Sandy Bridge Graphics Disappoints

See update and the end of this post: New drivers released.
Well, I'm bummed out.

I was really looking forward to purchasing a new laptop that had one of Intel's new Sandy Bridge chips. That's the chip with integrated graphics which, while it wouldn't exactly rock, would at least be adequate for games at midrange settings. No more fussing around comparing added discrete graphics chips, fewer scorch marks on my lap, and other associated goodness would ensue.

The pre-ship performance estimates and hands'-on trials said that would be possible, as I pointed out in Intel Graphics in Sandy Bridge: Good Enough. This would have had the side effect of pulling the rug out from under Nvidia's volumes for GPUs, causing the HPC market to have to pull its own weight, meaning have traditional HPC price tags (see Nvidia-based Cheap Supercomputing Coming to an End). That would have been an earthquake, since most of the highest-end HPC systems now get their peak speeds from Nvidia CUDA accelerators, a situation not in small part due to their (relatively) low prices arising from high graphics volumes.

Then TechSpot had to go and do a performance comparison of low-end graphics cards, and later, just as a side addition, throw in measurements of Sandy Bridge graphics, too.

Now, I'm sufficiently old-fashioned in my language that I really try to avoid even marginally obscene terms, even if they are in widespread everyday use, but in this case I have to make an exception:

Damn, Sandy Bridge really sucks at graphics.

It's the lowest of the low in every case. It's unusable for every game tested (and they tested quite a few), unless you're on some time-dilation drug that makes less than 15 frames per second seem zippy. Some frame rates – at medium settings – are in single digits.

With Sandy Bridge, Intel has solidly maintained its historic lock on the worst graphics performance in the industry. This, by the way, is with the Intel i7 chips overclocked to 3.4GHz. That should also overclock the graphics (unless Intel is doing something I don't know about with the graphics clock).

Ah, but possibly there is a "3D" fix for this coming soon? Ivy Bridge, the upcoming 22nm shrink of Sandy Bridge (the Intel "tock" following Sandy Bridge "tick"), has those wondrous new much-promoted transistors. Heh. Intel says Ivy Bridge will have – drum roll – 30% faster graphics than Sandy Bridge.

See prior marginal obscenity.

Intel does tend to sandbag future performance estimates, but not by enough to lift 30% up to 200-300%; that's what would be needed to produce what people were saying Sandy Bridge would do. Is that all we get from those "3D" transistors? The way the Intel media guys are going on about 3D, I expected Tri-Gate (which can be two- or five- or whatever-gate) to give me an Avatar-like mind meld or something.

All that stuff about on-chip integrated graphics taking over the low-end high-volume market for discrete graphics just isn't going to happen this year with Sandy Bridge, or later with Ivy Bridge. As a further grain of salt in my wound, Nvidia is even seeing a nice revenue uptick from selling discrete graphics add-ons to new Sandy Bridge systems. It's not that I have anything against Nvidia. I just didn't think that uptick, of all things, was going to happen.

This doesn't change my opinion that GPUs integrated on-chip won't ultimately take over the low-end graphics market. As the real Moore's Law – the law about transistor densities, not clock rates – continues to march on, it's inevitable that on-chip integrated graphics will be just fine for low- and medium-range games. It just won't happen soon with Intel products.

Ah, but what about AMD? Their Fusion chips with integrated graphics, which they call APUs, are supposed to be rather good. Performance information leaked on message boards about their upcoming A4-3400, A6-3650 and A8-3850 APUs make them sound as good as, well, um, as good as Sandy Bridge was supposed to be. Hm.

Several years ago I heard a high-level AMD designer say that people looking for performance with Fusion were going to be disappointed; it was strictly a cost/performance product. That was several years ago, and things could have changed, but chip design lead times are still multi-year.

In any event, this time I think I'll wait until shipped products are tested before declaring victory.

Meanwhile, here I go again, flipping back and forth between laptop specs and GPU specs, as usual.

Sigh.

UPDATE May 23, 2011

Intel has just released new drivers for Sandy Bridge. The press release says they provide “up to 40% performance improvements on select games, support for the latest games like Valve’s Portal 2 and Stereoscopic 3D playback on DisplayPort monitors.”

At this time I don't know of test results that would confirm whether this really makes a difference, but if it’s real, and applies broadly enough, it might be just barely enough to make the Ivy Bridge chip the beginning of the end for low-end discrete graphics.

The Cloud Got GPUs

Amazon just announced, on the first full day of SC10 (SuperComputing 2010), the availability of Amazon EC2 (cloud) machine instances with dual Nvidia Fermi GPUs. According to Amazon's specification of instance types, this "Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large" instance contains:

• 22 GB of memory
  
• 33.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core "Nehalem" architecture)
  
• 2 x NVIDIA Tesla "Fermi" M2050 GPUs
  
• 1690 GB of instance storage
  
• 64-bit platform
  
• I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)
  

So it looks like the future virtualization features of CUDA really are for purposes of using GPUs in the cloud, as I mentioned in my prior post.

One of these XXXXL instances costs $2.10 per hour for Linux; Windows users need not apply. Or, if you reserve an instance for a year – for $5630 – you then pay just $0.74 per hour during that year. (Prices quoted from Amazon's price list as of 11/15/2010; no doubt it will decrease over time.)

This became such hot news that GPU was a trending topic on Twitter for a while.

For those of you who don't watch such things, many of the Top500 HPC sites – the 500 supercomputers worldwide that are the fastest at the Linpack benchmark – have nodes featuring Nvidia Fermi GPUs. This year that list notoriously includes, in the top slot, the system causing the heaviest breathing at present: The Tianhe-1A at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, in China.

I wonder how well this will do in the market. Cloud elasticity – the ability to add or remove nodes on demand – is usually a big cloud selling point for commercial use (expand for holiday rush, drop nodes after). How much it will really be used in HPC applications isn't clear to me, since those are usually batch mode, not continuously operating, growing and shrinking, like commercial web services. So it has to live on price alone. The price above doesn't feel all that inexpensive to me, but I'm not calibrated well in HPC costs these days, and don't know how much it compares with, for example, the cost of running the same calculation on Teragrid. Ad hoc, extemporaneous use of HPC is another possible use, but, while I'm sure it exists, I'm not sure how much exists.

Then again, how about services running games, including the rendering? I wonder if, for example, the communications secret sauce used by OnLive to stream rendered game video fast enough for first-person shooters can operate out of Amazon instances. Even if it doesn't, games that can tolerate a tad more latency may work. Possibly games targeting small screens, requiring less rendering effort, are another possibility. That could crater startup costs for companies offering games over the web.

Time will tell. For accelerators, we certainly are living in interesting times.

Intel Graphics in Sandy Bridge: Good Enough

As I and others expected, Intel is gradually rolling out how much better the graphics in its next generation will be. Anandtech got an early demo part of Sandy Bridge and checked out the graphics, among other things. The results show that the "good enough" performance I argued for in my prior post (Nvidia-based Cheap Supercomputing Coming to an End) will be good enough to sink third party low-end graphics chip sets. So it's good enough to hurt Nvidia's business model, and make their HPC products fully carry their own development burden, raising prices notably.

The net is that for this early chip, with early device drivers, at low, but usable resolution (1024x768) there's adequate performance on games like "Batman: Arkham Asylum," "Call of Duty MW2," and a bunch of others, significantly including "Worlds of Warfare." And it'll play Blue-Ray 3D, too.

Anandtech's conclusion is "If this is the low end of what to expect, I'm not sure we'll need more than integrated graphics for non-gaming specific notebooks." I agree. I'd add desktops, too. Nvidia isn't standing still, of course; on the low end they are saying they'll do 3D, too, and will save power. But integrated graphics are, effectively, free. It'll be there anyway. Everywhere. And as a result, everything will be tuned to work best on that among the PC platforms; that's where the volumes will be.

Some comments I've received elsewhere on my prior post have been along the lines of "but Nvidia has such a good computing model and such good software support – Intel's rotten IGP can't match that." True. I agree. But.

There's a long history of ugly architectures dominating clever, elegant architectures that are superior targets for coding and compiling. Where are the RISC-based CAD workstations of 15+ years ago? They turned into PCs with graphics cards. The DEC Alpha, MIPS, Sun SPARC, IBM POWER and others, all arguably far better exemplars of the computing art, have been trounced by X86, which nobody would call elegant. Oh, and the IBM zSeries, also high on the inelegant ISA scale, just keeps truckin' through the decades, most recently at an astounding 5.2 GHz.

So we're just repeating history here. Volume, silicon technology, and market will again trump elegance and computing model.


PostScript: According to Bloomberg, look for a demo at Intel Developer Forum next week.

OnLive Follow-Up: Bandwidth and Cost

As mentioned earlier in OnLive Works! First Use Impressions, I've tried OnLive, and it works quite well, with no noticeable lag and fine video quality. As I've discussed, this could affect GPU volumes, a lot, if it becomes a market force, since you can play high-end games with a low-end PC. However, additional testing has confirmed that users will run into bandwidth and data usage issues, and the cost is not what I'd like for continued use.

To repeat some background, for completeness: OnLive is a service that runs games on their servers up in the cloud, streaming the video to your PC or Mac. It lets you run the highest-end games on very inexpensive systems, avoiding the cost of a rip-roaring gamer system. I've noted previously that this could hurt the mass market for GPUs, since OnLive doesn't need much graphics on the client. But there were serious questions (see my post Twilight of the GPU?) as to whether they could overcome bandwidth and lag issues: Can OnLive respond to your inputs fast enough for games to be playable? And could its bandwidth requirements be met with a normal household ISP?

As I said earlier, and can re-confirm: Video, check. I found no problems there; no artifacts, including in displayed text. Lag, hence gameplay, is perfectly adequate, at least for my level of skill. Those with sub-millisecond reflexes might feel otherwise; I can't tell. There's confirmation of the low lag from Eurogamer, which measured it at "150ms - similar to playing … locally".

Bandwidth

Bandwidth, on the other hand, does not present a pretty picture.

When I was playing or watching action, OnLive continuously ran at about 5.8% - 6.4% utilization of a 100 Mb/sec LAN card. (OnLive won't run on WiFi, only on a wired connection.) This rate is very consistent. Displayed image resolution didn't cause it to vary outside that range, whether it was full-screen on my 1600 x 900 laptop display, full-screen on my 1920 x 1080 monitor, or windowed to about half the laptop screen area (which was the window size OnLive picked without input from me). When looking at static text displays, like OnLive control panels, it dropped down to a much smaller amount, in the 0.01% range; but that's not what you want to spend time doing with a system like this.

I observed these values playing (Borderlands) and watching game trailers for a collection of "coming soon" games like Deus Ex, Drive, Darksiders, Two Worlds, Driver, etc. If you stand still in a non-action situation, it does go down to about 3% (of 100 Mb/sec) for me, but with action games that isn't the point.

6.4% of 100 Mb/sec is about 2.9 GB (bytes) per hour. That hurts.

My ISP, Comcast, considers over 250 GB/month "excessive usage" and grounds for terminating your account if you keep doing it regularly. That limit and OnLive's bandwidth together mean that over a 30-day period, Comcast customers can't play more than 3 hours a day without being considered "excessive."

Prices

I also found that prices are not a bargain, unless you're counting the money you save using a bargain PC – one that costs, say, what a game console costs.

First, you pay for access to OnLive itself. For now that can be free, but after a year it's slated to be $4.95 a month. That's scarcely horrible. But you can't play anything with just access; you need to also buy a GamePass for each game you want to play.

A Full GamePass, which lets you play it forever (or, presumably, as long as OnLive carries the game) is generally comparable to the price of the game itself, or more for the PC version. For example, the Borderlands Full GamePass is $29.99, and the game can be purchased for $30 or less (one site lists it for $3! (plus about $9 shipping)). F.E.A.R. 2 is $19.99 GamePass, and the purchase price is $19-$12. Assassin's Creed II was a loser, with GamePass for $39.99 and purchased game available for $24-$17. The standalone game prices are from online sources, and don't include shipping, so OnLive can net a somewhat smaller total. And you can play it on a cheap PC, right? Hmmm. Or a console.

There are also, in many cases, 5 day and 3 day passes, typically $9-$7 for 5-day and $4-$6 for 3-day. As a try before you buy, maybe those are OK, but 30 minute free demos are available, too, making a reasonably adequate try available for free.

Not all the prices are that high. There's something called AAAAAAA, which seems to consist entirely of falling from tall buildings, with a full GamePass for $9.99; and Brain Challenge is $4.99. I'll bet Brain Challenge doesn't use much bandwidth, either.

The correspondence between Full GamePass and the retail price is obviously no coincidence. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that relationship to be wired into the deals OnLive has with game publishers. Speculation, since I just don't know: Do the 5 or 3 day pass prices correspond to normal rental rates? I'd guess yes.

Simplicity & the Mac Factor

A real plus for OnLive is simplicity. Installation is just pure dead simple, and so is starting to play. Not only do you not have to acquire the game, there's no installation and no patching; you just select the game, get a PayPass (zero time with a required pre-registered credit card), and go. Instant gratification.

Then there's the Mac factor. If you have only Apple products – no console and no Windows PC – you are simply shut out of many games unless you pursue the major hassle of BootCamp, which also requires purchasing a copy of Windows and doing the Windows maintenance. But OnLive runs on Macs, so a wide game experience is available to you immediately, without a hassle.

Conclusion

To sum up:

Positive: great video quality, great playability, hassle-free instant gratification, and the Mac factor.

Negative: Marginally competitive game prices (at best) and bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. The cost can be argued, and may get better over time, but your ISP cutting you off for excessive data usage is pretty much a killer.

So where does this leave OnLive and, as a consequence, the market for GPUs? I think the bandwidth issue says that OnLive will have little impact in the near future.

However, this might change. Locally, Comcast TV ads showing off their "Xfinity" rebranding had a small notice indicating that 105 Mb data rates would be available in the future. It seems those have disappeared, so maybe it won't happen. But a 10X data rate improvement wouldn't mean much if you also didn't increase the data usage cap, and a 10X usage cap increase would completely eliminate the bandwidth issue.

Or maybe the Net Neutrality guys will pick this up and succeed. I'm not sure on that one. It seems like trying to get water from a stone if the backbone won't handle it, but who knows?

The proof, however, is in the playing and its market share, so we can just watch to see how this works out. The threat is still there, just masked by bandwidth requirements.

(And I still think virtual worlds should evaluate this technology closely. Installation difficulty is a key inhibitor to several markets there, forcing extreme measures – like shipping laptops already installed – in one documented case; see Living In It: A Tale of Learning in Second Life.)

All Hail the GPU! – a Tweetstream

I recently attended a talk at Colorado State University (CSU) by Sharon Glotzer, and tweeted what was going on in real time. Someone listening said he missed the start, and suggested I blog it. So, here is a nearly zero-effort blog post of my literal tweetstream, complete with hashtags.

I did add a few comments at the end, and some in the middle [marked like this]

Value add: This is a CSU Information Science and Technology (ISTeC) Distinguished Lecture Series. The slides and a video of the lecture will soon appear on the page summarizing all of the lectures. Keep scrolling down to the bottom. Many prior lectures are there, too.

Starting Tweetstream:

At CSU talk by Sharon Glotzer UMich Ann Arbor "All Hail the GPU: How the Video Game Industry is Transforming Molecular & Materials Selection [no hashtag because I hit the 140 character limit]

Right now everybody's waiting to get the projector working #HailGPU

At meetup b4 talk, She said they redid their code in CUDA and overnight got 100X speedup #HailGPU [talked to her for about 3 minutes]

Backup projector found & works, presentation starting soon, I hope. #HailGPU

None of her affiliations is CS or EE -- all in materials, fluids, etc. "Good to be talking about our new tools." #HailGPU

First code she ever wrote as a grade student was for the CM-2. 64K procs. #HailGPU

Image examples of game graphics 2003, 05, 08 - 03 looks like Second Life. #HailGPU

Also b4 talk, said when they moved to Fermi they got another 2X. Not bothered using CUDA; says "it's easy." #HailGPU

Just reviewing CPU vs. GPU arch now. #HailGPU

"Typical scientific apps running on GPUs are getting 75% of peak speed." Hoowha? #HailGPU [This is an almost impossibly large efficiency. Says more about her problems than about GPUs.]

"Huge infusion from DARPA to make GPGPUs" -- Huh? Again. Who? When? #HailGPU

"Today you can get 2GF for $500. That is ridiculous." #HailGPU [bold obviously added here, to better indicate what she said]

Answer to Q: Nvidia got huge funding from DARPA to develop GPGPU technology over last 5 years. #HailGPU [I didn't know that. It makes all kinds of sense.]

"If you've ever written MPI code, CUDA is easy. Summer school students do it productively. Docs 1st rate." #HailGPU [MPI? As in message-passing? Leads to CUDA, which is stream? Say what? Must be a statement unique to her problem domain.]

Who should use them? Folks with data-parallel problems. Yes, indeed. #HailGPU

She works on self-assembly of molecules. Like lipids self-assembled into membranes. #HailGPU

Her group doing materials that change (Terminator), multi-function & sensors (Iron Man), cloaking (illustration was a blank :-) #HailGPU [cloaking as in "Klingons"] [Bah.]

Said those kinds of things are "what the material science community is doing now." #HailGPU

Hm, not seeing tweets from anybody else. Is this thing working? // ra_livesey @gregpfister - it most certainly is, keep going [Just wanted some feedback; wasn't seeing anything else.]

Her prob, Molecular Dynamics, is F=ma across a bazillion particles a bazillion times. Yeah, data parallel. #HailGPU [The second bazillion is doing the first bazillion over a bazillion time steps.]

First generates neighbor list for each particle - what particles does each particle interact with? Mainly based on distance. #HailGPU

Response to Q: Says can reduce neighbor calc from N^2 to less (but not "Barnes-Hut"), but no slides for that. #HailGPU

Typically have ~100 neighbors per particle. #HailGPU [Aha! This is where a chunk of the 100X speedup comes from! For each molecule or whatever, do exactly the same code in simple SIMD parallel for all 100 neighbors, at the same time, just varying their locations. If they had 100 threads; I think they do, would have to check. !Added in edit to this post!]

Says get same perf on $1200 GPU workstation as on $20,000 cluster. (whole MD code HOOMD-Blue) #HailGPU [I think I may have the numbers slightly wrong here – may have been $40,000, etc. – but the spirit is right; see the slides and presentation for what she exactly said.]

Most people would rewrite code for 3X speedup. For 100X, do it yesterday. #HailGPU

Done work on "patchy nanotetrahedra" forming strands that bundle together spontaneously. #HailGPU

"Monte Carlo not so data parallel" (I don't agree.) #HailGPU

Used to be a guy at IBM who did molecular dynamics on mainframes with attached vector procs. It is easy to parallelize. #HailGPU [Very, very easy. See "bazillions" above. In addition, lots of floating-point computing at each individual F=ma calculation.]

Guy at IBM was Enrico something-or-other. Forget last name. #HailGPU [Unfortunately, the only things after "Enrico" that come to my mind are "Fermi" -- which I know is wrong -- and, for some unknown psychological reason, "vermicelli." Also um, wrong. But tasty.]

Worked on how water molecules interacted. Thought massively parallel was trash. #myenemy #HailGPU

Trying to design material that, when you do something like turn on a light, chante: become opaque, start flowing, etc. #HailGPU

Also studying Tetris as a "primitive model of complex patchy particles" Like crystal structures form. #HailGPU

Students named their software suite "Glotzilla". Uh huh. She doesn't object. Self-analysis code called Freud. #HailGPU

My general take: MD simulation is a field in need of massive compute capabilities, is pleasantly parallel, more FPUs=good. #HailGPU

Answer to post-talk Q: Her Monte Carlo affects state of the system, can't accept moves that isn't legal and affects others. Strange.

Limits of GPU usability relate to memory size. They can do 100K particles, with limited-range interaction. #HailGPU

So if you have a really large-scale problem, can't use GPUs without going off-chip and losing a LOT. #HailGPU

Talk over, insane volume of tweets will now cease. #HailGPU

End of Tweetstream.

I went to a lunch with her, but didn't get a chance to ask any meaningful questions. Well, this depends on what your definition of "meaningful" is; she grew up in NYC, and therefore thinks thin-crusted, soft, drippy pizza is the only pizza. As do I. But she folds it. Heresy! That muffles the flavor!

More (or less) seriously, molecular dynamics has always been an area in which it is really fairly simple to achieve tremendous parallel efficiency: Many identical calculations (except for the data), lots of floating-point for each calculation (electric charge force, Van Der Walls forces, etc.), not a whole lot of different data required for each calculation. I have no doubt whatsoever that she gets 75% efficiency; I wouldn't be surprised at even better results. But I think it would be a mistake to think it's easy to extend such results outside that area. It was probably well worth DARPA's investment, though, in terms of the materials science enabled. I mean, cloaking? Really?

OnLive Goes Live June 17 2010

Games in the cloud in June. Let's see if it works.

Onlive runs games – they list Borderlands, Mass Effect 2, and others – on their server farms, and streams the video to your PC or TV. I've written about this before, in some detail, as the Twilight of the GPU; it's a possible "twilight" since obviously OnLive users need neither consoles nor high-end gaming PCs.

Ah, but will it work? Everybody, everywhere, is questioning that.

The most obvious issue is lag: the time between twitching a control and seeing the response. OnLive inserts a time-of-flight delay in there, which clearly can't help. Whether it will be enough to seriously affect gameplay is anybody's guess right now; the live demo at the original announcement seemed to play well, and they claim it'll be OK (but then, they would). The ugly fact is that console game developers struggle with lag now; that doesn't leave much slack for a long-distance connection.

There's another issue, one which most people are ignoring, that I brought up in my earlier post: bandwidth. The bandwidth chewed up in hours of gaming is large enough (see that post for the math) that it seems like it must force a response from ISPs.

We shall see. I'm pre-registered to be a beta tester when they do an external beta, or so their web site tells me. If they decide I'm worthy, I'll try it and post my reactions here. That will be interesting because of my location: I'm just north of Denver, rather far from all of their four centers:  San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Dallas. I'm still with the 1000-mile radius they say is needed (600 mi. by air to Dallas), but hardly in their pocket like the usual Silicon Valley coterie of likely beta testers.

See that earlier post for more details about OnLive, or Google "onlive" and check out the many stories on this announcement. It's pointless for me to try to link to them here, since it went everywhere. Even AP. But here's CNET, and Reuters, and PCWorld if you want to read more about the announcement itself.

 (This may be the shortest post ever to appear in this blog. I don't usually do "repeat the news" posts, but this one is both major and highly relevant to my general subject area.)