Nvidia K1 demistified :)

Pieter3dnow

Pieter3dnow

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jul 29, 2009
Messages
6,784
I can't stop laughing when I read this it shows that tech websites should not be taken seriously.

http://semiaccurate.com/2014/01/20/well-nvidias-tegra-k1-really-perform/

So can the K1 beat a pair of nine-year old consoles? Sure, but a Tegra 3 was claimed to match the same pair too. Can the Tegra K1 handily beat an A6X and an A7? Sure. Can a K1 beat the competition be it Apple or Qualcomm in the same power envelope? I will leave that for you to figure out, but do note the lack of any power numbers at full clocks in any of the presentations. Also note the increased skepticism of the message bearers over time, it goes hand in hand with the messages being delivered.
Click to expand...
 
Semiaccurate is extremely anti-Nvidia but they have gotten several things right long before other sites reported the same things, which means some of their sources are reliable.

For instance, they called out GF100 as being extremely hot and power hungry, as well as grossly missing it's targeted performance ~7 months before GTX 480 shipped. And they also said the GTX 680 would beat the Radeon 7970 on release in both price and performance.
 
Not much here...if they thought it was real "cough" news the article would be behind their pay wall.
 
Thanks for the share, I actually thought the article was interesting. A lot in there about corporate dealings and press manipulation. It might 'seem' obvious looking at these things in hindsight, but it's hard to know you're getting played when it's going down. Getting an NDA as a small (or even big site) from a large manufacturer is a big deal. A lot of sites would have agreed/complied site unseen just for a peak behind the curtain, unwittingly becoming a part of someone else's agenda.
 
We should be rooting for a healthy nVidia. We need to develop an open eco-system for mobile as was done for PC and nVidia has the opportunity to do so, with their worldclass desktop GPU drivers now available on an ARM platform.

I just hope that nVidia starts getting some significant design wins, or they may not be in the ARMs race much longer.
 
"I just hope that nVidia starts getting some significant design wins".
I agree but it is not as easy as one thinks. The market has ceded to QC and they have a fairly good offering going forward and they do have the option of dropping the price if they had to in order to keep a large player from defecting. Seeing their release of S801 makes me think QC is trying as hard as possible to hold on their lead. OEMs now are looking for a good total package and QC still have the best LTE modem embedded in the SoC. Their graphics aren't half bad.
So what can NV do to offset this ?. Match the price with >40% more in terms of performance. Anything less would not be attractive enough to switch. Also, potentially 20% additional savings in power (if possible at 28nm).
So can mobile Kepler do it ?. NV have to switch to Maxwell just to deliver the performance they wanted at the given power budget. Should they do it (ie go to Maxwell right away) ?. Hell yeah!. They can do minor iterations later but getting to the "King of graphics" without power compromise is something that a big OEM is after in order to stay competitive. So at least NV can price the lower parts of T4 and K1 according to it market nature in terms of performance positions. The flagship needs to be out there faster as their opportunity window is closing each passing quarter!.
 
What would be even better is if they can integrate Maxwell cores into the K1 (K2?) and bring that to market faster than probably planned. The power savings and performance/W are insane and would likely translate into good mobile performance as well.
 
crispy79 said:
We should be rooting for a healthy nVidia. We need to develop an open eco-system for mobile as was done for PC and nVidia has the opportunity to do so, with their worldclass desktop GPU drivers now available on an ARM platform.
Click to expand...

That's the thing though: Nvidia is NOT providing the same stellar driver support as their desktop products. HTC has laid the blame on Nvidia for spotty support for new Android versions.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014...kat-update-for-one-x-blames-nvidia-for-delay/

With a growing reputation for poor support, it's no surprise that OEMs ditched the already questionable Tegra 4 design in droves. And I figure that Nvidia decided it was not worth the effort supporting their products if they couldn't command premium prices.

So if Nvidia doesn't consider their mobile silicon a growth industry anymore, where else are they going to grow?
 
Last edited:
nVidia has been backing off their "stellar" support of proprietary PC drivers for several years, at least from the Linux perspective. We haven't had overclocking on Linux for soon to be 4 GPU generations and essentially every non-trivial feature is officially supported for Linux drivers only on Quadros (SLI and large multi-GPU/multimonitor support via SLIMosaic / BaseMosaic) or may literally require you to soft mod your card into a Quadro (Xen VGA passthrough, even Xen dom0 VGA seems broken for non-Quadro with current driver/recent kernel).

On the whole, nVidia's drivers right now are only barely more functional than the ATI drivers that got me to switch like 5 years ago. I don't think this is a company right now that seems to care about or have the engineering capability to deliver quality products outside of their Windows/x86 comfort zone.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top