New Nvidia's Chief Scientist Bill Dally talks about GPU Tech, DX11 and Larrabee

[S.T.A.R.A.C.]

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,692145/Nvidias-Chief-Scientist-Bill-Dally-about-GPU-technology-DirectX-11-and-Intels-Larrabee/News/

Bill Dally: My name is Bill Dally and up until January I was chairman at the computer science department at Stanford University, I've been in the academic world since the mid-eighties, I was a professor at MIT in Boston from 1986 to 1997 and then I joined the Stanford faculty in 1997 and been there ever since.

My expertise is mostly in the area of parallel computing. I've built a number of experimental parallel machines over the years: The J-Machine, the M-Machine, the Imagine Stream Processor and most recently a processor called ELM. I've also done a lot of work on interconnection networks, designing a number of networks that were used in Cray supercomputers in the nineteen-nineties. And more recently coming up with the Flattened-Butterfly and Dragonfly-topologies.

At Nvidia I'm chief scientist, which [really] involves three pieces of the job. One is to set technical direction[ing] and consult with the product groups to influence their technologies that make our products better going forward. The other is to lead Nvidia research which has a goal of looking 5 - 10 years ahead, identifying challenges and opportunities and developing strategic technologies to make Nvidia products more competitive. Then finally is an outreach component where I meet with customers and partners and university researchers, evangelize GPU computing and the CUDA programming language.

Covjek je zamijenio Davida Kirka i logican je izbor jer je expert za parallel computing.

Bill Dally: First of all, right now, Larrabee is a bunch of View-graphs. So, until they actually have a product, it's difficult to say how good it is or what it does. You have to be careful to read to much into View-graphs - it's easy to be perfect, when you have to do is be a View-Graph. It's much harder when you have to deliver a product that actually works.

But to the question of the degree of fixed function hardware: I think it puts them at a very serious disadvantage. Our understanding of Larrabee, which is based on their paper at Siggraph last summer and the two presentations at the Game Developers Conference in April, is that they have fixed function hardware for texture filtering, but they do not have any fixed function hardware either for rasterization or compositing and I think that that puts them at a very serious disadvantage. Because for those parts of the graphics pipeline they're gonna have to pay 20 times or more energy than we will for those computations. And so, while we also have the option of doing rasterization in software if we want - we can write a kernel for that running on our Streaming Multiprocessors - we also have the option of using our rasterizer to do it and do it far more efficiently. So I think it puts them at a very big disadvantage power-wise to not have fixed function hardware for these critical functions. Because everybody in a particular envelope is dominated by their power consumption. It means that at a given power value they're going to deliver much lower performance graphics.

I think also that the fact that they've adopted an x86-instruction set puts them at a disadvantage. It's a complex instruction set, it's got instruction prefixes, it only has eight registers and while they claim that this gives them code compatibility, it gives them code compatibility only if they want to run one core without the SIMD extension. To use the 32 cores or use the 16-wide SIMD extension , they have to write a parallel program, so they have to start over again anyway. And they might as well have started over with a clean instruction set and not carry the area and power cost of interpreting a very complicated instruction set - that puts them at a disadvantage as well.

So while we're very concerned about Larrabee, Intel is a very capable company, and you always worry, when a very capable company starts eating your lunch, we're not too worried about Larrabee at least based on what they disclosed so far.

Evo nesto i za Audia

 

[audiofreak]

Evo da vidite kako izlgeda taj lik cisto da imamo neki kontekst za diskusiju:

First of all, right now, Larrabee is a bunch of View-graphs. So, until they actually have a product, it's difficult to say how good it is or what it does.

Aha, bas kao i njihov GT300.

Za compositing im ne treba fixed function hardware. Za rasterizaciju mozda, ali svakako ne onakav kakav imaju NVIDIA i ATI, pun stepenova koji u 90% igara ne rade nista.

we can write a kernel for that running on our Streaming Multiprocessors

Da mogu i da im to radi vec bi ga napisali i udarali u sva zvona kako ga imaju.

Because everybody in a particular envelope is dominated by their power consumption.

A da, samo zaboravlja da ljudi zanemaruju potrosnju kad nesto radi dobro.

it gives them code compatibility only if they want to run one core without the SIMD extension.

Heh, imam utisak da nikad nisu videli ni Intelov kompajler ni biblioteke.

Sve u svemu, NVIDIA pravi klasicnu pocetnicku gresku podcenjivanja protivnika, a po mom misljenju Intel je poslednji koga bi smeli da podcene kad je u pitanju SIMD, paralelno programiranje i optimizacija.

 

[S.T.A.R.A.C.]

Na toj slici je mladji. Ima njegova slika na linku sto sam okacio, ali sto ti je sad njegov izgled bitan

Cuj, GT300 ce se dokazati tamo gdje treba. Za Larrabee to nismo sigurni. I ne kuzim ovo za stepene i rasterizaciju? Sta si mislio sa tim?

I ne podcijenjiva Nvidia nikoga. Bill je to lijepo ovdje rekao:

So while we're very concerned about Larrabee, Intel is a very capable company, and you always worry, when a very capable company starts eating your lunch, we're not too worried about Larrabee at least based on what they disclosed so far.