5 ms·

NVIDIA's Drive PX 2 has too high power consumption and too low perf/W for the moment. They're winning this space because they are there more than that they are

by varelse 10y ago

NVIDIA's Drive PX 2 has too high power consumption and too low perf/W for the moment. They're winning this space because they are there more than that they are the best possible solution. And they may continue to win because successful execution of an 80% product is worth far more than a 90+% powerpoint processor cough TenSilica et al. cough, or because this is such a huge potential market, it might actually go to a successful competitor. 2018 and beyond will be very interesting. For while it's really desirable have the deep learning equivalent of x86 assembly language (CUDA) across a full stack from training to inference, in the end, IMO cost will be king. I'm not a big fan of $150K high-end servers filled with $5000 GPUs that can be bested with clever code on a $25K server fill with $1200 consumer GPUs. But I am a huge fan of charging what you can while you are unopposed. It's just that I think that state is temporary.

maxerickson 10y ago
Is 10 watts the correct figure? The powertrain uses 300+ Watts, so it seems like a manageable number if it is correct.
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago
  That's a big "+" on your figure - it's about 300 Watt-hours per mile, or 3600W constantly, if you're going 60 mph. For comparison, one horsepower is about 750 watts - a Tesla is a very low-drag car. Anandtech reported [1] that the TDP of the whole board is around 250W. The Tegra SoCs are probably around 10W, but that doesn't get you much in the way of GPU horsepower. 1: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9903/nvidia-announces-drive-px-2-pascal-power-for-selfdriving-cars http://www.anandtech.com/show/9903/nvidia-announces-drive-px...
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Yeah, I screwed up the math. Point stands though.
    - vectorjohn 10y ago
      I don't think it does still stand when you were off by an order of magnitude.
      - maxerickson 10y ago
        Yeah, in the wrong direction, I underestimated the powertrain consumption, so the power cost of the computer is relatively even smaller. The point I made missed the point though, it apparently isn't the energy consumption they are concerned with, other people in the thread are pointing to limiting/getting rid of the heat being the main concern.
- varelse 10y ago
  Seems indeed, and in fact an A/C will eat a kilowatt or more, but... The components of this system need to generate next to zero heat and they need to be placed in all sorts of inconvenient locations. That's causing automakers to desire extremely low-power dedicated circuitry over GPUs. Consider as an example the C7 Corvette: despite its enormous blindspot, it still doesn't have blindspot indicators because they can't find any way to cram existing sensors into the thing. There are more examples, that's just the one with which I'm most familiar because I balked on purchasing one over this despite an insanely great deal on it at the time.
  - sliken 10y ago
    I don't believe that. Today's cameras are tiny and the C7 isn't a particularly small car.
revelation 10y ago
Wait, who cares about the power consumption in a car? perf/W is a useful number if you are trying to stack a data center full of these things and electricity (incl for cooling) is essentially your only cost. But if a car is using 300Wh/mile or, in an ICE, generating 100kW in excess heat it is an entirely pointless metric. (Just for clarification: no one is using the Drive PX2 in a data center. Just look at these connectors: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9903/NVIDIA_DRIVE-PX-2.jpg http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9903/NVIDIA_DRIVE-PX-2.jpg )
- varelse 10y ago
  Informal anecdotal knowledge: GM wants 10-20 watts for the entire self-driving system, sensors and all.
  - revelation 10y ago
    Well, they are going to be disappointed. We all want a small black box we can stuff under the steering wheel and have it draw zero power so we don't need to cool it or pay for the extra thick cabling. But in the meantime, where we haven't actually solved the problem even when the trunk is full of racks with high-end boxes, it seems silly to mandate that, in the classic GM "compromises safety" sense.
  - rasz_pl 10y ago
    GM isnt exactly the shining beacon you should follow and listen, they did get scammed out of $1B on Cruise after all.
dogma1138 10y ago
>I'm not a big fan of $150K high-end servers filled with $5000 GPUs that can be bested with clever code on a $25K server fill with $1200 consumer GPUs. But I am a huge fan of charging what you can while you are unopposed. It's just that I think that state is temporary. There is virtually not a single "enterprise" grade product which can't be made at least 50% cheaper (or sometimes 10 times...) with off the shelf consumer grade hacked hardware.... Enterprise products always have a pretty steep markup, but what you lose with those 1200$ GPUs is both features (e.g. virtualization, thin provisioning, DMA/Cuda Direct etc.) and support. When you buy a 5000$ CPU over a 500$ with the same performance what you pay for is reliability and support, if you don't care about that then fine, but when you need to launch a 100M$ service on top of that platform you won't really care about the price tag it's all in the cost of doing business.
- mattnewton 10y ago
  I don't understand your argument, so maybe this is off base, but if you are saying people in industry aren't replacing their supercomputers with commodity gpu's, you're wrong; both apple and google have massive purchase orders for commodity nvidia gpus because they aren't just cheaper, they are better at this application. And I imagine other companies are as well. Edit: "replace" is probably not the right word, this is work that the old systems don't do well, but they aren't throwing out x86 racks for gpus of course. It's just instead of buying more of the same for machine learning applications.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    They aren't buying consumer GPU's they aren't buying the NVIDIA dedicated servers, but they aren't running Geforce chips either. If nothing else is that because you cannot virtualize Geforce line GPU's, there is no CUDA Direct or NVLINK support etc. If you are telling me that Google is buying Geforce GPU's and flashing the bios with a custom bios ripped off a Quadro card so they can do PCIe passthrough in a hypervisor and initialize the cards then sorry not buying it.
    - cambion 10y ago

by varelse 10y ago

maxerickson 10y ago

Is 10 watts the correct figure? The powertrain uses 300+ Watts, so it seems like a manageable number if it is correct.

LeifCarrotson 10y ago
That's a big "+" on your figure - it's about 300 Watt-hours per mile, or 3600W constantly, if you're going 60 mph. For comparison, one horsepower is about 750 watts - a Tesla is a very low-drag car. Anandtech reported [1] that the TDP of the whole board is around 250W. The Tegra SoCs are probably around 10W, but that doesn't get you much in the way of GPU horsepower. 1: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9903/nvidia-announces-drive-px-2-pascal-power-for-selfdriving-cars http://www.anandtech.com/show/9903/nvidia-announces-drive-px...
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Yeah, I screwed up the math. Point stands though.
  - vectorjohn 10y ago
    I don't think it does still stand when you were off by an order of magnitude.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      Yeah, in the wrong direction, I underestimated the powertrain consumption, so the power cost of the computer is relatively even smaller. The point I made missed the point though, it apparently isn't the energy consumption they are concerned with, other people in the thread are pointing to limiting/getting rid of the heat being the main concern.
varelse 10y ago
Seems indeed, and in fact an A/C will eat a kilowatt or more, but... The components of this system need to generate next to zero heat and they need to be placed in all sorts of inconvenient locations. That's causing automakers to desire extremely low-power dedicated circuitry over GPUs. Consider as an example the C7 Corvette: despite its enormous blindspot, it still doesn't have blindspot indicators because they can't find any way to cram existing sensors into the thing. There are more examples, that's just the one with which I'm most familiar because I balked on purchasing one over this despite an insanely great deal on it at the time.
- sliken 10y ago
  I don't believe that. Today's cameras are tiny and the C7 isn't a particularly small car.

revelation 10y ago

Wait, who cares about the power consumption in a car? perf/W is a useful number if you are trying to stack a data center full of these things and electricity (incl for cooling) is essentially your only cost. But if a car is using 300Wh/mile or, in an ICE, generating 100kW in excess heat it is an entirely pointless metric. (Just for clarification: no one is using the Drive PX2 in a data center. Just look at these connectors: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9903/NVIDIA_DRIVE-PX-2.jpg http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9903/NVIDIA_DRIVE-PX-2.jpg )

varelse 10y ago
Informal anecdotal knowledge: GM wants 10-20 watts for the entire self-driving system, sensors and all.
- revelation 10y ago
  Well, they are going to be disappointed. We all want a small black box we can stuff under the steering wheel and have it draw zero power so we don't need to cool it or pay for the extra thick cabling. But in the meantime, where we haven't actually solved the problem even when the trunk is full of racks with high-end boxes, it seems silly to mandate that, in the classic GM "compromises safety" sense.
- rasz_pl 10y ago
  GM isnt exactly the shining beacon you should follow and listen, they did get scammed out of $1B on Cruise after all.

dogma1138 10y ago

>I'm not a big fan of $150K high-end servers filled with $5000 GPUs that can be bested with clever code on a $25K server fill with $1200 consumer GPUs. But I am a huge fan of charging what you can while you are unopposed. It's just that I think that state is temporary. There is virtually not a single "enterprise" grade product which can't be made at least 50% cheaper (or sometimes 10 times...) with off the shelf consumer grade hacked hardware.... Enterprise products always have a pretty steep markup, but what you lose with those 1200$ GPUs is both features (e.g. virtualization, thin provisioning, DMA/Cuda Direct etc.) and support. When you buy a 5000$ CPU over a 500$ with the same performance what you pay for is reliability and support, if you don't care about that then fine, but when you need to launch a 100M$ service on top of that platform you won't really care about the price tag it's all in the cost of doing business.

mattnewton 10y ago
I don't understand your argument, so maybe this is off base, but if you are saying people in industry aren't replacing their supercomputers with commodity gpu's, you're wrong; both apple and google have massive purchase orders for commodity nvidia gpus because they aren't just cheaper, they are better at this application. And I imagine other companies are as well. Edit: "replace" is probably not the right word, this is work that the old systems don't do well, but they aren't throwing out x86 racks for gpus of course. It's just instead of buying more of the same for machine learning applications.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  They aren't buying consumer GPU's they aren't buying the NVIDIA dedicated servers, but they aren't running Geforce chips either. If nothing else is that because you cannot virtualize Geforce line GPU's, there is no CUDA Direct or NVLINK support etc. If you are telling me that Google is buying Geforce GPU's and flashing the bios with a custom bios ripped off a Quadro card so they can do PCIe passthrough in a hypervisor and initialize the cards then sorry not buying it.
  - cambion 10y ago