NVIDIA Announces Tesla K40 GPU Accelerator and IBM Partnership In Supercomputing 59
MojoKid writes "The supercomputing conference SC13 kicks off this week and Nvidia is kicking off their own event with the launch of a new GPU and a strategic partnership with IBM. Just as the GTX 780 Ti was the full consumer implementation of the GK110 GPU, the new K40 Tesla card is the supercomputing / HPC variant of the same core architecture. The K40 picks up additional clock headroom and implements the same variable clock speed threshold that has characterized Nvidia's consumer cards for the past year, for a significant overall boost in performance. The other major shift between Nvidia's previous gen K20X and the new K40 is the amount of on-board RAM. K40 packs a full 12GB and clocks it modestly higher to boot. That's important because datasets are typically limited to on-board GPU memory (at least, if you want to work with any kind of speed). Finally, IBM and Nvidia announced a partnership to combine Tesla GPUs and Power CPUs for OpenPOWER solutions. The goal is to push the new Tesla cards as workload accelerators for specific datacenter tasks. According to Nvidia's release, Tesla GPUs will ship alongside Power8 CPUs, which are currently scheduled for a mid-2014 release date. IBM's venerable architecture is expected to target a 4GHz clock speed and offer up to 12 cores with 96MB of shared L3 cache. A 12-core implementation would be capable of handling up to 96 simultaneous threads. The two should make for a potent combination."
Re:What about OpenCL 1.2 support? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nvidia has sidetracked OpenCL for CUDA?
Nvidia has never much liked OpenCL. And why would they? They currently hold the high ground in GPU computing, with a proprietary API that only they can implement. I'd assume that they have some sort of 'OpenCL contingency plan', just in case the market shifts, or they ever want to sell a GPU to Apple ever again; but as of right now, supporting OpenCL would just be a "Sure, please, commodify me, I'd love that!" move.
So, let me get this straight here... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm shocked.
More to it than that... (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM has announced willingness to license the Power8 design in much the same way that ARM licenses their stuff to a plethora of companies. IBM has seen what ARM has accomplished at the lower end in terms of having relevance in a market that might otherwise have gone to Intel given sufficient time, and sees motivation to do that in the datacenter where Intel has significantly diminished POWER footprint over the years. Intel operates at obscene margins due to the strength of their ecosystem and technology, and IBM is recognizing that it needs to build a more diverse ecosystem itself if it wants to compete with Intel. That and the runway may be very short for such an opportunity. ARM as-is is not a very useful server platform, but that gap may close quickly before IBM can move, particularly as 64-bit ARM designs start getting more prevalent.
For nVidia, things are a bit more than 'sure we'll take more money'. nVidia spends a lot of resources on driver development and without their cooperation, using their GPU accelerator solution will get nowhere. nVidia has agreed to invest the resources to actually support Power. Here, nVidia is also feeling the pressure from Intel. Phi has promised easier development for accelerated workloads as a competitor to nVidia solutions. As yet, Phi hasn't been everything people had hoped for, but the promise of easier development today and promise for improvements later has nVidia rightly concerned about future opportunities in that space. Partnering with a company without such ambitions gives them a way to try to apply pressure against a platform that clearly has it's sights on closing the opportunity for GPU acceleration in HPC workloads. Besides, IBM has the resources to help give a boost in terms of software development tooling that nVidia may lack.