Updated at 4:40 p.m. PDT: adding to discussion of next-generation Nvidia Ion chip.
As graphics kingpin Nvidia tries to reshape itself into a broad-based computing company, it is taking big gambles with potentially big payoffs, while it fends off challenges from rivals Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
The world's largest supplier of standalone graphics chips for PCs needs to grow. Established markets have matured and Nvidia must seek out other ways to make money.
Nvidia's Fermi-based GF100 graphics processor.
"In almost every market they have entered they have become dominant," said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, which tracks the graphics chip market. "Almost 90 percent market share in the workstation business and 55 to 65 percent in the graphics business. But if you're that successful you can't really grow the market anymore, and if you want to keep growing your company, then you have to get into new markets."
Enter supercomputing and Nvidia's brand-new Fermi architecture. "That's a huge market and big margins," said Peddie. Fermi was announced last week at an Nvidia conference to great fanfare when prestigious Oak Ridge National Laboratory said it plans to use Fermi in a future supercomputer.
It would be an understatement to say that the Fermi chip potentially packs a computing wallop. The chip integrates an astounding 3 billion transistors, about three times the number of transistors in Nvidia's most powerful graphics chip now on the market, and it has been designed with features that make it more suitable for high-performance computers, the first time that Nvidia has architected a chip this way.
Fermi GPUs, each containing 512 processing cores, would enable "substantial scientific breakthroughs" that would be impossible without the new technology, Jeff Nichols, Oak Ridge's associate lab director for computing and computational sciences, said last week.
Nvidia hopes to parlay this computing power into the mainstream. (For a comparison of Fermi with AMD's newest graphics chip see: ATI and Nvidia face off--obliquely.)
"Fermi will offer Nvidia the opportunity to grow our consumer business by having the fastest raw graphics power," said Drew Henry, general manager of Nvidia's bread-and-butter GeForce graphics business. "But it's also going to expand our business by allowing people to process better video and photo applications and to use the GPU for many, many more mainstream applications." (GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)
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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.
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