Be Faster: nVidia Intros All-CUDA Quadro Graphics
As part of my report on SolidWorks World, I had included a chart of graphics board brandnames from nVidia:
1. GeForce = consumer and entertainment.
2. Quadro = professional applications, like CAD.
3. Tesla = high performance computing.
nVida invited CAD journalists to learn about its new FX x800 line of six Quadro graphics boards. nVidia marketing named the online event "The Power of 10 Launch," referring to the ten years the company has been in existence. During the decade, they have boasted a number of firsts, including these:
1st Linux and 1st 64-bit drivers for professional graphics boards
1st real-time rendered movie, "Final Fantasy," and 1st interactive raytracer
1st graphics board with 4GB RAM
The company was pretty pleased to show off a graph with their sales of professional graphics boards swamping that of an unnamed competitor -- ATi. I asked about Matrox, and was told they are mainly into financial graphics.
Quadro
The point to the Webcast was to describe nVidia's newest line of Quadro graphics boards, which boast dual-PCI Express graphics, support for multiple operating systems (at the same time), multi-threaded drivers, and the ability to handle up 144GB RAM -- "support for massive GPU memory footprint" indeed.
The new boards range in price from a dollar under $100 to an astounding $3,300. Don't worry: there will be no peer (or other) pressure on you to buy the $3.3K board, because its 240 parallel CUDA cores are meant for 4D seismic and medical imaging. By "4D," nVidia means 3D graphics + time: graphics boards that show, say, the development of a tumor.
Instead, we CAD users will be marketed with boards that range from $99 to $899:
Quadro FX 380 ($99) for "volume" CAD -- 50% faster than its predecessor.
Quadro FX 580 ($149) for "volume" CAD -- adds 30-bit color through DisplayPort.
Quadro FX 1800 ($599) for midrange CAD -- 60% faster than FX 380.
Quadro FX 3800 ($899) for high-end MCAD -- adds stereo imaging and multi-OS support.
All of the new models in this line of Quadro graphics boards contain the CUDA ISA, even the cheapest FX380 with its 16 CUDA processors.
About CUDA
CUDA [compute unified device architecture] is the programming interface that runs software on the graphics board. nVidia sees this as a good thing, because their GPUs are so much faster than Intel's CPUs. A chart showed Intel's i7 965 CPU maxing out at 104GFLOPS (giga floating point operations per second), with the nVidia FX3800 archiving 933GFLOPS -- about 9x faster. nVidia says developers are seeing an 18x-150x speed up in graphics display using CUDA.
You can program for CUDA using these programming languages:
C for CUDA (available now).
OpenCL, also being implemented by Apple in its OS (beta available in summer).
DirectX 11 Compute.
Other languages being added, such as Python, C++, and Fortran.
The drawback to CUDA: the software running on it has to do parallel processing. nVidia claims that 25,000 developers are busy porting code from Intel CPUs to CUDA GPUs. However, for the most part they are specialized medical and imaging programs. Still, nVidia is handing out cash -- $500 thousand to $5 million -- to help develop software to exploit their GPU through their new GPU Ventures Program <
http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu_ventures_program.html >.
What's In It for CAD Users?
Other than buying an FX 380 or 580 for their somewhat faster speeds, I wonder how else do CAD users benefit from CUDA-ization. It's hard to say. nVidia described five advanced graphics technologies that CAD users could benefit from:
1. NVSCALE allows apps to work across multiple GPUs (available spring 09).
2. NVIRT performs realtime raytracing with specular reflections, like metal and glass (fall 09). This is a result of nVidia's purchase of mental ray a year ago; AutoCAD uses mental ray for its rendering.
3. 3D Vision Pro provides a professional version of 3D glasses: wireless active shutter 3D glasses that include a compass, accelerometer, and API. The IR [infra red] transmitter lets several people view the same 3D drawing at the same time (second half 09).
4. SDI Input Card reads video from multiple digital cameras, and then stores the video on the GPU. Useful for comparing inspections of products (summer 09).
5. Multi-OS allows graphics from more than one operating system to be virtualized and accelerated on GPUs. Until now, you needed either two GPUs or one GPU that accelerated only one OS (available now). The practical effect is that one computer can run Windows and Mac and/or Linux-based CAD with the graphics board doing the hard work of handling rendering, etc. for all of them.
When I asked which CAD vendors were implementing them ("No need to name names," I added), the response was vague. There is apparently some initial interest from CAD vendors.
Paraphrased Q&A
Q: Your comparison chart showed "Competitor" as singular. Do you have just one competitor?
A: Yes, ATI seen as the only competitor in the workstation market.
Q: What about Matrox?
A: They no longer are; they specialize in multi-displays for financial companies.
Q: What is DisplayPort?
A: DisplayPort is the new interface port, which Apple and PC vendors are starting to implement. It allows 30-bit color.
Q: Why are your GPUs so much faster than CPUs?
A: GPUs are faster because they use a parallel architecture; CPU is serial.
Q: This isn't the best time to introduce cutting edge cool stuff?
A: This lets customers become more productive (less time to design), which provides costs savings.
Q: Even the cheapest $99 board has CUDA in it?
A: Yes. There is a perception that Quadra is really expensive; this is not the case.
Q: Is CAD taking advantage of CUDA?
A: CAD is not being ported to CUDA right now; science and education currently primarily doing it. Ray tracing within the CAD app could take advantage of Cuda.
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