Some architecture support has been completely marked with the latest release of the CUDA runtime this month, and the end of various aging NVIDIA graphics cards is approaching.
“Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architecture support are considered to be completely complicated and will be frozen in the future release,” said Chipmaker in CUDA 12.8 release notes.
This decision could affect the data center operators and science agencies that are still dependent on old models. The youngest of these architecture is almost eight years ago, and the eldest son celebrates his 11th birthday this year. They grow very fast.
Good news for those who are still shaking one of these aging cards, such as the 700, 900, and 1000 series desktop chips, and the data center parts of the 1000 series after NVIDIA. Don’t stop the operation, for a while.
According to NVIDIA, at least at this time, the features abolished in the latest release still work. However, documents may be deleted, and future releases may be “not officially supported”.
As we understand, you may eventually realize that you are running unsupported old software, and may encounter problems with future operating systems and compatibility.
This change mainly affects those who use CUDA to perform a workload with many calculations in GPUs. NVIDIA’s Maxwell Generation of Cards graphic driver is still available and seems to be actively supported. That being said, the watch is over every moment for Maxwell. NVIDIA finished support for his predecessor, KEPLER, in 2021. Therefore, it may not be so long before Maxwell joins the brother in Lega Gai Vin.
Of course, just because hardware may not be supported in the future does not mean that users will abandon them before magic smoke escapes. Finally, the Starion tiled display system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center is still running in a bundle of 13 -year -old Quadro K5000.
There are still many people running Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta Hardware. The Sierra SuperComputer of Livermore National Laboratory is equipped with IBM Power9 CPUS and NVIDIA V100 Axela Retators and is still swaying. Meanwhile, the Summit, the same brother, was abolished last fall.
It is also famous that NVIDIA’s V100 series parts use Openai to train GPT 3.5.
CUDA 12.8 also drops many old operating systems, including Windows 10 21H2, Debian 11, Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 15 SP4 and OpenSuse 15.4, in addition to blaming hardware.
The registration book contacted NVIDIA for comments. I will inform you if you are listening. ®
