4 ms·
> Nvidia’s Fermi architecture was ambitious and innovative, offering advances in GPU compute along with features like high tessellation performance. However Ter
by scrlk 3y ago
> Nvidia’s Fermi architecture was ambitious and innovative, offering advances in GPU compute along with features like high tessellation performance. However Terascale 2’s more traditional approach delivered better power efficiency.
Fermi was given the nickname "Thermi" for a good reason. AMD marketing had a field day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QkyfGJgcwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QkyfGJgcwQ
It didn't help that the heatsink of the GTX 480 resembled the surface of a grill: https://i.imgur.com/9YfUifF.jpg https://i.imgur.com/9YfUifF.jpg
- anvuong 3y agoWell AMD marketing turned out to be a joke, remember Poor Volta? I still think AMD haven't even recovered from that. There marketing for GPUs have been terrible since.
- DiabloD3 3y agoYou mean Vega. Volta is a Nvidia arch. Vega's marketing pushed Nvidia to make what is ending up to be the best product series they will ever make: series 10. That isn't much of a joke, it scared the shit out of Nvidia, and they blinked. Vega was too late in the pipeline to stop, and Raja was ultimately let go for his role in the whole thing. He refused to start making more gamer-friendly cards, and was obsessed with enterprise compute/jack of all trades cards. Immediately afterwards was a pivot towards a split arch, allowing multiple teams to pursue their intended markets. Its why AMD won against Nvidia. Nvidia still has no real answer to AMD's success, other than continuing to increase card prices and making ridiculously large chips that have poor wafer yields. Nvidia won't even have working chiplets until series 60 or 70, while AMD already has them in a shipping product.
- Toqoz_ 3y ago“Poor Volta” was the line from AMD’s marketing team.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>Its why AMD won against Nvidia. Won how? >Nvidia still has no real answer to AMD's success Which success? Answer to what? Are you from a paralel multiverse? In this reality, it's the other way around. Nvidia is making so much money from the AI hype than AMD is the one trying to play catch-up.
- sigmoid10 3y agoYeah, and before that they ruled the bitcoin craze. You literally couldn't buy Nvidia cards for an insanely long time time because the 30 series was so cost effective at mining that everyone and their uncle wanted in on the deal. AMD has some edge in the non high end server niche, but Nvidia rules everything else. In the AI craze AMD is not even an afterthought anymore, as everyone wants Nvidia. Even companies like Google and Tesla, who used to make their own AI chips.
- DiabloD3 3y agoIts weird people keep repeating that. I've been fortunate enough to meet a fair number of programmers who have moved onto make-AI-go-brrrr jobs, most of what they're handling is AMD hardware. Nvidia strongly missed the boat by continually pushing CUDA lock in, while being on the Khronos steering committee and having made important contributions to OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and the SPIR-V ecosystem while simultaneously having pretty poor support for standard APIs in their software stack. Highest perf per watt and perf per dollar is AMD land. AMD keeps moving fowards while Nvidia keeps making weird missteps. There is a reason why I said series 10 is the best they will ever make, there will never be a return to that: they're stuck in the same loop Raja was: make everything bigger for the sake of bigger, instead of making actual performance improving changes.
- sigmoid10 3y agoI actually work in the field (for quite a few years by now) and basically everyone I know (who knows what they're doing and isn't just getting started) uses Nvidia. AMD drivers for GPGPU compute sucked so bad for so long, noone even bothered to try them anymore. CUDA might be closed source, but it is lightyears ahead in stability and usability. If you want to get things done in AI, you buy Nvidia. Everyone who actually has to make these decisions knows that.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago....which is hilarious because later on, the 580 had the same TDP as the 1070ti, but half the performance.