The successor to Volta and Turing ushers in a new architecture. Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference in 2020 didn’t proceed like any before it. Originally scheduled for what turned out to coincide COVID-19 onslaught of March, Nvidia early on reworked the conference to an online event. And rather than scheduling talks and sessions live and packed over four days, the company … [Read more...] about Nvidia’s Ampere 2020 signals a new era for Nvidia
Radeon Pro 7: focusing on double-precision sensitive applications
A top-end Vega-based AIB for the professional segment. With AMD’s Navi GPU beginning to fill out the Radeon Pro line in 2020, you’d think the next professional GPU launched would be a Navi AIB, particularly if that AIB was targeted at the high end of the market. But you’d be wrong, because AMD’s Radeon Pro 7, launched in the spring of 2020 leverages the previous … [Read more...] about Radeon Pro 7: focusing on double-precision sensitive applications
Benchmarking the Radeon Pro W5700
Performance: relative to its predecessor and the most comparable Nvidia offering. As is our practice when evaluating workstation-class graphics AIBs, we ran SPEC's Viewperf, in this case the newest version 13. Viewperf focuses workload on the graphics AIB, such that the rest of the system isn't (or at least shouldn't often be) the bottleneck. As a result, Viewperf will give a … [Read more...] about Benchmarking the Radeon Pro W5700
Nvidia’s most accessible Turing-class Quadro: the RTX 4000
Benchmarking and assessing a Turing-class GPU a much different process. At the introduction of its paradigm-shifting Turing generation GPU, Nvidia released three initial versions of Quadro RTX products, the RTX 8000, RTX 6000, and RTX 5000. All are expensive, pricy enough to fit into JPR’s Ultra-high End professional/workstation GPU class, defined as anything over $1,500 … [Read more...] about Nvidia’s most accessible Turing-class Quadro: the RTX 4000
The workstation market in Q3’18: Economic conditions and demand drive the market to record levels
Vendors are justifiably more confident to hang their hats on the workstation market than most other PC-related markets. And for good reason, the workstation does not suffer (at least not to a substantial degree) from the forces that have been dragging on the mainstream PC market as of late, namely lagging replacement cycles due to reaching “good enough” computing levels, as … [Read more...] about The workstation market in Q3’18: Economic conditions and demand drive the market to record levels
AMD’s Next Horizon dawns with 7-nm Epyc Rome Zen 2 processor
Alex Herrera takes stock of AMD’s latest hardware introductions and notes the company has an edge on Intel and a serious play against Nvidia in the data center. If Las Vegas placed odds on what news AMD would break in San Francisco at its Next Horizon, the heavy favorites would have been clear: the official announcements of both Zen 2 processor technology and the first 7-nm … [Read more...] about AMD’s Next Horizon dawns with 7-nm Epyc Rome Zen 2 processor
The tale of Turing
A big-picture look at how Nvidia got to Turing, and how the new architecture signals an inflection point in GPU evolution. At Siggraph in August, Nvidia pulled the covers off of Turing, which one could argue is both a successor to not one but both of its preceding generations, Pascal and Volta. In the process, Nvidia confirmed several of the more expected advancements in its … [Read more...] about The tale of Turing
Boxx bets on Zen to power an AMD comeback in workstation CPUs
The company is an early backer on Zen to power an AMD comeback in workstation CPUs I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Reviewing a workstation from Boxx is a delight. No knock against the big box vendors who do sensible and innovative jobs in creating and building workstations. But the workstation volume-leading trio of HP, Dell, and Lenovo face different constraints … [Read more...] about Boxx bets on Zen to power an AMD comeback in workstation CPUs