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Nvidia has announced its $2,500 Turing-based Titan RTX GPU. It is said to have a single precision performance of 16.3 teraflops and "tensor performance" of 130 teraflops. Double precision performance has been neutered down to 0.51 teraflops, down from 6.9 teraflops for last year's Volta-based Titan V.
The card includes 24 gigabytes of GDDR6 VRAM clocked at 14 Gbps, for a total memory bandwidth of 672 GB/s.
Drilling a bit deeper, there are really three legs to Titan RTX that sets it apart from NVIDIA's other cards, particularly the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Raw performance is certainly once of those; we're looking at about 15% better performance in shading, texturing, and compute, and around a 9% bump in memory bandwidth and pixel throughput.
However arguably the lynchpin to NVIDIA's true desired market of data scientists and other compute users is the tensor cores. Present on all NVIDIA's Turing cards and the heart and soul of NVIIDA's success in the AI/neural networking field, NVIDIA gave the GeForce cards a singular limitation that is none the less very important to the professional market. In their highest-precision FP16 mode, Turing is capable of accumulating at FP32 for greater precision; however on the GeForce cards this operation is limited to half-speed throughput. This limitation has been removed for the Titan RTX, and as a result it's capable of full-speed FP32 accumulation throughput on its tensor cores.
Given that NVIDIA's tensor cores have nearly a dozen modes, this may seem like an odd distinction to make between the GeForce and the Titan. However for data scientists it's quite important; FP32 accumulate is frequently necessary for neural network training – FP16 accumulate doesn't have enough precision – especially in the big money fields that will shell out for cards like the Titan and the Tesla. So this small change is a big part of the value proposition to data scientists, as NVIDIA does not offer a cheaper card with the chart-topping 130 TFLOPS of tensor performance that Titan RTX can hit.
Previously: More Extreme in Every Way: The New Titan Is Here – NVIDIA TITAN Xp
Nvidia Announces Titan V
Nvidia Announces Turing Architecture With Focus on Ray-Tracing and Lower-Precision Operations
Nvidia Announces RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070 GPUs, Claims 25x Increase in Ray-Tracing Performance
Nvidia's Turing GPU Pricing and Performance "Poorly Received"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Monday December 03 2018, @09:57PM (3 children)
So there's this cattery owner. She loves Persians but has no huge love for the trade shows so she's not competing anymore. Keeps a male and a few females and sells the odd litter to folks in the business or even just her vet. She's registered as an NPO and operates at a loss. But she doesn't care. Profits were never the point. She just loves those cats.
Now, why am I tell you this? Well, here's the thing: Some* miners are gamers. They're not in it for the profits. All they want is to game with the latest and greatest card and when a new one comes out, flip it off on ebay. For them, mining just cuts some costs for their hobby. If it wasn't viable, they wouldn't be able to afford fancy cards so they'd just game on lesser ones.
So, be careful assuming people only care about "how long it would pay for itself by mining ASIC-Resistant Crypto". There some irrational consumers out there that are normally willing to buy a $600 card just for gaming and are looking at those $2500 cards thinking "how long it would return $1900". And suffice to say, with enough of those customers around the valuation of the coins can get pretty screwy...
* https://cryptomenow.com/coinshares-released-a-19-page-report-on-bitcoin-mining-here-are-the-highlights/ [cryptomenow.com]
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @10:36PM
>For them, mining just cuts some costs for their hobby. If it wasn't viable, they wouldn't be able to afford fancy cards so they'd just game on lesser ones.
This can be risky. NiceHash fried something on my 1080, causing green artifacts. Between the NiceHash heist and the card it killed, I took a loss. I'm just glad it didn't kill my 1080ti.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:25AM (1 child)
The problem we've got isn't so much that prices have plummeted.
The problem we've got is that it now costs me significantly more to pay for the electricity to mine than mining will pay in coins.
That's a _widespread_ phenomenon; network hashrates have become smoking radioactive craters for most if not all cryptos.
That will make the price crash even worse because what the miners are paid for is confirming transactions. Without enough network hashrate, rather than twenty minutes to confirm a transaction, I expect by now it takes a whole day for some coins. As the price continues to drop, more and more miners stop mining, the confirmations take longer and longer, leading fewer and fewer to be willing to buy because doing so takes so very long.
When I get some money in Real Soon Now, I fully intend to buy some cryptos - but also fully expect to wait days for those transactions to clear.
The only way for this problem to be solved is for a whole bunch of miners to hurl themselves on hand-grenades for the good of the community. In my specific case, I only have one rig. I don't expect anyone to run _all_ their rigs but I _do_ expect lots of fellow miners to run at least a few rigs apiece.
Miners tend to be intimately familiar with why we mine; I haven't raised this issue in a public way before now, but you can be certain that this weekend or so I'll be blasting this concern throughout every corner of The Series Of Tubes.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @05:24PM
"but also fully expect to wait days for those transactions to clear."
get off the cheese, man.