Nvidia's Kepler Architecture: Coming To An SoC Near You
We're still waiting for the first Tegra 4-based device (Nvidia's Shield) to officially launch, but the company is already talking about the Kepler-based GPU in its next-generation Tesla SoC. Is the company planning to license this technology out?
Nvidia’s big news at this year’s SIGGRAPH in Anaheim, California is that the GPU you’ll find inside Project Logan (its next-gen Tegra) and perhaps in other SoCs, given a recent interest in licensing, is up and running, based on the company’s Kepler architecture.
Of course, this isn’t a completely unexpected revelation—Jen-Hsun spelled out the Tegra roadmap a few months ago at GTC, making it clear that Logan’s graphics component would be Kepler-based. Consistent with his announcement, company representatives maintain that Logan will ship in early 2014.
Mobile Kepler consists of one SMX
We do get some additional specifics, though. I asked Nvidia’s Matt Wuebbling about the composition of what it’s calling Mobile Kepler, and he replied that it’ll comprise a single SMX. That means we’ll be looking at 192 CUDA cores, 16 texture units, and, presumably 64 KB of L1.
According to Wuebbling, Mobile Kepler will use one-third the power of Imagination Technology's PowerVR SGX554MP4, at the heart of Apple’s A6X SoC, in an unspecified rendering workload. Nvidia’s using a 2 W figure to describe Mobile Kepler, comparing it to GeForce GTX Titan’s 250 W maximum TDP. Those are interesting claims, since Nvidia earlier specified that it was able to achieve better power efficiency from separate vertex and pixel shaders in Tegra 4 than a unified shader design allowed (for comparison, Tegra 4 sports 24 vertex and 48 pixel shaders).
Nvidia's team on the ground at SIGGRAPH gave us a demonstration of Mobile Kepler dialed back to the performance of Apple's fourth-gen iPad, illustrating the difference in power consumption through measuring the graphics rail of each system. You can see this in action below:
On the flip side, adopting the Mobile Kepler architecture enables support for APIs currently not available on Tegra 4's NV40-class architecture, such as OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenGL 4.4, DirectX 11, OpenCL, and CUDA 5.0. When Nvidia introduced Tegra 4, it shrugged off the lack of OpenGL ES 3.0 support by saying there wouldn’t be much content any time soon due to developers’ propensity for targeting the lowest common denominator of mobile devices. It’ll be interesting to see if that story changes in less than one year.
Some of the compute-oriented workloads enabled by CUDA/OpenCL
Should you hold off on Tegra 4-based devices like HP’s 21” Slate All-In-One due to today’s demonstration? Nvidia says no, naturally.
Who knows? But one thing is for certain! Tegra 4 will only enjoy about a month of competing against PowerVR Series 5 stuff, before Rogue drops. Then it's back to getting stomped on for Nvidia until mobile Kepler is ready. They better hurry it up!
Rogue hasn't bragged one bit yet about perf, only features. T4 will have a dominant cpu for a while, and only S800 will challenge it this year. It will take 4-6 months for a device to hit AFTER the day rogue ships. Imagination won't be in anything major but apple I'd guess this year. Also note they don't make any money and had to borrow 20mil just to pay for 100mil company mips. So they aren't swimming in dev money. Their party is over now that bigger fish have joined the race and now that gaming is the most important thing. Imagination was forced out of the desktop by NV/AMD just like Intel was. I believe the same is about to happen on mobile.
NV/AMD will have an advantage from this point forward as they have 20yrs of driver experience, game experience and devs know their hardware inside out and both will be putting their desktop chips in socs as they shrink them to make it inside one (this article is evidence of that, note the feature list now as that happens just vaulted ahead). Of course AMD has to last that long to get into a soc
Let me know when rogue hits a device other than Apple's.
"So what"? "Get over it"?.... I.m not some sort of idiot who does not understand how tech works. I'm with you on some of your points, but the problem is that the Shield is a DEDICATED GAMING HANDHELD DEVICE. It is competing directly with the 3DS & Vita, both of which won't have a refresh for 5-10 years. Although I PERSONALLY understand the Shield is more of a micro Android tablet with a controller attached and some cool software/tech implemented, it still will be judged as the $300 "handheld gaming device" that Nvidia is marketing it as. I mainly was stating that talking about/hyping the next iteration of a device before the first one even ships is a big misstep. Do you see Apple, Samsung, Sony, or any of the other major players doing that? No. I'd also be more understanding if the cpu/gpu were user replaceable/upgradeable down the line (like the "GPU" comparison you were using in your post), but we all know that will not be an option.
Here is what most people care about:
UI Responsiveness (Phones have almost nailed it with the S3 and Nexus 4)
Camera Quality (Sony is making better sensors for low light conditions)
Battery Life (??buy a bigger battery??)
NOT: Playing lame tap to shoot games that may need the latest OpenGL.
Most people I know (save the kids) use their phones for web browsing, music, photos, calling and a few utility apps. I only see toddlers and pre-teens playing Android games. Couple that with the fact that most Android games barely even utilize the full power of lets say a Tegra 3, I highly doubt OpenGL 3.4 or a Tegra 4, 5, 6 will vastly improve the things most people do on their phones. Do we really need this much power if we are going to stay with tap tap type of apps?
Wake me up when I can dock a x64 phone to a mouse, keyboard and HDMI out and do some real DAW work, video editing and more. Not some proof of concept Atrix crap. Maybe then I can better feel benefits of a 2GB RAM, quad core phone with a beefy GPU and justify spending +$600 for a phone. Until then, I feel the public will start regarding new phones much the way they view the next generation gaming systems.
"So what"? "Get over it"?.... I.m not some sort of idiot who does not understand how tech works. I'm with you on some of your points, but the problem is that the Shield is a DEDICATED GAMING HANDHELD DEVICE. It is competing directly with the 3DS & Vita, both of which won't have a refresh for 5-10 years. Although I PERSONALLY understand the Shield is more of a micro Android tablet with a controller attached and some cool software/tech implemented, it still will be judged as the $300 "handheld gaming device" that Nvidia is marketing it as. I mainly was stating that talking about/hyping the next iteration of a device before the first one even ships is a big misstep. Do you see Apple, Samsung, Sony, or any of the other major players doing that? No. I'd also be more understanding if the cpu/gpu were user replaceable/upgradeable down the line (like the "GPU" comparison you were using in your post), but we all know that will not be an option.
First I never said you were an idiot (and that post was to all saying stuff like your comment, it will be beat by next year blah blah - of course and again every year after that). Sorry if that's what you took from my previous post. I mentioned the "people getting burned by kepler" comment which was from antilycus. These statements will be true every year. But they are not bragging about the next shield here (we have no idea how long it's life will be), just the next SOC is being discussed. Maxwell has been talked about for over 2yrs (3?) but we still buy kepler tech anyway. Kepler buyers aren't burned they just want a card NOW and can't wait apparently. If you wait for some tech, you'll be waiting forever as you will be "burned" every year by the next rev (except in cpus' they seem to have slowed to a crawl because of AMD being so far behind Intel gives nothing).
This is playing against vita/3ds and even if kepler tech soc comes next year and even a new shield rev the games won't be aimed at T5 for a long time until T5 is middle of the road (I'd guess about when T6 comes we'll start seeing some T5 type stuff, maybe not even then). They don't have ONE game aimed yet at T4 or S800 (hawken is but it's not out yet). So you won't be out of date and they are moving towards multiple resolutions in games on android (settings like on PC's now, google knows this needs to get done), so you should be able to turn a T5/T6 game down to 720p in settings and still play on shield rev1 without issues, or turn off some settings that keep fps up high. I hope they rev this yearly or at least every 2 then allow all to play via settings instead of holding us in a 5-10yr stuck in stone device. I want that gone. I want less holding us back and more going forward. Consoles need to die precisely because they are stuck in stone for so long holding us back. Just make games have settings on mobile or the ability to recognize a soc's power and turn off a few graphical features so it runs fast on lower hardware. That's much better than saying we won't make better games because hardware is stuck until 2021 etc.
Don't forget this streams PC gpus, plays all current games from googleplay (and they have a lot of great ones already) etc. It's also a portable movie player with hdmi out, miracast etc. For that vita/3ds are useless. These features will always be usable and get better with apps or android os upgrades. Nvidia isn't going to make a $300 device useless with rev2 next year (if they don't just wait for the next rev T6 to fully allow 1080p fun, as I think T5 may come up short for anything better than fully maxed out 720p xbox360/ps3 type stuff). Settings will ensure all can play on older versions and T3 devices already out there.
Anyway, I don't see anything mentioned about Shield Rev2 here, just "here comes kepler mobile and our features/drivers from the desktop" so to speak. All soc makers brag yearly about their next stuff, NV has to do it too. Yes sony/samsung/apple/MS etc all brag about the next version of everything. SurfaceRT r2 for example has T4 or S800 (wifi or lte). Should they not do that because someone with T3 rev1 surface might get ticked? They have to. SurfaceRT r2 isn't cpu upgradable either. Every year apple, samsung etc brag about the next coming phone. Samsund already bragging about octa rev2 just this week. Did Gs4 OctaR1 buyers just get burned? Sure and so will octa rev2 buyers next year by 20nm chips
Here is what most people care about:
UI Responsiveness (Phones have almost nailed it with the S3 and Nexus 4)
Camera Quality (Sony is making better sensors for low light conditions)
Battery Life (??buy a bigger battery??)
NOT: Playing lame tap to shoot games that may need the latest OpenGL.
Most people I know (save the kids) use their phones for web browsing, music, photos, calling and a few utility apps. I only see toddlers and pre-teens playing Android games. Couple that with the fact that most Android games barely even utilize the full power of lets say a Tegra 3, I highly doubt OpenGL 3.4 or a Tegra 4, 5, 6 will vastly improve the things most people do on their phones. Do we really need this much power if we are going to stay with tap tap type of apps?
Wake me up when I can dock a x64 phone to a mouse, keyboard and HDMI out and do some real DAW work, video editing and more. Not some proof of concept Atrix crap. Maybe then I can better feel benefits of a 2GB RAM, quad core phone with a beefy GPU and justify spending +$600 for a phone. Until then, I feel the public will start regarding new phones much the way they view the next generation gaming systems.
As more games are made that are NOT tap tap crap, using gamepads now that everyone can use their old xbox360 pads etc, the phone/tablet etc will be used as a portable console with wireless gamepad and hdmi out to tv or in the case of a newer tv miracasted to TV. This is where you're completely wrong. T4/5/6 etc will bring eventually bring levels way above xbox360/ps3 and likely even ps4/xbox1 before 2021 (when those two might be upgraded) which will make consoles pointless. You'll carry your phone (tablet, whatever) on you with a gamepad and you have a portable console wherever you go and in your house. No need for consoles shortly. Did you watch the video in this article? Nice water etc. IF games on these come looking like that I have no need for a console.
These are designed to replace consoles at some point, not to become your workstation pc replacement. That won't come until Denver/Boulder etc (in house cpu's made for 3-4ghz and aimed at Intel/AMD). Then you'll get what you want. Hopefully by then apps will be out to make that happen - like adobe ported to android etc, to take advantage of an ARM 64bit box with a REAL PSU inside the box just as you have now. Wintel will be able to possibly be replaced once we get them in a 500watt tower running at 4ghz with a Maxwell card inside...
Nvidia innovates and engineers. Everyone else (AMD, Matrox, etc) copy NVidia's tech. I love my Tegra 3, but I am worried that mobile chipsets are going to have less than a 1 year life span. Tegra 4 owners are going to get burned when Kepler releases on tablets. Also notice in above video... it's no in a tablet form yet.
You do realize nearly that almost all the stuff that NVidia "innovates and engineers" as you claim was actually purchased from other companies, right?
I still believe that at $299, the Shield is a very powerful device for the money.
Did I miss that? Where do you see that NV officially stated this? Not that I'd be surprised just that I kind of want shield r2 and wasn't sure they'd release yearly or wait for full 1080p T6 fun (so 2yr cycle)...LOL. I'd guess it would be the first T5 device and it's supposed to be out early next year (hopefully just after my maxwell purchase to pull the same stuff you are talking about from my PC gpu). Then again, as I said I expect T5 to come up short at 1080p so not sure how much this really matters. Just that I see no point in buying R1 when I'm so close to R2 debut if it's coming after a Q1 maxwell purchase. I don't think I'd hesitate if I already had a 680 though (if that makes you feel any better about shield r1
I am only waiting because I currently have and AMD card and I want to let the games percolate a bit more since I have so many others to play now anyway. I haven't even started skyrim (waited for legendary) and still have baldurs gate enhanced etc to play now that it's pretty done getting patched. I have even more but those two alone for a working guy will suck the life out of my spare time for months.
Anyway congrats it is a great product and I think will show the power of mobile over the next year (socs vs. consoles I mean and lead to great gamepad games if they keep it going yearly etc). I don't think you'll be disappointed