Why did Nvidia disable an SMX on the GTX Titan?

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OWEN10578

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May 10, 2013
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I don't get it, the GTX Titan was supposed to be their fastest most badass card they have so why did Nvidia disable an SMX? I mean, the Quadro K6000 is a fully enabled GK110 part so why did Nvidia disable an SMX in the Titan? If anyone can come up with a reason or what you think might be the cause why Nvidia did what they did please post in the thread as I'm really curious. :)
 
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babernet_1

babernet_1

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Nvidia designed the GK110 part with 16 SMX units that can be individually disabled in production after testing. With that huge chip, more often than not, you will have defects and need to disable a SMX unit. Initially, only the perfect chips were used in the Quadro boards costing many thousands of dollars. All the while, Nvidia was saving and binning GK110 GPU's with bad SMX units. After several months, they came out with the Titan board and started using up those partially defective GK110 chips (one or two bad SMX units) by disabling the defective SMX units and placing them in a Titan board. Real nice, $1000 for a defective chip (only 14 of 16 SMX units enabled). Of course, the GTX 780's are also GK110 with four SMX units disabled for a total of 12 SMX units in operation.
 
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OWEN10578

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Oh I see, it's just about money after all. But what about the new radeon cards coming? They're supposed to be faster than Titan, do you think nvidia will bring out a fully enabled Titan Ultra/Titan Extreme or something?

 
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Cristobal Navarro

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Babernet explained it very well. I Just want to point out that GK110 has 15 SMX units, not 16, since there is room used for the command processor which allows recursive execution of GPU kernels.

It is very important to understand that chip manufacturing is not binary (defective -- perfect), you have a gradient of quality where just very few units reach full perfection, which are sold as the server version hardware or the extreme consumer product. The rest of the gradient is carefully normalized so that you get the other mid and low range models.

The AMD R200 cards coming now are on pair with the GTX Titan, but much cheaper. I am looking forward to the oficial review.

I think Nvidia will release a fully 15 SMX Geforce card, since they already must have a good amount of full-core chips. Rumors say that it will be called the GTX Titan Ultra.
 
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renz496

renz496

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could be yield reason. note that their best performing tesla; the K20X also have one SMX disabled. the K6000 comes out much later than Tesla K20X and GTX titan itself. by that time the the process already mature enough and yield most likely improved. remember the original GTX480 and GTX460 also have one disabled SM.
 
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michael_chocomel

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garooda52

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Same as Intel, or any other integrated circuit manufacturer. When silicon is cured, it's on a large wafer, consisting of many separate ic's (cpu's) or (gpu's) in this case. The silicon in the center yields the most perfect (i7's), while the silicon toward the outer edges is of lesser quality. (i3's or celerons). These components are then separated (cut) into according grades of cpu/gpu, and shipped to market branded as different market segments. i7, i5, i3, Pentium, Celeron, atom (which doesn't deserve capitalization) -poke poke. Lol
Similarly, grading can be based on bandwidth. 1.6ghz/2.8ghz.
The chips manufactured from the center of the production silicon are more "pure" with less defects or "culling", the ones on the edges are downgraded market segment products.
 
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