NVIDIA Announces Tesla General Purpose Processor Platform

Nvidia has announced Tesla, a third product line next to the GeForce and Quadro graphics products. The company aims to use Tesla cards and the massive floating point horsepower of its graphics processors to take over a portion of the lucrative supercomputing market.

The core of each Tesla device is a GeForce 8-series GPU as well as the general component layout of the high-end Quadro FX 5600 workstation graphics card with 1.5 GB of memory (in Tesla, it has 1.35 GB). The only noteworthy difference between the FX 5600 and a Tesla card is the fact that the supercomputing-targeted devices lack the graphics outputs on the backpanel, which we were told, allows Nvidia to increase the clock speed on Tesla.

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The discrete GPGPU card is named Tesla D870, and basically it’s a heavily modified GeForce 8800GTX board with 1.5 GB of GDDR-3 memory and does not come with any video connectors (resulting in improved cooling). Desktop Supercomputer is nothing else but a QuadroPlex system with two Tesla D870 cards while enterprise GPU servers, as Nvidia calls them - are something that is needed to get a good crack into the HPC market. Every Tesla part is PCIe Generation 2 compliant, while enterprise parts feature next-gen nForce Professional chipset from Nvidia.

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NVIDIA designed the new Tesla family for everything from graphics rending to medical research and data farming. At the core level, GPUs are far more efficient at dealing with parallel computing than general-purpose processors. This makes Tesla very powerful for cluster-type applications.

The Tesla S870, D870 and C870 carry an MSRP of $12,000, $1,499 and $7,500, respectively.

Daily Tech - NVIDIA Announces Tesla General Purpose Processor Platform