Volta is the codename for a
GPU
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...
microarchitecture
In computer engineering, microarchitecture, also called computer organization and sometimes abbreviated as µarch or uarch, is the way a given instruction set architecture (ISA) is implemented in a particular processor. A given ISA may be imp ...
developed by
Nvidia
Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...
, succeeding
Pascal
Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name
* Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name
** Blaise Pascal, Frenc ...
. It was first announced on a roadmap in March 2013, although the first product was not announced until May 2017.
The architecture is named after 18th–19th century Italian chemist and physicist
Alessandro Volta
Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (, ; 18 February 1745 – 5 March 1827) was an Italian physicist, chemist and lay Catholic who was a pioneer of electricity and power who is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and th ...
. It was NVIDIA's first chip to feature
Tensor Cores, specially designed cores that have superior deep learning performance over regular CUDA cores. The architecture is produced with
TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semiconductor company, the world' ...
's
12 nm FinFET
A fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) is a multigate device, a MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor) built on a substrate where the gate is placed on two, three, or four sides of the channel or wrapped around the channel, ...
process. The
Ampere
The ampere (, ; symbol: A), often shortened to amp,SI supports only the use of symbols and deprecates the use of abbreviations for units. is the unit of electric current in the International System of Units (SI). One ampere is equal to elect ...
microarchitecture is the successor to Volta.
The first graphics card to use it was the datacenter
Tesla V100, e.g. as part of the
Nvidia DGX-1
Nvidia DGX is a line of Nvidia-produced servers and workstations which specialize in using GPGPU to accelerate deep learning applications. The typical design of a DGX system is based upon a rackmount chassis with motherboard that carries high per ...
system.
It has also been used in the Quadro GV100 and Titan V. There were no mainstream GeForce graphics cards based on Volta.
Details
Architectural improvements of the Volta architecture include the following:
*
CUDA
CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ...
Compute Capability 7.0
** concurrent execution of integer and floating point operations
*
TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semiconductor company, the world' ...
's
12 nm
1 (one, unit, unity) is a number representing a single or the only entity. 1 is also a numerical digit and represents a single unit of counting or measurement. For example, a line segment of ''unit length'' is a line segment of length&nb ...
FinFET
A fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) is a multigate device, a MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor) built on a substrate where the gate is placed on two, three, or four sides of the channel or wrapped around the channel, ...
process,
allowing 21.1billion
transistors
upright=1.4, gate (G), body (B), source (S) and drain (D) terminals. The gate is separated from the body by an insulating layer (pink).
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch ...
.
*
High Bandwidth Memory 2 (HBM2),
*
NVLink 2.0: a high-bandwidth bus between the CPU and GPU, and between multiple GPUs. Allows much higher transfer speeds than those achievable by using
PCI Express
PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common ...
; estimated to provide 25 Gbit/s per lane.
(Disabled for Titan V)
* Tensor cores: A tensor core is a unit that multiplies two 4×4
FP16
In computing, half precision (sometimes called FP16) is a binary floating-point computer number format that occupies 16 bits (two bytes in modern computers) in computer memory. It is intended for storage of floating-point values in applications w ...
matrices, and then adds a third FP16 or FP32 matrix to the result by using
fused multiply–add
Fuse or FUSE may refer to:
Devices
* Fuse (electrical), a device used in electrical systems to protect against excessive current
** Fuse (automotive), a class of fuses for vehicles
* Fuse (hydraulic), a device used in hydraulic systems to prot ...
operations, and obtains an FP32 result that could be optionally demoted to an FP16 result.
Tensor cores are intended to speed up the training of neural networks.
Volta's Tensor cores are first generation while Ampere has third generation Tensor cores.
*
PureVideo Feature Set I hardware video decoding
Products
Volta has been announced as the GPU microarchitecture within the
Xavier generation of
Tegra
Tegra is a system on a chip (SoC) series developed by Nvidia for mobile devices such as smartphones, personal digital assistants, and mobile Internet devices. The Tegra integrates an ARM architecture central processing unit (CPU), graphics proc ...
SoC focusing on
self-driving car
A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous car, driver-less car, or robotic car (robo-car), is a car that is capable of traveling without human input.Xie, S.; Hu, J.; Bhowmick, P.; Ding, Z.; Arvin, F.,Distributed Motion Planning for S ...
s.
At Nvidia's annual GPU Technology Conference keynote on May 10, 2017, Nvidia officially announced the Volta microarchitecture along with the
Tesla V100.
The Volta GV100 GPU is built on a 12 nm process size using HBM2 memory with 900 GB/s of bandwidth.
Nvidia officially announced the NVIDIA TITAN V on December 7, 2017.
Nvidia officially announced the Quadro GV100 on March 27, 2018.
Application
Volta is also reported to be included in the
Summit
A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous.
The term (mountain top) is generally used only for a m ...
and
Sierra supercomputers, used for GPGPU compute. The Volta GPUs will connect to the
POWER9
POWER9 is a family of superscalar, multithreading, multi-core microprocessors produced by IBM, based on the Power ISA. It was announced in August 2016. The POWER9-based processors are being manufactured using a 14 nm FinFET process, in ...
CPUs via
NVLink 2.0, which is expected to support
cache coherency
In computer architecture, cache coherence is the uniformity of shared resource data that ends up stored in multiple local caches. When clients in a system maintain caches of a common memory resource, problems may arise with incoherent data, whi ...
and therefore improve GPGPU performance.
See also
*
List of Nvidia graphics processing units
References
External links
{{Nvidia
Nvidia Volta
Nvidia microarchitectures