IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 01/10/2009

NVIDIA Fermi PhysX demo screenshots and information

While the focus of NVIDIA's "Fermi" architecture announcement was well and truly upon its abilities in terms of GPU computing, CUDA and the like, that didn't prevent PhysX getting a mention during proceedings, and indeed a demonstration of some advanced PhysX processing running on Fermi hardware.آ NVIDIA has now provided some more information about, and screenshots of, the demo shown during yesterday's GTC keynote speech.

The PhysX Fluids Demo shows the performance of PhysX to simulate water and fluid effects by using SPH particles with Navier-Stokes solvers. Different flowsآ and droplets of water do interact, create realistic waves and behavior though surface tension in real-time. The water is created through the simulation of 128,000 particles.

You can check out a handful of screenshots from this demo by way of an automated slide show by clicking on the image below:

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Elite Bastards review: NesteQ FanMax 8-channel fan controller

If you're running a system with a lot of fans for optimal cooling, then chances are you'll want some way to control them all to keep a handle on both temperatures and noise levels.آ Enter NesteQ's FanMax controller, with support for up to eight fans and the ability to split them into a pair of fan "groups" which can be enabled or disabled at the touch of a button.آ Is it worthy of consideration as a possible purchase?آ We check it out.

As you might have guessed by now, the FanMax takes up a single 5.25" drive bay in your system, with the front panel exposed at the front of the chassis as you see above.آ This panel gives you control over each of the eight fans that this unit supports via a speed control dial which effectively controls the voltage fed to that fan between 6 and 12 volts to adjust its speed, while these eight fans can also be split into two "group" of four fans.

NesteQ FanMax 8-channel fan controller review

As always your thoughts and comments on this review are most welcome, and can be left in our forum.

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NVIDIA reveals next-generation "Fermi" GPU architecture

As part of NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference which is currently ongoing in San Jose, California, the GPU giant has lifted the lid on what will be their next-generation architecture, a part now known to be codenamed "Fermi".آ So, what's it all about?آ A number of sites spill the beans.

NVIDIA astonished us with GT200 tipping the scales at 1.4 billion transistors. Fermi is more than twice that at 3 billion. And literally, that's what Fermi is - more than twice a GT200.

At the high level the specs are simple. Fermi has a 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface and 512 cores. That's more than twice the processing power of GT200 but, just like RV870 (Cypress), it's not twice the memory bandwidth.

The architecture goes much further than that, but NVIDIA believes that AMD has shown its cards (literally) and is very confident that Fermi will be faster. The questions are at what price and when.

Anandtech

Like most major PC processors these days, Fermi hasn't been entirely re-architected fresh from a clean sheet of paper; it is an incremental enhancement of prior Nvidia GPU architectures that traces its roots two major generations back, to the G80. Yet in the context of this continuity, Fermi brings radical change on a number of fronts, thanks to revisions to nearly every functional unit in the chip.

Many of the changes, especially the ones Nvidia is talking about at present, are directed toward improving the GPU's suitability and performance for non-graphics applications. Indeed, Nvidia has invested tremendous amounts in building a software infrastructure for CUDA and in engaging with its customers, and it claims quite a few of the tweaks in this architecture were inspired by that experience. There's much to cover here, and I've tried to organize it in a logical manner, but that means some key parts of the architecture won't be addressed immediately.

The Tech Report

The first implementation of this architecture, that we are tentatively calling GT300, will have some impressive raw specifications.آ The GPU is made up of 3.0 billion transistors and features 512 CUDA processing cores organized into 16 streaming multiprocessors of 32 cores each.آ The memory architecture is built around a new GDDR5 implementation and has six channels of 64-bits for a total memory bus of 384-bits.آ The memory system can technically support up to 6GB of memory as well – something that is key for HPC applications.

Each SM includes 32 CUDA processing cores (4x the previous GT200 design) as you can see above but also introduces other new features to help improve performance.آ Each processor includes a fully pipelined integer and floating point unit that implements the newer IEEE 754-2008 standard – another important move for GPU computing.آ The new Evergreen core from AMD also implements this standard as it adds support for the fused multiply-add instruction.

Also included in each SM are 16 load and store units and 4 special function units to handle calculations like sin and cosine.

NVIDIA is claiming that the double precision performance of the Fermi architecture will be greatly improved over the existing GT200 design.

PC Perspective

Nvidia’s last generation product, the GT200 struck a fine balance. The architecture certainly pushed the envelope of programmability, adding double precision support, atomic operations and a fledging software ecosystem, while holding the highest performance for a single GPU product. At the moment, that crown actually belongs to AMD’s Radeon 5870, which launched last week. AMD’s focused optimization is showing gains in many segments of the graphics market, particularly those below the â€کextreme’ price points, in the mainstream market.

It is in this context that Nvidia has announced a next generation architecture, which aims for even greater performance, reliability and programmability; unlocking even more software capabilities. This new architecture goes by several names to the keep the unwary on their toes: Fermi or GF100, although some in the press are mistakenly bandying about GT200. Nvidia has chosen to primarily discuss architecture and not to disclose most microarchitecture or implementation details in this announcement. Where possible, our educated speculation fills these gaps and will be clearly noted as such. The lack of details is partially due to the fact that products based on Fermi will not be out for several months – and even this timeline is unclear.

Curiously, they are also not discussing the graphical capabilities of this chip and instead focusing only on compute. Hence our discussion is focused primarily on the GPU as a compute device. Accordingly, we will try and use standard terminology and point out where and how GPU terminology differs.

Real World Technologies

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