News Nvidia joins GPGPU race

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/06/21/nvidia_joins_gpgpu_race/1

Nvidia makes a serious move into the GPGPU space... it's time to meet Tesla.

 

For anyone wanting a rather brief but useful insight into GPGPU stuff: http://leri.univ-reims.fr/~nocent/uot/Site/GPU Master Class.html

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.

 

Yay tons of near pointless Hz, and nVidia sucking even more Watts, they should start investing in the national grid

 

Yes, marvellous, lovely, smashing, super.

Now what does it actually do?

Phil

 

Everything! Well, almost. You couldn't replace your CPU with it, but you could offload your insane mathematical calculations onto it, and it'll run them faster than a dual Core 2 Quad system.

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

 

so basically in the future we will have a separate motherboard for our graphics processing which will have unparalleled memory and require its own 2000W power supply.

 

pointless, expensive and very non energy efficient.

 

The numbers sound impressive, but like everyone here has said, "What's the point? What do *I* get out of it?"

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...

 

OK I know what a GPU is but what is a GPGPU Is it like two GPU's or is it like a dual core GPU Also I think Nvidia should be using there time to make a GPU that doesn't use so much power What good is a fast rig if you can't afford the energy bill Also with the speeds that Nvidia is now getting out of there GPU's does any one think they will eventualy make a leep to Processors

 

For anyone who said something to the effect of "what does this do for me?" the answer is nothing. Quote from the article:
"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.

 

This Tesla is even more expensive... to the tune of $100,000

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???

 

I would guess applications like Lord of the Rings where they had to render massive scenes.

 

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.

 

the basic onme shown may wind up in some CAD analysis workstations if the FEA (finite element analysis) programs start to take advantage of CUDA, but othewise it will simply be for extremely specialized applications (like F@H)

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.

 

£10 says you can flash a 8800gtx to a tesla bios and use it . Otherwise some very interesting and powerful computing power.

 

FWIW, you can use an 8800 GTX with CUDA... this is just a bit more specialised and will be certified like the Quadros are.

 

General Purpose Graphics Proccesing Unit

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

 

This could probably mean better CGI in movies in the future

 

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?