Categoria: HardwareSoftware

Ampere and the gaming GPU

There have been many reports that Nvidia’s next generation technology will be codenamed Ampere and we want to set one thing straight. The successor of Volta is an AI/ML chip and not a GPU – just like Volta never was.

Many will jump the gun and say well, Volta did ship as a Titan V for $ 2999 and you can perform  cryptocurrency mining with it really well. Since this is HBM 2, and an extremely big core, Nvidia could never bring this to a reasonable $ 750ish market and would struggle to sell Titan V even at $ 1,000.

Nvidia wanted to address this Founders/Titan prosumers market and offer them a very fast GPU and that is what Volta is. Volta, as you know by now, shines in machine learning and artificial intelligence thanks to optimized architecture and a bunch of specialized tensor cores. It would made a hell of a GPU but big chunks of the Volta won’t  do anything for graphics acceleration as they are, quite simply, hardwired for AI tasks. Since Nvidia knows that some people are willing to spend $ 2,999 to get the Volta for research, it kick-started this market. Nvidia has always been well known for making people pay a ridiculous amount of money for pinnacle technology as Jensen loves the incredible high margins.

DRIVE PX Pegasus

Nvidia will have a GPU that will come in 2018 to replace the Pascal based GTX 1000 series and won’t be a cut down version of Volta. It will be a brand new unit designed from  scratch. Jensen already announced the next generation Post Volta GPU in European GTC in October 2017.

The new DRIVE PX Pegasus is necessary for Level 5 autonomous driving for  robo taxis in the future and has two Post Volta big GPUs. This solution is not shipping anytime soon and will most likely start showing up in the latter part of 2018. Nvidia has already said that  Level 5 autonomous taxis might start showing up in 2021, a good three years from now.  

Bear in mind that the automotive industry is a very slow one. It takes around six years to refresh a new car platform. It takes three years to do a face lift of an existing car. So, the car that they started designing in 2017 won’t be shipping before 2023. Level 5 Robo taxis of 2021 have started development in 2015.

So, the post Volta GPU inside of the Drive PX Pegasus will take years to integrate in car designs. The Volvo Drive PX 2 is based on 2x Tegra X2 Parker and 2x Pascal based GPUs and was announced two years ago. Nvidia went public about it at CES 2016 that Volvo has a plan to power a fleet of 100 Volvo XC90 SUVs that showed up on some roads in 2017.

2018 GTX at its own event

Our colleagues around the globe are speculating the release date and most likely the Volta successor will be announced at Nvidia’s GPU technology conference between March 26 – March 29 2018. It will most likely ship much later than that, but hey, at least Nvidia can announce  things to come.

The gaming GPU will be launched at its own event, as this has been its practice for many years now. AI and Gaming big GPUs have separate roadmaps as you can make money on two big chips specialized for a given task.

It is hard to imagine that the successor of Volta or Nvidia GPU can be manufactured at 7nm simply as 7nm won’t be available for GPUs in 2018. Nvidia will most likely stick with the reliable 12nm.

 
Watchdog wanted a deterrent effect

The European Union aimed for a “deterrent effect” on Google and other technology giants when it ordered the internet search outfit to pay 2.4 billion euro ($ 2.8 billion) for breaching antitrust law over how it displays shopping ads.

Regulators said that “the need to ensure that the fine has a sufficiently deterrent effect not only on Google and Alphabet but also on undertakings of a similar size and with similar resources”.

The European Commission said in a 215-page document laying out details of its seven year investigation into the company. The “particularly large” revenue of Google’s parent, Alphabet also determined the size of the fine, the EU said.

The penalty, levied in June, was more than double an earlier one billion euro fine on Intel and came with a threat of more daily fines for Google if it did not comply with an order to offer equal treatment to rival shopping-comparison services. Big numbers in cases of mega-companies have been a theme for EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who dared to order Apple to pay back some 13 billion euro in taxes last year.

Dirk Auer, a research fellow at Liege University’s Competition and Innovation Institute warned that it is a little risky to speak of deterrence when the behaviour is novel.

“Large fines can only have a deterrent effect if firms know that their behaviour might infringe the law. Here, the behaviour was not listed” in the EU’s enforcement priority and “Google is challenging this very point” in its court appeal.

The EU defended its move to levy a fine in a case that raised some new issues, in a young industry it hasn’t investigated thoroughly before now.

“Even if the conduct may have certain features that have not been examined in past decisions, this does not prevent the imposition of a fine”, it said in the document.

“Contrary to what Google claims, Google and Alphabet committed the infringement described in this decision intentionally or negligently” and the company “could not have been unaware of the fact that Google held a dominant position in the national markets for general search”.

The fine was based on revenue from Google’s comparison shopping service in 13 European countries, including sales from the paid product results and bottom text ads displayed on the Google Shopping website. That amount was multiplied by a figure that was redacted from the EU document.

Another legal expert warned that the courts might see it unreasonable of the Commission to impose any fine.

Damien Geradin, a professor at Tilburg University’s Law & Economics Centre. Regulators’ explanations “fail to convince that there is a need for an additional” multiplier of the penalty and the size of the fine needs to reflect the gravity of the infringement “which could not be that bad since the commission was willing to settle the case” at an earlier stage of its probe.

Google said it had implemented a remedy, as ordered by the EC, to ensure equal treatment for competitors.

“We have cooperated fully with the European Commission during its seven years of competition inquiry. We maintain that our innovations in online shopping have been good for shoppers, retailers and competition in general.”