Quote:
Originally Posted by wolf
maybe this is the foundation of what theyre using for the multi core gpu, think of it, four of these babies on one 40nm die
32 rops, 1280 sp's, 512-bit gddr5, hello!
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And what would be the advantage of that versus a monolithic GPU with those specs?? It would use MORE silicon for the same performance and I can't see any benefit on that. Today GPUs are made in a way that harvesting is extremely easy and node independent. The GT200 for example has 10 SP nodes and 8 ROP nodes with a 64bit MC each. If one of those fails the chip is still usable in GTX260 form. Your hypothetical chip would be better because you can scrap 1/4 of the chip at once if one of it's units fail?? If you wanted (go figure why...) you could still do it in any modern GPU with the added value that you can choose which parts you want to scrap.
Multi CPU on a die works for CPUs because you can't scrap its units if they fail, just the cache and because it's the better way of reaching parallelism. But GPUs are inherently parallel already.
Another issue is that if your elemental unit (each of those 4 GPUs) is a low-end part what are you going to do wth the ones that fail? Create an even lower end card? Foresee that will happen and use self-repairability in conjuntion to harvesting? A bad idea in any case IMHO, because you would inevitably end up with too many different options, this kind of chips (following your example):
1 - Chips with 4 full cores.
2 - Chips with 4 cores with 28 ROPS (448 bits) and 1280 SPs.
3 - 4 cores with 32 ROPS and say 800-960 SPs.
4 - 4 cores with 24-28 ROPS and 800-960 SPs.
[5 to 8] Repeat 1-4 but with 3 cores.
[9-12] Repeat 1-4 with 2 cores.
13 - Chips where each core is different.
*Note that the clockability of each core has not been mentioned, but that would just add one more layer of complexity, which is not good.
As you can see, there are too many different chips there, so you would have to scrap a lot of cores in order to create a defined lineup. You think Nvidia has released too many cards lately? That's a joke compared to what would they have to do for the above to be anything close to profitable.