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The differences you're listing off are all matters of how the same underlying silicon is configured during the final stages of manufacturing. The workstation ca
by wtallis 6y ago
The differences you're listing off are all matters of how the same underlying silicon is configured during the final stages of manufacturing. The workstation cards that support ECC RAM are using the same RAM chips as the consumer cards, and the memory controller is just configured to use a portion of the memory for ECC instead of as additional capacity. Having one, two or four DRAM dies per memory channel doesn't have any direct connection to whether it's a workstation/server GPU or a consumer GPU, and the consumer GPUs could just as easily be equipped with the same 48GB instead of 12GB or 24GB, if there were sufficient demand.
When you look at the workstation cards that aren't top of the line, it's clear that they are nearly identical hardware to more mainstream consumer gaming GPUs, and the most significant hardware differences are usually smaller coolers on the workstation cards leading to lower clock speeds.
- foota 6y agoNote: it's less about demand and more about price discrimination. Prosumers realize a higher benefit from their graphics cards and therefore have a higher willingness to pay, but they have higher RAM requirements than do others. This allows nvidia to segment their customer base by restricting the RAM on their gaming cards. If they didn't restrict the RAM on their gaming cards then they couldn't segment them. That doesn't mean there's not consumer demand for cards with higher RAM and marginally higher prices.
- cma 6y agoStarting with 3000 series the consumer cards use ECC too right?
- wtallis 6y agoNewer generations of DRAM (both GDDRx and the DDRx used in desktops and servers) are dense enough that they need on-die ECC. But that only offers some protection for data at rest, while the traditional kind of ECC involves also transmitting extra bits in order to also protect against transmission errors, providing end-to-end data protection. I don't think Nvidia has started allowing the latter kind of ECC to be enabled on consumer products.
- cma 6y agoSounds like it isn't exactly the same, but they are able to detect some transmission errors: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-founders-edition/39.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-f...
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoThat surprises me because memory corruption in something like texture-memory for game world rendering is far-less important than memory corruption in shader program memory. GPU memory needs to be fast, and ECC can slow it down - and add cost. So if they were going to use ECC in gaming GPUs I’d expect it to be limited to areas reserved for shader programs and “program state” rather than output texture memory. If all of VRAM is ECC backed then I’m wowed and kudos to NVIDIA for doing that.
- jacoblambda 6y agoECC slows down RAM however RAM speeds are starting to become bounded by error rates. To push into the faster timings ECC actually becomes essential to keep the system from becoming unstable. This is the reason why DDR5 is so much faster despite using ECC effectively by default.
- wtallis 6y agoFor GPUs, it's not just the RAM timings and clock speeds that matter. The way they implement ECC also directly subtracts from the effective memory bus width and therefore the total bandwidth.
- jacoblambda 6y agoThis is true for off-die ECC (i.e the kind that computes ECC between chips using a separate chip) however on-die ECC (the ECC logic and parity memory being included in the memory chip itself) like what DDR5 will have doesn't have this bandwidth issue. It causes the dies to cost slightly more but otherwise largely results in the same performance as non-ECC memory. In the GPU space, this is why HBM2 memory doesn't really have a performance difference between ECC and non-ECC memory.