Nvidia 'Fermi' chip for Mac, Windows too

Nvidia's new Fermi chip is being billed as a supercomputing chip but Nvidia doesn't want you to forget that it is also aimed at Apple's Snow Leopard and Windows 7.

The Fermi chip was announced with much fanfare on Wednesday as key silicon in a future supercomputer from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But, wait, Fermi is also going to be great at accelerating stuff in Snow Leopard and Windows 7--not to mention a great gaming chip, according to Bill Dally, chief scientist at Nvidia who spoke during a conference call with analysts on Thursday.

The Fermi graphics processing unit (GPU)--which packs 512 processing cores--will support DirectX-11, a technology for speeding certain multimedia software in Windows 7, and also support an analogous technology in Snow Leopard, OpenCL.

"A lot of (the chip's new) features accelerate key consumer applications. Both Snow Leopard and Windows 7 enable the GPU to be used as a co-processor to accelerate third-party applications," Dally said. With a "discrete (standalone) GPU they can get very good performance on these applications," he said.

Applications that Nvidia says will be accelerated by the Fermi chip

(Credit: Nvidia)

Dally gave examples (see graphic) of consumer titles such as Adobe's Creative Suite, Motion DSP's vReveal (for fixing photographs), and Badaboom (for creating iPod video).

He offered a qualifier, however. "We are paying a bit of a compute tax in that we launched a part where a lot of the consumer compute applications haven't really taken hold yet. But over time as more consumer computer applications are developed that take advantage of our compute (consumer) features...I think it's going to give us a big leg up," he said.

And being an Nvidia chip, games are a big target market. "Fermi adds value to games by doing exactly the same kind of scientific simulations that we use to predict climate and to understand the genome and other things," according to Dally. "A great example of that is our PhysX package that basically does physical simulations to make games appear more real."

He also explained why the chip was billed as a supercomputer chip initially and not a gaming chip. "It's a zero-sum game. You have a certain amount of die (chip) area, a certain power budget. It is the case that we put a bunch of die area into double-precision floating point, a bunch of die area into ECC. And for gaming graphics applications, those give less returns than they do for the scientific applications," he said. Double-precision floating point operations are used heavily in scientific computing. ECC, or error correcting code, is a technology that can correct data errors on the fly.

And Dally explained how Fermi can be scaled down to lower-end chips used in the gaming and consumer segments. "We're not talking about other (chips) at this point in time but you can imagine that we can scale this part by having fewer than the 512 cores and by having these cores have fewer of the features, for example less double-precision," he said.

All the Fermi products, including gaming and professional workstation chips, will be announced "pretty close together." Chips are expected sometime in the coming few months.

And how does Fermi stack up against current public information about Intel's future "Larrabee" graphics chip? "We can't compare anything to Larrabee until it shows up and can actually be measured," said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, which tracks the graphics chip market. "But remember, Larrabee was started over two years ago and both ATI and Nvidia have had two new designs out since then," he said. "So the pressure will be on Intel to chase fast-moving ATI and Nvidia," Peddie said. ATI, which is Advanced Micro Devices' graphics chip unit, already has a chip in stores--the Radeon HD 5800-- that supports Windows DirectX-11.

[solitare_pax]

So should Intel be worried?

[tipoo_]

Nope. x86 isnt going away for a LONG time, and they have their foot (almost) in the door of GPGPU with Larrabee.

[Gold_Storm_Mac]

intel should be concentrating on CPU's. they haven't done well in the past with GPUs. OR maybe they could acquire nvidia and compete with ATI and AMD.

[Dalmatian28]

To the writer of this article: Why you can't just write stup*d article without going cheep with that Mac vs. pc garb*ge !!! This article should have been about Nvidea but... look at your title! What happen to the standards???? We all know that writers without talent use violence and sex in the movies to accomplish the same thing! Is this your version of it! Why not for once just write the article and cover the story without putting that vs. in there! It would show us that you still have some talent and higher standards than most of your coworkers! Thank you!!!!

[medanat]

Dalmatian28, QQ.

[cvaldes1831]

@Dalmatian28:<br /><br />Please take your meds.<br /><br />Thank you.

[Seaspray0]

"512 processing cores" How much energy will this thing consume and will it heat my house in the winter?

[Vegaman_Dan]

I don't play games on a computer and don't really need GPU horsepower. Yet I have a 512Mb PCI-X card in my desktop simply because it was the cheeapest card at the time that supported dual DVI monitors at the time.

[samueltayloralexander]

i think he was just saying that this is also going to be a consumer gpu

[Kirkaiya]

Should be interesting to see whether (and by how much) the gaming version of this Nvidia Fermi chip leapfrogs ATI's Radeon HD 5870, which can put out something like 2.7 TeraFlops, roughly double the previous generation (a 4870, which I have, although ATI released a 4890 part as well).<br /><br />I doubt Nvidia would want to be bought out by Intel, not yet anyway. And if Intel does get "larrabee" off the ground, and competitive price/performance-wise with low and mid-range GPUs from Nvidia and ATI, they (Intel) will have even less incentive to pay what would be a premium for Nvidia. As for the ongoing Nvidia-ATI performance war: let the games continue, since we all win!

[skipperpma]

Dalmatian28 - I would agree with you whenever this tactic is used. That being said, in this case, I have to side with the author. I don't feel any sort of spin was put on the article. It was only highlighting the fact that the chip could be used to enhance performance in both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. <br />I don't see anything wrong with that.

[Zabadok]

i kinda miss my XT-AT IBM computer, never worried about upgrades 10 years! cause verything was DOS :-D

[cptnjarhead]

Same here... Hell im still waiting for games with MMX support to come out ;) <br />All this hype is just that.. hype!...remember.. DX8 ? more realistic textures, DX9 more realistic textures, DX10 you guessed it.. more fricken realistic textures? and now DX11 and Fermi? I can?t wait.... now those pesky wooden doors and windows..will look more realistic.. when you try to blow them up with a rocket launcher and nothing happens... lame lame lame... when will they learn... eye candy is slight of hand.. no matter how good it looks.. all I want is a game that doesn?t have unbreakable windows/doors or invisible barriers.. .. but all we get are more realistic textures that we cannot interact with. Hardware is great.. but it cannot shine without software? so this means nothing to me.<br />LAME

[Mike_MotionDSP]

Howdy...<br /><br />vReveal actually fixes video problems (shake, poor lighting, video noise...), not photo problems!

[Constable Odo]

Are graphics companies really going to give some parity to Macs. Everything up to now is geared for Windows computers and they always get the newest, fastest and least expensive graphics cards. When Macs get some graphics card, it's always about a year behind and costs twice as much. I very doubtful that graphics card makers are going to do much for Apple. I'm still not sure why Apple doesn't spend some of it's money to write drivers for graphics cards, but maybe it's more complicated than I understand it to be. Maybe there's no point in doing so since most of the games are written for Windows PCs and it would just be a waste of money for Apple. I just hope the Apple OS can use all those GPU processing cores to speed up things overall and then people won't think they're getting shafted when they spend more money on Macs.

[Yelonde]

Trust me, most macs come with better graphics than average PCs do *cough* intel graphics *cough*. Also, the price of GPUs on macs are no more expensive than their PC counterparts. For example, you can get a mac version of a GTX285 for about $400. Newegg sells the same product for about $375 on average, so there is not that big of a price difference, not even close to twice the price difference.<br /><br />Also, programs like FCP do make heavy use of GPU features. When I am not using programs like motion, I still like booting into windows and playing crysis on my mac from time to time.

[peretparker]

I am not play on P.C. So need it<br /><br /><br />Ab Circle Pro

[DukeW]

Wow! The Fermi is both a floor wax *and* a dessert topping! Seriously, now that Apple is using Intel chips, there is almost no difference between Macs and PCs, internally speaking. Same processor and memory buses, obviously the same processors, and even the same graphics cards in the same slot architecture. Same disks, same everything. The only differences are the OS and the high-tone design. So let's all stop the silly Apple vs. PC thing, and go back to worrying about something really important, like paper vs. plastic....