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Nvidia's Chief Scientist on the Future of the GPU

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wed Apr 30, 2008 12:34 PM
from the well-isn't-that-special dept.
Graphics Software
teh bigz writes "There's been a lot of talk about integrating the GPU into the CPU, but David Kirk believes that the two will continue to co-exist. Bit-tech got to sit down with Nvidia's Chief Scientist for an interview that discusses the changing roles of CPUs and GPUs, GPU computing (CUDA), Larrabee, and what he thinks about Intel's and AMD's futures. From the article: 'What would happen if multi-core processors increase core counts further though, does David believe that this will give consumers enough power to deliver what most of them need and, as a result of that, would it erode away at Nvidia's consumer installed base? "No, that's ridiculous — it would be at least a thousand times too slow [for graphics]," he said. "Adding four more cores, for example, is not going anywhere near close to what is required.""
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Submission: Nvidia's Chief Scientist on the future of the GPU by teh bigz (900495)
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  • NV on the war path? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Vigile (99919) * on Wednesday April 30 2008, @12:39PM (#23253102)
    Pretty good read; interesting that this guy is talking to press a lot more:

    http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=530 [pcper.com]

    Must be part of the "attack Intel" strategy?

    • VIA (Score:3, Interesting)

      by StreetStealth (980200)
      The more Nvidia gets sassy with Intel, the closer they seem to inch toward VIA.

      This has been in the back of my mind for awhile... Could NV be looking at the integrated roadmap of ATI/AMD and thinking, long term, that perhaps they should consider more than a simple business relationship with VIA?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Retric (704075)
        The real limitation on a CPU/GPU hybrid is memory bandwidth. A GPU is happy with .5 to 1 GB of FAST RAM but CPU running vista works best with 4-8GB of CHEEP ram and a large L2 cash. Think of it this way a GPU needs to access every bit of ram 60+ times per second but a CPU tends to work with a small section of a much larger pool of ram which is why L2 cash size/speed is so important.

        Now at the low end there is little need for a GPU but as soon as you want to start 3D gaming and working with Photoshop on th

    • interesting that this guy is talking to press a lot more:
      I was a couple of weeks ago in a conference given by him at Barcelona (Spain). He is a nice speaker. He seems at a round of conferences around the world universities showing the CUDA technology. By the way, CUDA technology seems to be an interesting thing.

  • At some point in the future... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 30 2008, @12:40PM (#23253112)
    Everything will be integrated into one chip, and we will call it the PU.
  • CPU based GPU will not work as good as long as they have to use the main system ram also heat will limit there power. NVIDAI should start working HTX video card so you can the video card on the cpu bus but it is on a card so you put ram and big heat sinks on it.

  • Ugh. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From TFA> The ability to do one thing really quickly doesn't help you that much when you have a lot of things, but the ability to do a lot of things doesn't help that much when you have just one thing to do. However, if you modify the CPU so that it's doing multiple things, then when you're only doing one thing it's not going to be any faster.

    David Kirk takes 2 minutes to get ready for work every morning because he can shit, shower and shave at the same time.

  • FOR NOW (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Relic of the Future (118669) <dalesNO@SPAMdigitalfreaks.org> on Wednesday April 30 2008, @12:42PM (#23253146)
    There wasn't a horizon given on his predictions. What he said about the important numbers being "1" and "12,000" means consumer CPUs have about, what, 9 to 12 years to go before we get there? At which point it'd be foolish /not/ to have the GPU be part of the CPU. Personally, I think it'll be a bit sooner than that. Not next year, or the year after; but soon.

    • Personally, I think it'll be a bit sooner than that. Not next year, or the year after; but soon.
      You mean it'll coincide with the release of Duke Nukem Forever?

      • You mean it'll coincide with the release of Duke Nukem Forever?

        Nope. Duke Nukem Forever will be delayed so the engine can maximize the potential of the new combined GPU/CPU tech.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Dolda2000 (759023)
      Why would one even want to have a GPU on the same die as the CPU? Maybe I'm just being dense here, but I don't see the advantage.

      On the other hand, I certainly do see possibly disadvantages with it. For one thing, they would reasonably be sharing one bus interface in that case, which would lead to possibly less parallelism in the system.

      I absolutely love your sig, though. :)

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by renoX (11677)
        >Why would one even want to have a GPU on the same die as the CPU?

        Think about low end computers, IMHO putting the GPU in the same die as the CPU will provide better performance/cost than embedded in the motherboard.

        And a huge number of computers have integrated video so this is an important market too.
  • Graphics card man says that CPU's not a threat to his businees. I'm shocked!
  • ..there's discrete chips, but on the low end there's already integrated chipsets and I think the future is heading towards systems on a chip. A basic desktop with hardware HD decoding and 3D enough to run Aero (but not games) can be made in one package by Intel.
    • Aero takes more graphics support than some games. Even some new games if you look at some smaller niche titles.

  • "No, that's ridiculous -- it would be at least a thousand times too slow [for graphics]," he said. "Adding four more cores, for example, is not going anywhere near close to what is required."

    He then quipped, "Go away kid, ya bother me!" [dontquoteme.com]

  • "If the market wants to move away from GPU integration, let it, but we're not going to help it along..."
  • So I am going which ever manufacturer has the best drivers for my platform of choice, Linux. So if the future doesn't hold this for Nvidia, it doesn't really interest me.
    • And if your platform of choice doesn't hold much future/value for Nvidia, you will continue to not really interest them.

      The only people who run Linux without access to a Windows/OSX box tend to be the ones who are only willing to run/support Open Source/Free software. This is also the group least likely to buy commercial games, even if they were released for Linux.

      No games -> No market share for high end graphics cards with big margin -> The graphics cards companies don't care
      • Does Nvidia make commercial games? I thought they made hardware. I can't (yet) download hardware for free.

  • Why wouldn't you have a gpu core in a multiple ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Cedric Tsui (890887) on Wednesday April 30 2008, @12:55PM (#23253298)
    ... core processor? I don't understand the author's logic. Now, suppose it's 2012 or so and multiple core processors have gotten past their initial growing pains and computers are finally able to use any number of cores each to their maximum potential at the same time.

    A logical improvement at this point would be to start specializing cores to specific types of jobs. As the processor assigns jobs to particular cores, it would preferentially assign tasks to the cores best suited for that type of processing.
    • well, yeah, for sure. But I see that as only the first step. It's like the math-coprocessor step. My 32-core cpu has six graphics cores, four math cores, two HD video cores, an audio core, 3 physics, ten AI, and 6 general cores. But even that only lasts long enough to reach the point where mass production benefits exceed the specialized production benefits.

      It'll also be the case that development will start to adjust back towards the cpu. Keep in mind, I don't think even one game exists now that is actu
      • Supreme Commander is the game that requires 2 cores (well, ok you can drop the frame rate, polygon levels and other fidelity settings of course. Nobody would ever release a game that couldn't be played on a single core machine)(not yet at least).

        I think, considering the diminishing returns from adding cores, that adding specialised units on die would make sense. Look at how good a GPU version of folding@home is, and think how that kind of specialised processign could be farmed off to a specialised core. Not
    • I think the interviewer wasn't asking the right questions. His answer was for why you can't replace a GPU with an N-core CPU, not why you wouldn't put a GPU on the same die with your CPUs. I think his answers in general imply that it's more likely that people will want GPU cores that aren't attached to graphics output at all in the future, in addition to the usual hardware that connects to a monitor. I wouldn't be surprised if it became common to have a processor chip with 4 CPU cores and 2 GPU cores, and a

      • I think it's fairly clear that GPUs will stick around until we either have so much processing power and bandwidth we can't figure out what to do with it all, at which point it makes more sense to use the CPU(s) for everything, or until we have three-dimensional reconfigurable logic (optical?) that we can make into big grids of whatever we want. A computer that was just one big giant FPGA with some voltage converters and switches on it would make whatever kind of cores (and buses!) it needed on demand. Since

    • I was under the impression that optimal bus design used to different but that was sort of going away with the move to multi core designs.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think a better question is "Why wouldn't we have a separate multi-core GPU along with the multi-core CPU?" While I agree that nVidia is obviously going to protect it's own best interests, I don't see the GPU/CPU separation going away completely. Obviously there will be combination-core boards in the future for lower-end graphics, but the demand on GPU cycles is only going to increase as desktops/games/apps get better. However, one of the huge reasons that video cards are a productive industry is that ther
      • Hmmm. That's interesting.
        You're right. Perhaps the CPU and the GPU are too different to play nicely on the same die.

        A little simpler then. If CPU processing power does continue to increase exponentially (regardless of need) then one clever way to speed up a processor may be to introduce specialized processing cores. The differences might be small at first. Maybe some cores could be optimized for 64bit applications while others are still backwards compatible with 32bit. (No. I have no idea what sort of logis
  • There's the sun reflecting off the cars, there's the cars reflecting off each other, there's me reflecting off the cars. There's the whole parking lot reflecting off the building. Inside, there's this long covered walkway, and the reflections of the cars on one side and the trees on the other and the multiple internal reflections between the two banks of windows is part of what makes reality look real. AND it also tells me that there's someone running down the hall just around the corner inside the building, so I can move out of the way before I see them directly.

    You can't do that without raytracing, you just can't, and if you don't do it it looks fake. You get "shiny effect" windows with scenery painted on them, and that tells you "that's a window" but it doesn't make it look like one. It's like putting stick figures in and saying that's how you model humans.

    And if Professor Slusallek could do that in realtime with a hardwired raytracer... in 2005, I don't see how nVidia's going to do it with even 100,000 GPU cores in a cost-effective fashion. Raytracing is something that hardware does very well, and that's highly parallelizable, but both Intel and nVidia are attacking it in far too brute-force a fashion using the wrong kinds of tools.

    • During the Analyst's Day, Jen-Hsun showed a rendering of an Audi R8 that used a hybrid rasterisation and ray tracing renderer. Jen-Hsun said that it ran at 15 frames per second, which isn't all that far away from being real-time. So I asked David when we're likely to see ray tracing appearing in 3D graphics engines where it can actually be real-time?

      "15 frames per second was with our professional cards I think. That would have been with 16 GPUs and at least that many multi-core CPUs â" that's what t

      • Actually, you don't.

        What, you're one of these heretics who doesn't realize that we're in an elaborate computer simulation?

  • Future is set (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Archangel Michael (180766) on Wednesday April 30 2008, @01:02PM (#23253390) Journal
    The pattern set by the whole CPU / Math Co-Processor integration showed the way. For those old enough to remember, once upon a time the CPU and Math Co-Processor were separate socketed chips. Specifically you had to add the chip to the MOBO to get math functions integrated.

    The argument back then is eerily similar to the same as proposed by NV chief, namely the average user wouldn't "need" a Math Co-Processor. Then came along the Spreadsheet, and suddenly that point was moot.

    Fast forward today, if we had a dedicated GPU integrated with the CPU, it would eventually simplify things so that the next "killer app" could make use of commonly available GPU.

    Sorry, NV, but AMD and INTEL will be integrating GPU into the chip, bypassing bus issues and streamlining the timing. I suspect that VIDEO processing will be the next "Killer App". YouTube is just a precursor to what will become shortly.

    • CPUs, GPUs... in the end they're all ICs [wikipedia.org]. Bets against integration inevitably lose. The history of computation is marked by integration.

      NVidia already makes good GPUs and tolerable chipsets. They should expand to make CPUs and build their own integrated platform. AMD has already proven there is room in the market for entirely non-Intel platforms.

      It's that or wait till the competition puts out cheap, low power integrated equivalents that annihilate NVidia's market share. I think they have the credibilit
      • I've actually been suggesting to my friends for a while, that you'll end up with about four or five different major vendors of computers, each similar to what Apple is today, selling whole systems.

        Imagine Microsoft buying Intel, AMD buying RedHat, NVidia using Ubuntu(or whatever) and IBM launching OS/3 on Powerchips, and Apple.

        If the Document formats are set (ISO) then why not?

        There will be those few that continue to mod their cars, but for the most part, things will be mostly sealed and only a qualified me

  • Realtime Ray Tracing and Multicore CPU's (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nherc (530930) on Wednesday April 30 2008, @01:08PM (#23253460) Journal
    Despite what some major 3D game engine creators have to say [slashdot.org] if real-time ray tracing comes sooner than later, at about the time an eight core CPU is common, I think we might be able to do away with the graphics card especially considering the improved floating point units going in next gen. cores. Consider Intel's QuakeIV Raytraced running at 99fps at 720P on a dual quad-core Intel rig at IDF 2007 [pcper.com]. This set-up did not use any graphic card processing power and scales up and down. So, if you think 1280x720 is a decent resolution AND 50fps is fine you can play this now with a single quad-core processor. Now imagine it with dual octo-cores which should be available when? Next year? I hazard 120fps at 1080P on your (granted) above average rig doing real time ray tracing some time next year IF developers went that route AND still playable resolutions and decent fps with "old" (by that time) quad-cores.
    • It seems like you could still have specialized ray-tracing hardware. Whether that's integrated into the main CPU as a specialized core, or as an expansion card really isn't relevant, though.

      I think the best thing about heading in this direction is that "accelerated" graphics no longer becomes limited by your OS--assuming your OS supports the full instruction set of the CPU. No more whining that Mac Minis have crappy graphics cards, no more whining that Linux has crappy GPU driver support....

      The downside i
  • Why not make one of the multiple cores a GPU, then the speed at which it communicates with the CPU will be at clock speed.

    Problem solved.

    Of course Nvidia will need to come up with a CPU.

    Cheers
     
  • Nvidia makes SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) multicore processors while Intel, AMD and the other players make MIMD (multiple instructions, multiple data) multicore processors. These two architectures are incompatible, requiring different programming models. The former uses a fine grain approach to parallelism while the latter is coarse-grained. This makes for an extremely complex programming environment, something that is sure to negatively affect productivity. The idea that the industry must some

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by hackstraw (262471)
      Nvidia makes SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) multicore processors...

      That is untrue. The Nvidia cuda environment can do MIMD. I don't know the granularity, or much about it, but you don't have to run in complete SIMD mode.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by AKAImBatman (238306)

      I would never have expected nVidia's chief scientist to say that nVidia's products would not soon be obsolete.

      Moving to a combined CPU/GPU wouldn't obsolete NVidia's product-line. Quite the opposite, in fact. NVidia would get to become something called a Fabless semiconductor company [wikipedia.org]. Basically, companies like Intel could license the GPU designs from NVidia and integrate them into their own CPU dies. This means that Intel would handle the manufacturing and NVidia would see larger profit margins. NVidia (IIR

      • Only Amiga made it possible! (Thanks to custom chips, not in spite of them.)

        It doesn't seem likely that one generic item would be better at something than many specific ones. Sure CPU+GPU would just be all in one chip but why would that be better than many chips? Maybe if it had RAM inside aswell and that enabled faster FSB.

        • It doesn't seem likely that one generic item would be better at something than many specific ones.

          Combined items rarely are. However, they do provide a great deal of convenience as well as cost savings. If the difference between dedicated items and combined items is negligent, then the combined item is a better deal. The problem is, you can't shortcut the economic process by which two items become similar enough to combine.

          e.g.
          Combining VCR and Cassette Tape Player: Not very effective
          Combining DVD Player an

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nick_davison (217681)

      Instead of 4 CPU cores on a quad-core chip, why not put 2xCPU cores and 2xGPU cores?

      Because now they have to make [number of CPU options] x [number of GPU options] variants rather than [number of CPU options] + [number of GPU options].

      Even taking a small subset of the market:
      8600GT, 8800GT, 8800GTS, 6600, 6700, 6800

      Six products sit on shelves. Users buy what they want. As a competitor to say the 8600GT comes out, Best Buy has to discount one product line.

      To give users the same choices as an integrated solution, that'd be 9 variants:

      8600GT/6600 - Budget
      8600GT/6700 - Typical desktop user
      860

    • It won't work, since linux will never get the drivers for it going.
      stop trolling! NVidia's drivers for Linux do the CUDA stuff!

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