4 ms·

A 192-core GPU? Am I out of touch with this area of technology or is that a typo?

mdda 12y ago
192 cores is right. It's now Nvidia's smallest 'slab', with the workstation/server class chips having multiples of that.
- jeffreyrogers 12y ago
  For comparison, Nvidia's highest level gaming GPU, the Titan Z[1] has 5760 cores... but it costs about $3000 [1]: http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/announcing-the-geforce-gtx-titan-z http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/announcing-the-gef...
revelation 12y ago
They are not "real cores". GPUs are massively parallel, so these are 192 computing cores, but they share everything else.
orbifold 12y ago
A high end gaming card has thousands of those. If you read the CUDA documentation you can find out more about the hardware. Physically a high end card has several streaming multiprocessors each with their own caches and access to a global level 2 cache, instructions are sorted into categories (integer math, floating point math, load/store/special functions) each of those correspond to functional units on the chip that execute in lock-step. The current generation has 32/64 of those (called the warp size, notice 192/32 = 6). High end cards have several of those streaming multiprocessors, for example the Titan 30 * 192 = 5760. A warp scheduler on each chip decides what to run, so for all 192 "cores" to be in use you would have to have independent floating point / integer and special function instructions to do. It is the same marketing trick that AMD uses to sell two integer functional units in a four core design as 8 'cores'. Overall cuda models the underlying hardware fairly faithfully, so if you are interested in the hardware design you should read the CUDA documentation.
- makomk 12y ago
  It's not actually the same marketing trick as AMD's new CPUs. The two cores in each unit of those CPUs are genuine, full-fat integer cores with their own control flow that can execute unrelated instructions from two different threads or processes at the same time; only the floating-point unit is shared between them. CUDA "cores" are more like individual lanes within the SIMD/SSE unit of a CPU - the control flow and instruction decoding are shared amongst an entire "warp" of 16/32/62 "cores" and all the "cores" execute exactly the same instruction in lockstep on different data.

mdda 12y ago

192 cores is right. It's now Nvidia's smallest 'slab', with the workstation/server class chips having multiples of that.

jeffreyrogers 12y ago
For comparison, Nvidia's highest level gaming GPU, the Titan Z[1] has 5760 cores... but it costs about $3000 [1]: http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/announcing-the-geforce-gtx-titan-z http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/announcing-the-gef...

revelation 12y ago

They are not "real cores". GPUs are massively parallel, so these are 192 computing cores, but they share everything else.

orbifold 12y ago

A high end gaming card has thousands of those. If you read the CUDA documentation you can find out more about the hardware. Physically a high end card has several streaming multiprocessors each with their own caches and access to a global level 2 cache, instructions are sorted into categories (integer math, floating point math, load/store/special functions) each of those correspond to functional units on the chip that execute in lock-step. The current generation has 32/64 of those (called the warp size, notice 192/32 = 6). High end cards have several of those streaming multiprocessors, for example the Titan 30 * 192 = 5760. A warp scheduler on each chip decides what to run, so for all 192 "cores" to be in use you would have to have independent floating point / integer and special function instructions to do. It is the same marketing trick that AMD uses to sell two integer functional units in a four core design as 8 'cores'. Overall cuda models the underlying hardware fairly faithfully, so if you are interested in the hardware design you should read the CUDA documentation.

makomk 12y ago
It's not actually the same marketing trick as AMD's new CPUs. The two cores in each unit of those CPUs are genuine, full-fat integer cores with their own control flow that can execute unrelated instructions from two different threads or processes at the same time; only the floating-point unit is shared between them. CUDA "cores" are more like individual lanes within the SIMD/SSE unit of a CPU - the control flow and instruction decoding are shared amongst an entire "warp" of 16/32/62 "cores" and all the "cores" execute exactly the same instruction in lockstep on different data.