5 ms·

It’s so annoying!!!! I work in computer graphics and scientific computation and it’s getting hard to get gpus with adequate double performance.

chillee 5y ago
You might be interested in the upcoming AMD Mi200 GPUs, which have 96 teraflops of fp64 performance.
- bodhiandphysics 5y ago
  Unfortunately, I need cuda (for now)
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    With some tweaking, I've had sucess running CUDA code with AMD's HIP framework. You'll need to do some changes probably.
bee_rider 5y ago
I think we'll just have to embrace it. Anyway, dealing with reduced precision is more fun that throwing bits at the problem.
simplestats 5y ago
I think it's hilarious. when I was in school, microprocessors were 8-bit. Then as the world got digitized it was 16-bit microprocessors. A least in my narrow world. Then 32 bit and floats came along and finally double floats. Each step was a big product effort and launch we sell as better technology. And just as we are finally got past the need to always make both 32 and 64 bit versions of everything, we turn around and head back down. Though I saw someone (Qualcomm?) with a press release about their next gen microprocessor supporting 32 bit floats! Not sure if it counts as another U-turn or they're just a straggler.
- wtallis 5y ago
  I think you may be improperly conflating address or pointer width with the data types used for integer or floating-point arithmetic—we had floats up to 80 bits with "16-bit" x86 processors. Nobody's moving backwards in terms of pointer size. And any history of the progression of bit widths is incomplete without mentioning the SIMD trend that PCs have been on since the mid-90s, starting with 64-bit integer vectors and culminating in today's 512-bit vector instructions that re-use those original 64-bit vector registers as mask registers. I don't think there's any point at which PCs have ever abandoned 8-bit and 16-bit data types, or ever appeared to be on a trajectory to do so. We've just had some shifts over the years of what kinds of things we use narrower data types for.
throwaway81523 5y ago
That's product differentiation: 32 bits is enough for mass market gpus for gamers. They figure the scientific computing market has more money, so they charge a ton extra if you want decent 64 bit, even though it's basically the same hardware. AMD Radeon VII is an exception to that, no longer made but not really obsolete yet, and you can still find them.

chillee 5y ago

You might be interested in the upcoming AMD Mi200 GPUs, which have 96 teraflops of fp64 performance.

bodhiandphysics 5y ago
Unfortunately, I need cuda (for now)
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  With some tweaking, I've had sucess running CUDA code with AMD's HIP framework. You'll need to do some changes probably.

bee_rider 5y ago

I think we'll just have to embrace it. Anyway, dealing with reduced precision is more fun that throwing bits at the problem.

simplestats 5y ago

I think it's hilarious. when I was in school, microprocessors were 8-bit. Then as the world got digitized it was 16-bit microprocessors. A least in my narrow world. Then 32 bit and floats came along and finally double floats. Each step was a big product effort and launch we sell as better technology. And just as we are finally got past the need to always make both 32 and 64 bit versions of everything, we turn around and head back down. Though I saw someone (Qualcomm?) with a press release about their next gen microprocessor supporting 32 bit floats! Not sure if it counts as another U-turn or they're just a straggler.

wtallis 5y ago
I think you may be improperly conflating address or pointer width with the data types used for integer or floating-point arithmetic—we had floats up to 80 bits with "16-bit" x86 processors. Nobody's moving backwards in terms of pointer size. And any history of the progression of bit widths is incomplete without mentioning the SIMD trend that PCs have been on since the mid-90s, starting with 64-bit integer vectors and culminating in today's 512-bit vector instructions that re-use those original 64-bit vector registers as mask registers. I don't think there's any point at which PCs have ever abandoned 8-bit and 16-bit data types, or ever appeared to be on a trajectory to do so. We've just had some shifts over the years of what kinds of things we use narrower data types for.

throwaway81523 5y ago

That's product differentiation: 32 bits is enough for mass market gpus for gamers. They figure the scientific computing market has more money, so they charge a ton extra if you want decent 64 bit, even though it's basically the same hardware. AMD Radeon VII is an exception to that, no longer made but not really obsolete yet, and you can still find them.