FP64 performance is limited on consumer because the US government deems it important to nuclear weapons research.
Past a certain threshold of FP64 throughput, your chip goes in a separate category and is subject to more regulation about who you can sell to and know-your-customer. FP32 does not matter for this threshold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjusted_Peak_Performance
It is not a market segmentation tactic and has been around since 2006. It's part of the mind-numbing annual export control training I get to take.
Can't wait until they update this to also include export controls around FP8 and FP4 etc in order to combat deepfakes, and then all of a sudden not be able to buy increasingly powerful consumer GPUs.
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This is so interesting, especially given that it is in theory possible to emulate FP64 using FP32 operations.
I do think though that Nvidia generally didn't see much need for more FP64 in consumer GPUs since they wrote in the Ampere (RTX3090) white paper: "The small number of FP64 hardware units are included to ensure any programs with FP64 code operate correctly, including FP64 Tensor Core code."
I'll try adding an additional graph where I plot the APP values for all consumer GPUs up to 2023 (when the export control regime changed) to see if the argument of Adjusted Peak Performance for FP64 has merit.
Do you happen to know though if GPUs count as vector processors or not under these regulations since the weighing factor changes depending on the definition?
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/10/24/2018-22... What I found so far is that under Note 7 it says: "A ‘vector processor’ is defined as a processor with built-in instructions that perform multiple calculations on floating-point vectors (one-dimensional arrays of 64-bit or larger numbers) simultaneously, having at least 2 vector functional units and at least 8 vector registers of at least 64 elements each."
Nvidia GPUs have only 32 threads per warp, so I suppose they don't count as a vector processor (which seems a bit weird but who knows)?