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Nvidia joins GPGPU race
Author: Brett ThomasPublished: 21st June 2007
Feel the power - Nvidia has announced Tesla today, its upcoming GPGPU product.
Back at the GeForce 8800 launch, arch rival Nvidia talked about CUDA, the GPU Computing aspects of its G80 graphics processor, but didn't really give any timeframe on when we'd see it rolled out. We were also left wondering how the company would cater for the HPC market because it didn't give any indication as to whether it was going to release a dedicated GPU computing device.
Well, wonder no more - the company has announced its own contribution to the GPGPU world. Meet Tesla.
For those who aren't entirely familiar with the concept of GPGPU, it's a lot easier than it sounds. The modern GPU is one of the two most complex things in the system, and some would consider it to be the most complex piece of silicon in a PC. Today's GPU is a massively parallel processing device and thus it can be many times quicker than a CPU in massively threaded tasks.
Three setups are scheduled for release - the C870, D870 and S870. The C870 is the Tesla card, which is PCI-Express and as the only "desktop" model, has no display output - it's literally a massively threaded computing processor. It's clocked at 575MHz core, and the 128 stream processing units are clocked at 1.35GHz (exactly like on the GeForce 8800 GTX), resulting in over 500 GigaFLOPS of compute power.
There's also 1.5GB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1600MHz on-board, just for kicks. Of course, it takes two PCIe power connectors and can suck up 170W of power at load - just like the regular G80. The big difference is the price - the C870 will set you back a whopping $1,499.00.
Two external systems have been developed as well, the D870 and S870. These take C870s and run them in parallel - two cards in the D870, which looks like a very mini tower, and a whopping four in the S870, passively cooled and built into a 1U rackmount chassis. Nvidia says performance scales pretty linearly on its multi-GPU Tesla solutions, because there is no SLI overhead - the four GPUs in the S870 are just controlled by four different threads on the CPU. Thus, you'll get over two TeraFLOPS out of the S870 at peak. The cost, in terms of power, for this is around 550W typical and a peak of almost 800W - not bad for a device that can deliver that level of compute power.
Each of these systems connect through an external PCIe host card, and are designed for high-end render farms and large-scale computations. Of course, that use is reflected in their prices - the D870 is $7,500 and the S870 is a massive $12,000.
Though the price is a little high for your average consumer, it's not targeted at them. It's more aimed at large corporations that need parallel computing power en-masse and it'll get the same level of support as Nvidia's Quadro-based workstation graphics cards. Thus, we'll see applications certified and certified systems that will run mission critical applications without failure.
Have you got a thought on the releases? Tell us about them in our forums.
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Comments (19)
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This was a lecture performed at my Uni during the last few months (I couldn't make it back) and the lecture information is rather useful.
Now what does it actually do?
Phil
Did you even RTFA? How about checking some of the videos on Nvidia's Tesla page page
Now I need to try and find an excuse to get the boss to buy one... Somehow
At the moment I can't see how this benefits the average game enthusiast -- the costs and requirements are almost prohibitively high. Again i do say almost as some people are quite mad.. ;)
I suppose it's fantastic for labs, researchers, engineers and CAd work. But for me, as a gamer -- it has potential, but I really don't want my game machine sucking up 3000+ watts in two separate boxes!
/sigh, it was so much easier with my C64...
"It's more aimed at large corporations that need parallel computing power en-masse and it'll get the same level of support as Nvidia's Quadro-based workstation graphics cards. Thus, we'll see applications certified and certified systems that will run mission critical applications without failure. "
Down the road this may be applied to running our games but in the mean time im sure it will end up somewhere inside the next super chess computer.
http://www.teslamotors.com/
But back to the topic. A $12,000 video card? Even for the high end CAD stations I buy and setup at work we are quite happy with the $1000 FX3450 series. What application can really justify this card???
Its more like a CPU than a video card, well, more like many many cpus.
did yopu not read the write-up?
2 Teraflops of general purpose processing power for 800w peak. It would require *many times* more than that to run a rendering or number crunching farm of similar capabilities, and would cost a lot more to boot.
It isnt pointless if you need it. You're not supposed to pop one of these in your home system, desktop apps arent programmed to take advantage of things like this. This is exclusively for high end number crunching.
for those calling this a video card; it isn't at all. It may be based on GPU technology, but is used for entirely different things.
Basically, you can use the GPU as more of a CPU
A GPU is extremely powerful (as shown by running F@H on GPU) however, it can only perform a very select range of functions, so it will never really replace a CPU (which will do almost anything, including GPU functions, but much more slowly)
The idea of this Box is not to be another GFX card, but more like a much more specialised CPU
currently, it can take hours to render mere frames for films or something along those lines
Plug one of these in and you could eventually start working in real time, that is going to be very appealing to companies making films and such
This isn't useful for normal people, but in the business world these boxes are very valuable
No, it would just mean faster rendered CGI in the future.
They render stuff at insane resolutions to begin with, this would just make it faster.
From what I've heard, the 8xxx series card is rendering realtime what pixar was prerendering in Toy story. Granted, thats at full frame or HD levels, not theater quality.
These could be the steps that push general computing to super computing in the future, for a normal system I mean.
:)
so its not 640x480?
:D