john Carmack Says to Take Nvidia's K1 Claims with Several Grains of Salt

[qwertywarrior]

i already knew K1 claims had a bit of BS also Anand spoke about this a little bit anyways here you go

 

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2014/2/19/john-carmack-says-to-take-nvidias-k1-claims-with-a-grain-of-salt.aspx

 

 

So, John Carmack, the co-founder of ID Software and current CTO of Oculus simply stated that people should, "Take Nvidia's comparisons between their K1 SoC and consoles with several grains of salt." As to saying that one grain of salt clearly wasn't enough. And to be honest, it is a somewhat fair assessment as we had made a similar one in our article covering the Tegra K1 announcement. The truth is that all of the performance we're seeing with the Tegra K1 is in actively cooled environments, nothing like we'd see in most applications of this SoC in tablets and such. Sure, Nvidia is trying to put this SoC in other places like Lenovo's All-in-One PC, but I think those applications are going to be fairly niche.

 

not to mention that memory bandwidth speeds are no way as fast as previous consoles

[Ashaira]

WTF since when did the xbox 360 have more power than the ps3? i know the ps3 was harder to code for but it was more powerful. Who made that chart?

[qwertywarrior]

WTF since when did the xbox 360 have more power than the ps3? i know the ps3 was harder to code for but it was more powerful. Who made that chart?

 

zoom at the bottom

[Ashaira]

Then what kind of comparison is that? oh lets exclude stuff that makes it more powerful because reasons.

I foresee another tegra 4 "success".

[Grave]

I'm more amazed at the 5W claim than anything else.

Is that real?

[Osmium]

I'm more amazed at the 5W claim than anything else.

Is that real?

 

Probably somewhat close but I doubt quite that small.

[qwertywarrior]

I'm more amazed at the 5W claim than anything else.

Is that real?

they didnt state if it was TDP or not so not sure what "kind" of 5 watt is that they just list "power"

5 watt sounds about right  to me but of course as stated u wont be able to use the soc at 100% load all the time it will throttle even the snapdragon 800 throttles down at ~1.1Ghz

[kuddlesworth9419]

Maybe but  the K1 is probably still going to be really powerful. Besides I don't even know what figure horsepower comes from or what it means. Nvidia use Gigaflops or Teraflops not horsepower.

[Warcony]

Eh the K1 will probably still be very powerful and capable.  While their comparison is probably a bit played up, it just shows how fast these mobile chips are developing.  If the Xbone and PS4 have a product cycle as long as the 360 and ps3 did, mobile chips will probably surpass or be equal to them in performance by the end.

[Kevinkt]

Now I know i should buy a cheap xbox 360 if i want an old consile

[TechFan@ic]

Nvidia did this with Tegra 4 as well, essentially the way Nvidia represents the stats is misleading.
They show the active power or TDP of the Tegra SOC in an actual mobile product, likely a tablet.
But the performance numbers of the Tegra SOC that they preset are measured in a large actively cooled enclosure, so they run the chip at significantly higher clock speeds with active cooling to showcase peak theoretical performance rather than the actual real world performance in an actual product with typical power & cooling constraints of say a tablet or a convertible.

At 5W the Tegra K1 is in fact not as powerful as Nvidia is claiming.
This is an interesting read I advise you to check out : http://semiaccurate.com/2014/01/20/well-nvidias-tegra-k1-really-perform/

 

That is not a 5W heatsink, think more than 2x that number

The heatsink on the K1s that Nvidia was showing in private was about 2 x 2 x .4 inches, a bit large for a 5W part don’t you think? In fact it is a bit large for a 28″ AIW device at least as far as Z/height goes, Lenovo can’t cool the 2.3GHz variant in the depth allowed. That should give you a very good idea about how much power a 2.3GHz K1 takes under load.

 

Tegra K1 was disappointing in one respect, it came out a nearly year late & so equally powerful more energy efficient products were launched by Qualcomm & Samsung before Tegra K1 was able to show up.
Nvidia's successful efforts with Maxwell to improve perf/W will likely allow Nvidia to release a more compelling Tegra product at 20nm, so lets hope they manage to meet their release schedule this time around.

[Kev]

WTF since when did the xbox 360 have more power than the ps3? i know the ps3 was harder to code for but it was more powerful. Who made that chart?

Probably got a lower score on whatever benchmark they used because it's hard to code for.

[Fetzie]

You should always take manufacturer benchmarks with a grain of salt, especially when they use non-standard units (horse power? Seriously?) and actually disable components of the other products in the comparison.

[exyia]

it's just a rough reference.....anyone who takes any comparisions like this seriously as accurate fact, from any vendor, is 100% your fault

 

nvidia had SO much else to actually show of the chip. if all you took from it was a rough comparision chart instead of their actual demo's, then I'm sorry, you're a stupid consumer

 

in other words - don't be stupid consumers

[ACatWithThumbs]

i already knew K1 claims had a bit of BS also Anand spoke about this a little bit anyways here you go

 

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2014/2/19/john-carmack-says-to-take-nvidias-k1-claims-with-a-grain-of-salt.aspx

 

 

So, John Carmack, the co-founder of ID Software and current CTO of Oculus simply stated that people should, "Take Nvidia's comparisons between their K1 SoC and consoles with several grains of salt." As to saying that one grain of salt clearly wasn't enough. And to be honest, it is a somewhat fair assessment as we had made a similar one in our article covering the Tegra K1 announcement. The truth is that all of the performance we're seeing with the Tegra K1 is in actively cooled environments, nothing like we'd see in most applications of this SoC in tablets and such. Sure, Nvidia is trying to put this SoC in other places like Lenovo's All-in-One PC, but I think those applications are going to be fairly niche.

 

not to mention that memory bandwidth speeds are no way as fast as previous consoles

Every phone has better memory then the Ps3/Xbox360 the Ps3 has only 256mb GDRR3 and 256mb DRR2 for the CPU.

The Ps3/Xbox360 doesn't even have Cuda Cores/Stream Processors and they don't support DX11.

You should remember the Ps3 has a GT7800 which is 9 Generations old.

1 Kepler SMX will be faster then any GT7000 series card and Tegra K1 has 1 Kepler SMX.

[Rassilon]

Maybe but the K1 is probably still going to be really powerful. Besides I don't even know what figure horsepower comes from or what it means. Nvidia use Gigaflops or Teraflops not horsepower.

It is in gigaflops.

[kuddlesworth9419]

It is in gigaflops.

Than why didn't they say so. Horse power is to do with horses, there are no horses in a GPU. Console peasants don't need to be convinced so Nvidia just needs to use proper scientific data. That is probably why they are really vague with the performance statistics. 

[Rassilon]

Than why didn't they say so. Horse power is to do with horses, there are no horses in a GPU. Console peasants don't need to be convinced so Nvidia just needs to use proper scientific data. That is probably why they are really vague with the performance statistics.

Horse power has to do with force per time.

And it's a colloquiallism. This is also a simplified table.

[Bentheren]

WTF since when did the xbox 360 have more power than the ps3? i know the ps3 was harder to code for but it was more powerful. Who made that chart?

The PS3 had a much more powerful cpu than the xbox 360  and the gpu in the ps3 was extremely weak, when taking full advantage of the processor in the PS3 developers could easily keep up and in some cases get better performance out of the ps3. I am pretty sure @Whiskers could give you a better explanation about it.

[Sined]

I'm more interested in seeing Nvidia not drop BSP updates at a whims because their "on to the next one" when a new version of Android is out.

[FeFiFoChizzle]

To those of you who doubt the facts, I challenge you to look into real life examples, and not just stats. I personally own an Nvidia Shield, and have seen what it is capable of and the SoC's performance as a whole. If you look past just what Nvidia will tell you, you'll see that there is a very limited XDA community for the Shield, but among that, there is a thread about an overclocking kernel which I have personally tried. The device is originally rated at 1.9GHz, but this kernel overclocks it to 2.55GHz without a hitch. If anything, there should be more proof by John Carmack, I'm sure he wouldn't want people claiming that his Oculus Rift is sub-par because of statistics. Even that said, if you knew about this kernel and how it can be implemented, you would know that that 2.55GHz core speed leaves a few cores idling, without any major head increase. Tell me any device that can go 0.65GHz over their rated speed and maintain almost the same thermal conditions, and still be idling, especially on a mobile device.

I have learned that many people take things how they see them, not how they experience them. If you have something that is a K1 device, then, and only then, should you criticize it. That's like some of the people making claims that the only problem with SteamOS is Linux. Let me tell you something as an avid Linux user, I would wish more than anything to turn my PC into a pure Linux machine. Due to the monopolization of DirectX, that isn't possible, and it's very very sad. Microsoft and other larger corporations are afraid to see something go open-source, so why would they be anything but opposed to promoting the "lack of ability" of SteamOS. Hey, at least Linux won't take up more than 1GB of RAM just to render UI elements for the OS. Windows 8 is also a big waste of time. Windows 8 is bundled on every new OEM system, whether you like it or not. That's like the difference between people coming to your door and selling you something, and coming to your door, and upon opening your door, then charge your card for their product. There are many problems with money, and one of them is that of letting it get to your head.

Please, if you think I am biased, try to take a gander at the XDA Thread I mentioned before:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2398836

I have hope that the K1 will be worth the wait and the drama

 

[Aelrikom]

What the hell is GPU horsepower?

 

I'm interested in seeing what it will do none the less.

[LapX]

WTF since when did the xbox 360 have more power than the ps3? i know the ps3 was harder to code for but it was more powerful. Who made that chart?

Nvidia...

[Hobox]

As with most things, I think this technology is most exciting for it's second or third gen release. Let other people deal with the early issues that have to get ironed out.

[Chevaishr]

guys its the gpu here thats special not the cpu