NVIDIA and AMD Launch New High-End Workstation, Virtualization, and HPC GPUs 95
MojoKid writes "Nvidia is taking the wraps off a new GPU targeted at HPC and as expected, it's a monster. The Nvidia K20, based on the GK110 GPU, weighs in at 7.1B transistors, double the previous gen GK104's 3.54B. The GK110 is capable of pairing double-precision operations with other instructions (Fermi and GK104 couldn't) and the number of registers each thread can access has been quadrupled, from 63 to 255. Threads within a warp are now capable of sharing data. K20 also supports a greater number of atomic operations and brings new features to the table including Dynamic Parallelism. Meanwhile, AMD has announced a new FirePro graphics card at SC12 today, and it's aimed at server workloads and data center deployment. Rumors of a dual-core Radeon 7990 have floated around since before the HD 7000 series debuted, but this is the first time we've seen such a card in the wild. On paper, AMD's new FirePro S10000 is a serious beast. Single and double-precision rates at 5.9 TFLOPS and 1.48 TFLOPS respectively are higher than anything from Intel or Nvidia, as is the card's memory bandwidth. The flip side to these figures, however, is the eye-popping power draw. At 375W, the S10000 needs a pair of eight-pin PSU connectors. The S10000 is aimed at the virtualization market with its dual-GPUs on a single-card offering a good way to improve GPU virtualization density inside a single server."
My entire computer uses less power than one of these cards.
And they have an 8-board FirePro system running (Score:5, Interesting)
3.6 kilowatts, 16 GPUs:
http://fireuser.com/blog/8_amd_firepro_s10000s_16_gpus_achieve_8_tflops_real_world_double_precision_/ [fireuser.com]
and to think all this comes from video games.
How long is the wait ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now they are all too expensive, and consume too much juice.
How long would the wait be before these things get to have pricetag that average Joe (well, advance version of average Joe) can afford ?
Re:My entire house uses less power than one of the (Score:5, Interesting)
just wait until you wet your noodle on capacitive/inductive AC where watts is watts except when it's volt-amps, and efficiency is measured as a ratio between watts and volt-amps.
Re:Desktop Virtualization does graphics on a serve (Score:2, Interesting)
I think you missed the point here. Even if the card is capable of doing super high res rendering, the network traffic would be the weak point. The graphics card is much much better off being put in the client than rendering to a bitmap that has to be transferred. (And remote desktop protocols try to compare what has actually changed in order to send the least amount of data, which will cause high processing load when you run something at a high FPS).
I think is for using GPUs for processing (Password cracking, protein folding, etc.), as many specialized computational software packages do.
Re:And they have an 8-board FirePro system running (Score:4, Interesting)
Those 8 TFLOPS would have landed it somewhere at the top of the #500 supercomputer performance list in November, 2011 [top500.org]. ASCI White [top500.org] used 8192 375MHz Power3 cores to achieve this performance. It took up a fair bit of space [energy.gov] and used 3 MW to run the machine with a further 3 MW needed for cooling. It had a theoretical processing speed of 12.3 teraflops.