It's amazing to step back and look at how much of NVIDIA's success has come from unforeseen directions. For their original purpose of making graphics chips, the consumer vs pro divide was all about CAD support and optional OpenGL features that games didn't use. Programmable shaders were added for the sake of graphics rendering needs, but ended up spawning the whole GPGPU concept, which NVIDIA reacted to very well with the creation and promotion of CUDA. GPUs have FP64 capabilities in the first place because back when GPGPU first started happening, it was all about traditional HPC workloads like numerical solutions to PDEs.
Fast forward several years, and the cryptocurrency craze drove up GPU prices for many years without even touching the floating-point capabilities. Now, FP64 is out because of ML, a field that's almost unrecognizable compared to where it was during the first few years of CUDA's existence.
NVIDIA has been very lucky over the course of their history, but have also done a great job of reacting to new workloads and use cases. But those shifts have definitely created some awkward moments where their existing strategies and roadmaps have been upturned.
Most people don't appreciate how many dead end applications NVIDIA explored before finding deep learning. It took a very long time, and it wasn't luck.
It was luck that a viable non-graphics application like deep learning existed which was well-suited to the architecture NVIDIA already had on hand. I certainly don't mean to diminish the work NVIDIA did to build their CUDA ecosystem, but without the benefit of hindsight I think it would have been very plausible that GPU architectures would not have been amenable to any use cases that would end up dwarfing graphics itself. There are plenty of architectures in the history of computing which never found a killer application, let alone three or four.
Even that is arguably not lucky, it just followed a non-obvious trajectory. Graphics uses a fair amount of linear algebra, so people with large scale physical modeling needs (among many) became interested. To an extent the deep learning craze kicked off because of developments in computation on GPUs enabled economical training.
It was luck, but that doesn't mean they didn't work very hard too.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
They were also bailed out by Sega.
When they couldn't deliver the console GPU they promised for the Dreamcast (the NV2), Shoichiro Irimajiri, the Sega CEO at the time let them keep the cash in exchange for stock [0].
Without it Nvidia would have gone bankrupt months before Riva 128 changed things.
Sega console arm went bust not that it mattered. But they sold the stock for about $15mn (3x).
Had they held it, Jensen Huang ,estimated itd be worth a trillion[1]. Obviously Sega and especially it's console arm wasn't really into VC but...
My wet dream has always been what if Sega and Nvidia stuck together and we had a Sega tegra shield instead of a Nintendo switch? Or even what if Sega licensed itself to the Steam Deck? You can tell I'm a sega fan boy but I can't help that the Mega Drive was the first console I owned and loved!
[0] https://www.gamespot.com/articles/a-5-million-gift-from-sega...
The whole GPU history is off and being driven by finance bros as well. Everyone believes Nvidia kicked off the GPU AI craze when Ilya Sutskever cleaned up on AlexNet with an Nvidia GPU back in 2012, or when Andrew Ng and team at Stanford published their "Large Scale Deep Unsupervised Learning using Graphics Processors" in 2009, but in 2004, a couple of Korean researches were the first to implement neural networks on a GPU, using ATI Radeons (now AMD): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00313...
I remember ATI and Nvidia were neck-and-neck to launch the first GPUs around 2000. Just so much happening so fast.
I'd also say Nvidia had the benefit of AMD going after and focusing on Intel both at the server level as well as the integrated laptop processors, which was the reason they bought ATI.
I'm not sure why the article dismisses cost.
Let's say X=10% of the GPU area (~75mm^2) is dedicated to FP32 SIMD units. Assume FP64 units are ~2-4x bigger. That would be 150-300mm^2, a huge amount of area that would increase the price per GPU. You may not agree with these assumptions. Feel free to change them. It is an overhead that is replicated per core. Why would gamers want to pay for any features they don't use?
Not to say there isn't market segmentation going on, but FP64 cost is higher for massively parallel processors than it was in the days of high frequency single core CPUs.
> Assume FP64 units are ~2-4x bigger.
I'm not a hardware guy, but an explanation I've seen from someone who is says that it's not much extra hardware to add to a 2×f32 FMA unit the capability to do 1×f64. You already have all of the per-bit logic, you mostly just need to add an extra control line to make a few carries propagate. So the size overhead of adding FP64 to the SIMD units is more like 10-50%, not 100-300%.
> Assume FP64 units are ~2-4x bigger.
I'm pretty sure that's not a remotely fair assumption to make. We've seen architectures that can eg. do two FP32 operations or one FP64 operation with the same unit, with relatively low overhead compared to a pure FP32 architecture. That's pretty much how all integer math units work, and it's not hard to pull off for floating point. FP64 units don't have to be—and seldom have been—implemented as massive single-purpose blocks of otherwise-dark silicon.
When the real hardware design choice is between having a reasonable 2:1 or 4:1 FP32:FP64 ratio vs having no FP64 whatsoever and designing a completely different core layout for consumer vs pro, the small overhead of having some FP64 capability has clearly been deemed worthwhile by the GPU makers for many generations. It's only now that NVIDIA is so massive that we're seeing them do five different physical implementations of "Blackwell" architecture variants.
Why would gamers want to pay for any features they don't use?
Obviously they don't want to. Now flip it around and ask why HPC people would want to force gamers to pay for something that benefits the HPC people... Suddenly the blog post makes perfect sense.
Similar to when Nvidia released LHR GPUs that nerfed performance for Ethereum mining.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 LHR which tried to hinder mining at the bios level.
The point wasn't to make the average person lose out by preventing them mining on their gaming GPU. But to make miners less inclined to buy gaming GPUs. They also released a series of crypto mining GPUs around the same time.
So fairly typical market segregation.
https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3060-anti-min...
No mention of the Radeon VII from 2019 where for some unfathomable reason AMD forgot about the segmentation scam and put real FP64 into a gaming GPU. From this 2023 list, it's still faster at FP64 than any other consumer GPU by a wide margin (enterprise GPU's aren't in the list). Scroll all the way to the end.
https://www.eatyourbytes.com/list-of-gpus-by-processing-powe...
Thats because Radeon VIIs were just AMD Instinct MI50 server gpus which didn't make the cut or were left over.
FP64 performance is limited on consumer because the US government deems it important to nuclear weapons research.
Past a certain threshold of FP64 throughput, your chip goes in a separate category and is subject to more regulation about who you can sell to and know-your-customer. FP32 does not matter for this threshold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjusted_Peak_Performance
It is not a market segmentation tactic and has been around since 2006. It's part of the mind-numbing annual export control training I get to take.
This is so interesting, especially given that it is in theory possible to emulate FP64 using FP32 operations.
I do think though that Nvidia generally didn't see much need for more FP64 in consumer GPUs since they wrote in the Ampere (RTX3090) white paper: "The small number of FP64 hardware units are included to ensure any programs with FP64 code operate correctly, including FP64 Tensor Core code."
I'll try adding an additional graph where I plot the APP values for all consumer GPUs up to 2023 (when the export control regime changed) to see if the argument of Adjusted Peak Performance for FP64 has merit.
Do you happen to know though if GPUs count as vector processors or not under these regulations since the weighing factor changes depending on the definition?
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/10/24/2018-22... What I found so far is that under Note 7 it says: "A ‘vector processor’ is defined as a processor with built-in instructions that perform multiple calculations on floating-point vectors (one-dimensional arrays of 64-bit or larger numbers) simultaneously, having at least 2 vector functional units and at least 8 vector registers of at least 64 elements each."
Nvidia GPUs have only 32 threads per warp, so I suppose they don't count as a vector processor (which seems a bit weird but who knows)?
> it is in theory possible to emulate FP64 using FP32 operations
I’d say it’s better than theory, you can definitely use float2 pairs of fp32 floats to emulate higher precision. Quad precision using too, using float4. Here’s the code: https://andrewthall.com/papers/df64_qf128.pdf
Also note it’s easy to emulate fp64 using entirely integer instructions. (As a fun exercise, I attempted both doubles and quads in GLSL: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/flKSzG)
While it’s relatively easy to do, these approaches are a lot slower than fp64 hardware. My code is not optimized, not ieee compliant, and not bug-free, but the emulated doubles are at least an order of magnitude slower than fp32, and the quads are two order of magnitude slower. I don’t think Andrew Thall’s df64 can achieve a 1:4 float to double perf ratio either.
And not sure, but I don’t think CUDA SMs are vector processors per se, and not because of the fixed warp size, but more broadly because of the design & instruction set. I could be completely wrong though, and Tensor Cores totally might count as vector processors.
Can't wait until they update this to also include export controls around FP8 and FP4 etc in order to combat deepfakes, and then all of a sudden not be able to buy increasingly powerful consumer GPUs.