Speculation and Rumors: Nvidia Blackwell ...

Ext3h said:
What you mean by mistake? Take a look at the timeline. By the point NVIDIA sold/licensed GDeflate to Microsoft, they had already the hardware decompression unit ready. "Hardware accelerated JPEG decompression" in Hopper rings a bell? They had deflate support, 2 years ago.
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Well Nvidia talked about hardware LZ and deflate decompression at GTC 2021. Direct Storage came out in 2022. Not seeing any real opportunity to bamboozle the competition here.

Btw, are deflate and gdeflate interchangeable? How exactly does a hardware deflate decompressor help with DS gdeflate?
 
trinibwoy said:
Btw, are deflate and gdeflate interchangeable? How exactly does a hardware deflate decompressor help with DS gdeflate?
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Not bitstream compatible, but only a couple of bit shuffles and extra padding bits away from being. Also more constrained.

If you have a hardware deflate decompressor, is trivial to extend it for GDeflate. But it does require to patch the frontend.

Same as LZ4 is mostly just Deflate with a different frontend extension that directly skips Huffman decoding.

Still the same though - even though it's 99% the same logic blocks, it's still an incompatible bitstream unless you were prepared.
 
Ext3h said:
Not bitstream compatible, but only a couple of bit shuffles and extra padding bits away from being. Also more constrained.

If you have a hardware deflate decompressor, is trivial to extend it for GDeflate. But it does require to patch the frontend.

Same as LZ4 is mostly just Deflate with a different frontend extension that directly skips Huffman decoding.

Still the same though - even though it's 99% the same logic blocks, it's still an incompatible bitstream unless you were prepared.
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So are you suggesting that the hardware decompressor in Blackwell will be capable of decompressing both GDeflate and LZ4? And so devs can choose to use either format, both of which will be handled by dedicated hardware in Blackwell, but by either CPU or GPU compute (depending on format used) on all other GPU architectures?

And that the max decompression rate of the unit is presumably PCIe5 16x, so 64GB/s?
 
pjbliverpool said:
So are you suggesting that the hardware decompressor in Blackwell will be capable of decompressing both GDeflate and LZ4?
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That would be my expectation, yes. If there is any hardware, all 3 formats are supported.
pjbliverpool said:
And that the max decompression rate of the unit is presumably PCIe5 16x, so 64GB/s?
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Uncertain about that, not on consumer grade silicon. 64GB/s would be over engineered for several more SSD generations. But I do expect that non-consumer silicon does achieve that data rate, and be it only for multiple streams.
 
I have no doubt the $10b claim is an exaggeration or misleading to some decent degree. It's not actually bad PR for them to talk about the immense amount of money they can spend on something when they're the leaders. It makes them look super healthy and impossible to compete with.
 
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