NVIDIA and AMD Launch New High-End Workstation, Virtualization, and HPC GPUs

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.

Comments

Desktop Virtualization does graphics on a server

[billstewart]

Server virtualization doesn't really need this - running web servers or databases or name servers, which are all essentially fancy timesharing.

But "Desktop Virtualization" emulates your entire desktop as a virtual machine on a shared server, graphics and all, and just ships the rendered screens back to your desktop, accessible from anywhere, with RDP or VNC or whatever, kind of like a clumsy version of X Windows except you get to do full-scale graphics acceleration at the server farm instead of at your desktop. The mainframe IT crowd like it, because the PC on your desk can be dumb and low-powered, and the server back in the server farm they get to maintain can be big and fancy, and they can have better control over it than over your desktop, don't need to keep every bit of software up to date on everybody's remote PC, and it's generally easier to manage. And if you're logging into your work desktop from Starbucks, they don't have to protect it as thoroughly from everybody else there, and you can access your work Windows desktop from your personal iPad or your kid's gaming machine or whatever, and the company data's not very vulnerable because there's really nothing running on the remote machine.

And using this chip, they've got a lot more graphics horsepower available for rendering desktops, so for instance they can provide you with adequate performance for video editing, not just for email and word processing .