Today’s opening keynote at NVIDIA’s GTC had a number of interesting
announcements (we’ll get to those in other articles) but the “star” of
the show was the upcoming Tesla K20.
Destined to spend its life in HPC systems and supercomputers, the K20 is
based off on a Kepler GK110 core which is billed as the “largest, fastest”
processing core ever designed. It features a threefold increase in double
precision performance over a comparable Fermi core and also incorporates
high level dynamic parallelism, and Hyper Q technology.
Hyper Q allows these new Kepler parts to process up to 32 concurrent work
queues (versus the single work queue for Fermi), allowing its massively
powerful parallel abilities to stay fully engaged, optimizing efficiency.
From the information that Hardware Canucks has seen, the GK110 core is
geared strictly towards high performance computing solutions rather than the
desktop GeForce product space since it incorporates functionality that won
’t be necessary for gaming or low level GPGPU compute. But that doesn’t
mean it can’t be scaled according to NVIDIA’s needs in other markets (
namely for GeForce and Quadro products) but for the time being it looks like
NVIDIA is targeting their flagship at high margin niches.
According to NVIDIA, this Kepler derivative will be the first highly
virtualized GPU delivered to market, allowing it to render frames and stream
them instantaneously without being connected to an external display. This
means it can be used in cloud computing applications, possibly allowing for
game streaming over a broadband internet connection to a remote device. As
with the GeForce-branded chip, this one will be very efficient, making it
possible to deploy Tesla-based clusters on much larger scale.
Stay tuned for more info as we can properly dissect the various nuances of
this new chip.