Ex-nVidia Engineer Reveals Secret of the Maxwell GPU

[Briggsy]

Full article here.

 

Yesterday, against the advice of her lawyer, an ex-nVidia engineer came forward with damning allegations regarding nVidia's latest GPU architecture known as 'Maxwell.' Ms. Avril Premiere was let go from nVidia in mid 2014 after she had filed numerous complaints to company officials, claiming that nVidia were cutting too many corners and were becoming a company without any ethical backbone. 

 

 

 

Ms. Premiere: After many months of consideration, I have decided that it is in the best interest of the consumer to know the truth behind the Maxwell architecture. When we were first asked to greatly increase the performance over Kepler at half the power draw, we thought someone upstairs had lost a few marbles. Kepler was already using an advanced form of color compression, transistor gating, variable frequency... we were pushing the limits of 28nm already.

 

After hundreds of virtual simulations with limited success were conducted, many of the engineers felt that a new approach was necessary. Taking a page from Televisions' book, we began experimenting with interlacing frames, where only half of the frame would be rendered and updated onscreen instead of a whole frame. The approach allowed us to effectively double the frame rates compared to Kepler. In order to properly assign workloads to the GPU, we also were forced to double the number of SM's and halve the number of cores per SM.

 

This approach saw benefits trickle down into other areas. Using this new approach, we were able to introduce a new form of anti-aliasing which we called Multi-Frame Anti-aliasing, or MFAA for short. In theory, we could obtain double the MSAA strength because only half a frame was being rendered at a time. 2x MSAA suddenly became 4x MFAA. In practice it was more like 2.5x-3.5x due to overhead, but the improvements somehow leaked over to the PR department and they ran with it. 

 

The end result was a new architecture that greatly improved the performance over Kepler, at half the power draw. This lead to many corners being cut in production, including weaker components and Ram partitioning. The original Titan at a thousand dollars was sold at a loss if you include the costs of R&D. The recent Titan X has a 200% markup with all expenses accounted for. 

 

 

 

Earlier this morning nVidia released a statement denying all claims from Ms. Avril Premiere.

 

 

At  nVidia we both take and make great strides to provide the highest quality and performance to our loyal customers. We are both alarmed and outraged at Ms. Premieres' allegations and intend to take full legal action against her and any parties involved with her smear campaign - not just to clear our name of these egregious claims - but to assure our customers that they always come first, no matter what it takes, no matter what the cost.

 

 

"When we attempted to contact Mr. Tom Petersen from nVidia, we were finally able to locate him at a Mr. Ryan Shrout's residence, who informed us that we were interrupting their slumber party, and that Mr. Petersen would be available later in the week."

 

 

At this point, things are just heating up. The location of Ms. Avril Premiere is currently unknown. She has disappeared without a trace as of this morning, and is believed to have fled the Country. The full article, including the full interview with Ms. Premiere, can be found here.

[Shotgun]

Labeling it as april fools uptop is illogical in the first place,no one's gonnna read it.

[Briggsy]

Labeling it as april fools uptop is illogical in the first place,no one's gonnna read it.

 

Thanks tips.

[harrynowl]

I was half expecting to see that video with the "engineer" again

[Shotgun]

I was half expecting to see that video with the "engineer" again

That would have been funny.

[OhNoesItsDobby]

Ms. Avril Premiere

 

*Squints*

[typographie]

The location of Ms. Avril Premiere is currently unknown. She has disappeared without a trace as of this morning, and is believed to have fled the Country.

 

I lol'd.

 

Nvidia is dangerous.