of the price/performance ratio.
 
That there is a - however remote - possibility, that the changes from GK104 to GK110 won't be benefitting gamers at all. For example, and I'm purely making this up mind you, Nvidia could have opted to stay with the design, clocks, # of functional units but only improve double precision throughput from, say one fourth (physically, Geforce products would be throttled down to 1/12th I expect) to one-half or - heavens forbid - even full rate and only attach a wider memory bus in order to enable larger data set buffers on professional products.

I was thinking just that, GK110 could be essentially the same as 104 but with possibly even a 512bit bus, to enable 8GB on a card.


Such a decision makes zero business sense financially.

If HPC warrants its own ASIC, then why bother with texturing at all, or for that matter tessellation or even DX compliance.

all the gaming stuff gets used on a Quadro, too. we've seen nvidia using a GF100 with only 256SP rather than a cut down GF104 by the way.

I understand skepticism but that idea is not all too different conceptually from the GF100/GF104 situation.
"nobody" buys a gtx 580 either, an order of magnitude more gamers buy a 560 ti instead.

another idea : maybe the GK104 can eat all the power budget already if full-specced and clocked high enough.
a GK110 wouldn't do much better for gaming except if it's sold as a monster 300W card.
 
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It does if the they expect to make greater inroads to the high margin HPC market. Not saying this is the case or that they would do this, of course. But this whole line is a "hypothetical" thought exercise anyway. :)



There's likely a minimum run of wafers for any order if they wish to be profitable keep per chip costs down. Only Nvidia knows where that breakeven point is where additional wafers don't significantly lower the per chip cost.

I'd imagine even with greater penetration into the HPC market it's still going to represent a low percentage of product compared to the professional market which could also benefit from this. And any remaining product can be sold to the consumer/prosumer market.

In other words, to prevent the per chip cost from being astronomical, it would make sense to have a chip capable of being sold in other markets than just HPC.

Enthusiasts have shown they are more than willing to spend a 200-700 USD price premium for 10-20% more performance (video cards and CPUs), so even if it's extremely large compared to the performance gain, it could still be priced such that there's some margin.

It may be counterintuitive from a consumer standpoint but it's business as usual for corporations which also sell product to business/professional customers.

Heck just look at IVB-E or SB-E. Both products offer extremely minimal gain for the consumer market (almost everything added is mainly of benefit in the professional/business market), yet it is still available to consumers and as you can see even on this forum, Enthusiasts are more than willing to pay that price premium.

Regards,
SB

Once you have GK104 taped out, it's going to cost an insane amount of time and money to remove the graphics pipeline from GK110, even if no Tesla consumer is going to need those.
 
Blazkowicz said:
I understand skepticism but that idea is not all too different conceptually from the GF100/GF104 situation.
Last time I checked, GF110 had 33% more CCs than GF104/114 and had greater overall performance. You don't need a huge performance delta to cash in on a much higher price, which is exactly the point. It is not a significant investment in die size cost for that extra performance, so it is always worth doing.
 
Such a decision makes zero business sense financially.
Please explain.
If HPC warrants its own ASIC, then why bother with texturing at all, or for that matter tessellation or even DX compliance.
Because you might also want to sell it in the CAD/CAM/CAE area where you might need a little texturing, but then, maybe you're right! But that (maybe I've hidden the link too well in my earlier posting) would probably mean even less gaming prowess, not "only a little more" due to higher memory bandwidth.

Exactly, hence it can't be just a GK104+HPC. Nobody would buy it.
If it weren't for higher bandwidth and larger framebuffers and thus probably just a little more punch in high-res, high-antialiasing gaming. But if they really use what I've linke above, it would be even GK104-minus-something-plus-HPC...
 
Could be there a solution to beef up geometry processing and tessellation on GK106 and GK107?

The tiny Cape Verde has a tessellation performance like GF114:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/855-8/performances-theoriques-geometrie.html
http://www.tweakpc.de/hardware/test...on_hd_7770/benchmarks.php?benchmark=heaven2ex

This would be far above a 1 GPC GK107 and on a level with a 2 GPC GK106, if they follow the Fermi geometry/tessellation performance scaling.

Or could be Cape Verde just be overpowered in this terms, especial if you compare it with Tahitis performance, which could be driver problem or broken design?

But on the other side, I think geometry should not be scaled so much. GK104 and above should render nearly the same geometry like GK106/107 and invest the higher performance in resolution/anti-aliasing/better lighting.
 
The GTX460 in that comparison is based on GF104 that have much lower base clock and hence lower primitive rate than GF114. Additionally, GF104 omits one of eight multiprocessors -- geometry performance in Fermi scales also with the # of multiprocessors (culling, clipping, tessellation, etc.).
 
CarstenS said:
But that (maybe I've hidden the link too well in my earlier posting) would probably mean even less gaming prowess, not "only a little more" due to higher memory bandwidth.
Why would that mean less gaming prowess?

CarstenS said:
Please explain.
I already have.
 
Once you have GK104 taped out, it's going to cost an insane amount of time and money to remove the graphics pipeline from GK110, even if no Tesla consumer is going to need those.

Wrong guy, Ninelven was making the claim that a HPC only part should just remove the graphics pipeline. I'm arguing that including the graphics pipeline is much more cost effective in a part that is tailor made for the HPC market yet still viable for the professional market with some appeal to enthusiasts in the consumer market.

The same hypothetical idea that Carsten proposed.

Regards,
SB
 
Silent_Buddha said:
Wrong guy, Ninelven was making the claim that a HPC only part should just remove the graphics pipeline.
Funny, I don't recall writing that.

EDIT: Bored now... If Nvidia releases a chip with a die size > GK104, it will not be a GK104 + bandwidth and 1/2 rate DP. <---- (That is a period)
 
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good find :p
IF we consider GT640M has same bandwidth with GT630M, GK104 may be roughly 85-106% faster than GTX560Ti(GF114) in a perfect world..
 
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