It all sounds good but no news yet on when it will be out, other than the "in the next few weeks" line.
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BOINC blog

Some more technical data of the G300 for Nvidia.

http://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/fermi_white_papers/NVIDIAFermiArchitectureWhitepaper.pdf

It is likely to be at least 3 times faster than a GTX285 for GPUGRID.
We will probably compile specifically for it with multiple application versions, so that people can use the maximum of performance.

gdf

It is the 25 percent deposit that I am worried about!

How big of a loan would one have to apply for to get one of these things? Do I need to be looking at a ten year term?

I have heard 20% higher than current price of GTX295.

gdf

We will take advantage of the 2.5 Tflops single precision.

gdf

Scientific accuracy can be obtained/validated in more than one way.
So, double precision is not the only method!

PS. I doubt if the amount of DDR5 will make any difference to GPUGRID, well not any time soon. If there is a card released with 512MB that costs 30% less than one with say 2GB, get the 512MB card - If you want to go from A to B fast and not spent too much getting there, buy the car without the caravan attached!

My confidence in NVidia has dropped significantly.
They presented a mockup Fermi-Tesla card as 'the real thing' without telling anyone beforehand that it was a fake card. It took this article to make them confirm it was a mockup. This would suggest they do not have a real card.

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/10/01/nvidia-fakes-fermi-boards-gtc/

Guys the G300 is simply amazing!

I want to test it before saying it, but it could really be the reference architecture for two years. Once it is out nobody would want to buy a GTX295. That is why factories are not producing them anymore.
It is different for the GTX285, I am sure that it will just become a low end card, maybe under another name.

Nvidia has always, as a practice, advertised something before they have it in the market. In this case, it is just few months away, so quite in time. G300 should be out between Christmas and new year. The G300 should then the fastest GPU out there, including ATI (which however will be just almost there with the 5870, amazing as well).

When to support ATI does not depend on us, but on ATI themselves to provide a working openCL implementation. I believe that this is close now.

gdf

Well, I would think that none of your ATI card could actually run faster than a GTX285 for our application. If you mean that you get more credits, this is just due to overcrediting by the projects. Something that it is bound to change long term.

gdf

There is a fundamental flaw with NVidia. They sell GPU’s that are excellent for gamers and for crunchers, but they are expensive due to research and design of cutting edge technology. Partially as a result of this, they don’t sell well against Intel in the low end market – where most of the sales occur. Unfortunately for NVidia Intel have proprietary rights on chip design and can therefore hold NVidia to random – and have been doing so for some time! With a year of financial instability it is little wonder that the manufactures of a panicle technological design are struggling. When you are faced with competitors that are capable of flexing considerable muscle (buy our GPUs or you wont get our CPU’s) and governments who are scared to help NVidia, you are in a difficult position!
It is likely that in Europe Intel could be fined for their present actions, but by the time that happens there might be two CPU manufacturers and the same two GPU manufacturers.
By most accounts the G200 range was difficult and expensive to manufacture so it would be an unnecessary financial burden on the company to try to keep these production lines running. Now is not the time to produce a card that will not sell at a profit! It seems sensible that they are cutting manufacturing back now, several months before the release of the G300 based GPU’s. I expect the new G300 line will require the full attention of NVidia – it could make or break the company. To keep manufacturing lots of pointless old lines of technologies, as Intel do with their CPU’s, would definitely spell the end for NVidia.

So by the end of the year there will be some G300 out (I hope more than few).

gdf

I did not say anyone would fail. I suggested that a plan to save the company was in place and this does not include selling old line GPUs! Nice technical insight but businesses go bust because they cant generate enough business to pay off their debts in time, not because of the technical details of a future architecture.

As soon as we get a H5870 I will be able to tell you.
Maybe we can have a chat in case it is not fast to see where is the problem.

gdf

We got access to a 4850, and you were right shared memory is still emulated via global memory, so of not use.

gdf

We got access to a 4850, and you were right shared memory is still emulated via global memory, so of not use.
gdf

NVIDIA has released another GT300 card.

They did it in the only way they know how. They Re-branded the GT220 and called it a GeForce 315!

Fortunately, it is OEM only. So shoppers need only look out for the existing range of p0rkies.

The first effort was particularly special. The GeForce 310 uses DDR2. At this rate dont count out an AGP comeback.

LOL!!!

I guess this put's nVidias comment "You'll be surprised once the Geforce 300 lineup is complete" into a whole new light..

MrS
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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Please nobody buy a G315 ever.

gdf

Here is my opinion on the GT210, GT220 and GT315.

The G210 is a resounding No, don’t go there card!
The GT220, GT230M and GT315 cards are not cards I would buy to participate in this project. So stay away from them. They are not good value for money, if you want to participate here. That said the GT220 / GT315 might get through about 1 task a day, if the system is on 24/7.

Mobile devices tend not to be on too much. They tend to use power saving features by default, so the system goes to sleep after a very short time.
I would expect a GT230M to overheat quickly and make the system very noisy.
I found that the graphics card in my laptop caused system instability when running GPUGrid, and rarely finished a job. It was not worth it, and may have caused more bother than it was worth to the project.

As for the GTX 260 1.8GB, the amount of RAM makes no difference. What matters is the core.

Seriously, notebooks and GPU-crunching don't mix well. Nobody expects a desktop GPU to run under constant load and even less so for a mobile card. It will challenge the cooling system heavily, if the GPU has any horsepower at all (e.g. not G210).

MrS
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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

MrS, as always you are quite correct, but perhaps he will be fine with Einstein, for a while at least.
It barely uses the GPU. Its not even 50/50, CPU/GPU; more like 90% CPU.
Einstein GPU+CPU tasks compared to CPU tasks only improve turnover by about 30min; from about 8h to 7h 30min and so on. When I tested it, albeit on a desktop, my temps did not even rise above normal usage. Not even by one degree! GPUGrid puts on about 13 degrees (mind you my GTX260 has 2 fans, and the system has a front fan, side fan, exhaust fan, and PSU fan).

I would not recommend using it with Collatz however!

RM, Keep an eye on the temps just in case they manage to improve on the design, you can use GPU-Z, and see if there are any notable changes.

I use to use a USB laptop cooler that just sat under the laptop blowing cold air around it. I think I bought it for around £10. At the time I was just crunching on the CPU, but it did pull the temps down to a reasonable level.

Ask around and find somone who can build a system for you. Pay them $200 and you will save money on buying an OEM HP, Dell...
Alternatively contact a local dealer (shop) and get them to build one.
If you must get a system with a low spec card, get a GT240. There is not much difference in price between a GT220 and a GT240, but the GT240 will do twice the work. You could even have Two GT240s instead of a GTX260 sp216 or GTX275.
The GT240 cards do not require additional power connectors, so you will not need an expensive PSU.

The gaming-related features of GT300 (or now GF100) have been revealed (link). Impressive raw power and more flexible than previous chips.

MrS
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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Good Link MrS.
The limited article I read this morning had little to offer, that one was much better.

For what it’s worth, this is what I would speculate:
It will be about 512/240 *1.4 times as fast as a GTX285 (3 times as fast).
This would make it over 65% faster than the GTX 295.

The 1.4 is based on a guess that the cores will be faster due to the 40nm GT100 architecture and using speedier DDR5 (which is not confirmed).
Assuming it uses GDDR5 the frequency increase will be advantageous despite the memory bus width. The memory temperatures should be lower. I would say 2GB would be the new standard.

With higher transistor count the performance should be higher. With the 40nm core size (and given the low temperatures of cards such as the GT 240 and GT220) core temperatures should also be lower.

Unfortunately I cannot see these cards being sold at low prices. I would speculate that they would be well over the $500 mark; around $720 to $850 – hope I am wrong! If they are released in March at that price I don’t think I will be rushing out to buy one, though many will.
I doubt that they will be significantly more power hungry than a GTX 295, but again I would want to know before I bought one. I don’t fancy paying £400 per year to run one.

Perhaps someone else would care to speculate, or correct me.
I expect that over the comming few weeks there will be many more details released.

Unrelated.
We are doing the last tests on the new application. After a lot of work, at the moment we are 60% faster on the same hardware than the previous one.
On linux is ready, we are fixing it for Windows.

gdf

Perhaps someone else would care to speculate

My rough guess of 512/240=2.13 and multiplied by an improved architecture factor (1.4) giving about 3 times the performance of a GTX 285 is only meant as a guide to anyone reading this and interested in one of these cards, as is my price speculation and power consumption guess!

I broadly incorporated, what you more accurately referred to as architecture improvements, into what I thought would result in GPU and RAM system gains via their new supporting architectures (not that I understand them well), but I was just looking (stumbling about) for an overall ball park figure.

I take your point about the 40nm core being packed with 3B transistors; the performance vs power consumption is tricky, so there may not be any direct gain there.
Where the RAM is concerned, I spotted the lower bandwidth, but with DDR5 being faster and with the cache improvements I guessed there might be some overall gain.
Although my methods are not accurate they might suffice at this stage.
Do you think the new architecture will improve GPUGrid performance in itself by about 40% (my guesstimate of 1.4)?

I like the sound of your little GF100. Buying one of those might just about be possible at some stage. Something around the performance of a GTX 295 or perhaps 25% faster would go down very well, especially if it uses less power.

O/T
GDF – Your’ new, 60% faster application sounds like an excellent achievement. Does it require Cuda Capable 1.3 cards or can 1.1 and 1.2 cards also benefit to this extent?

O/T
GDF – Your’ new, 60% faster application sounds like an excellent achievement. Does it require Cuda Capable 1.3 cards or can 1.1 and 1.2 cards also benefit to this extent?[/quote]

It is slightly slower if compiled for 1.1. We are trying to optimize it, the only other solution is to release an application for 1.3 cards alone.

gdf

Hi SK,

I'm not saying your factor of 1.4 is wrong. In fact, I couldn't even if I wanted to ;)

The point is that I don't have a "better" number. Just the gut feeling that in typical games the speed up will be lower, because otherwise GT200 would have been quite unbalanced in some way. However, if any of the shiny new features can be used, the speed up can be much larger. At Milkyway I'd expect a factor of 8 per clock due to the massive increase of raw DP number crunching power.

Regarding a speed up of 1.4 for GPU-Grid. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if GPU-Grid could make good use of the new features. But deciding for a specific number would be too bold..

Regarding the memory bandwidth: on GT200 the GDDR3 is used between 1000 and 1250 MHz (data rate = frequency * 2) whereas current GDDR5 reaches up to 1200 MHz (data rate = frequency * 4). That's a nice speed up of 2 due to the frequency. Overall bandwidth should be 1.5 times higher than on GT200 (512 vs 386 bit). To sustain 2x the performance one needs to first approximation 2x the bandwidth - So we're not winning much here.
However, as you also said, the on chip cache is better and larger now. And GT200 wasn't terribly bandwidth constrained. That's why I think we're not winning much here, but the memory subsystem should still be fast enough.

I like the sound of your little GF100.