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fp32 is almost never "gimped," since that's the basis of performance for most video games and 3D applications. perhaps you meant fp64? That sees more use in industrial apps (e.g. oil and gas exploration) and so is often slower on consumer cards, and historically was artificially limited. For recent GPUs, it's not quite fair to call fp64 gimped, since the fp64 equipped cards are completely different designs - the lack of fp64 on this card is a design choice, not an artificial restriction for product segmentation.



FP16 is also becoming a feature of interest, especially for machine learning.


The card reportedly has a 4x speed INT8 mode.


Is it worth to buy this GPU instead of the PASCAL X (price apart) FP speaking since 1080 is for gamers and PASCAL X meant for ML/DL ?


I'm not sure what the original post is referring to but many early GPUs were not fully IEEE FP32 compliant, where many operations (particularly trig functions if I recall) would have 24 or fewer bits, either not supporting FP32 or requiring many cycles to compute. This article seems to describe some of the Radeon cards: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minifloat


The Radeon cards mentioned in that article are really old ones that predate modern unified shader architectures, DirectX 10, and compute support. As far as I know all non-mobile-phone GPUs released in the last decade or so support FP32 precision, though not necessarily with full IEEE compliance.


I think they may have meant fp16, which is of interest to machine learning programmers.


Yeah I was referring to the arbitrary gimping of the cards to drive Tesla sales




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