GPU-based Supercomputing Could Face Price Hikes

Tiffany Trader, Associate Editor, HPCwire

The end is in sight for cheap
GPU-based supercomputing, according to an International Science Grid
This Week (iSGTW) opinion piece out this week. Author Greg Pfister
argues that CUDA development has thus far been subsidized by the high
volume sales of NVIDIA's mass market low-end GPUs.

But sometime next year, we will see the arrival of chips that
integrate the GPU and CPU on the same die. Intel's "Sandy Bridge"
processor chip and AMD's Llano processor are both due out in mid-2011,
and AMD's CPU/GPU Fusion architecture is also in the works.

If the mass market consumer, using graphics mostly for games and
entertainment purposes, can take advantage of these double-duty chips
(as a referenced Anandtech article says they can) then where will be the
market for NVIDIA's low-end GPUs?

Says Pfister:

This means the end of the low-end graphics subsidy of
high-performance GPGPUs like Nvidia's CUDA. That subsidy is very
significant, because the fixed costs of developing any chip family are
very large; spreading them out over a high-volume low end makes a major
difference, even if the high end has substantial revenue. So prices will
rise, since GPGPUs will no longer have a huge price advantage over
purpose-built HPC gear. How much will they rise? It's very hard to say,
but I have one somewhat wobbly data point saying that the difference
will be substantial.

The "wobbly data point" is arrived at by comparing a PS3 (mass market
subsidized through volume and games) versus a custom built IBM HPC
appliance, and extrapolating a 10 to 1 cost differential. Guess which
one's cheaper?

Even if the HPC market is growing as data suggests, Pfister notes
that high-end GPU revenue is no match for the dollars generated by the
demand for GPUs at the consumer level.

It may seem a stretch, but one way to still tap at least some of
that mass market would be for NVIDIA to come up with their own
integrated graphics processor. In fact, they already have, as noted in a
recent HPCwire blog
.
NVIDIA's Tegra line of processors, designed for mobile devices, has a
heterogenous architecture including the low-power ARM processor and the
GeForce GPU. Who's to say NVIDIA isn't planning another heterogenous
processor using the CUDA-class chip with ARM CPUs? They could also
choose to co-opt a higher-end CPU by teaming with another chipmaker. Or
NVIDIA could even start designing its own x86 processor and then with
that create an integrated graphics chip worthy of a gaming-class desktop
or a Blue-Ray-capable notebook media machine. "NVIDIA-inside" anyone?