Update #2, November 18 2009 02:17AM GMT - Following our article, we were contacted by Mr. Andy Keane, General Manager of Tesla Business and Mr. Andrew Humber, Senior PR Manager for Tesla products. In a long discussion, we discussed the topics in this article and topics of Tesla business in general. First and foremost, Tesla is the slowest clocked member of Fermi-GPU architecture as it has to qualify for supercomputers. The way to win the HPC contract is more complex than the CPUs itself.
Bear in mind that Intel flew heads out of Oak Ridge with their otherwise superior Core 2 architecture after Woodcrest had a reject rate higher than 8% [the results of that Opteron vs. Xeon trial in 2006 are visible today, as Oak Ridge is the site of AMD-powered Jaguar, world's most powerful supercomputer]. In order to satisfy the required multi-year under 100% stress, nVidia Tesla C2050/2070 went through following changes when compared to the Quadro card [which again, will be downclocked from the consumer cards]:
- Memory vendor is providing specific ECC version of GDDR5 memory: ECC GDDR5 SDRAM
- ECC is enabled from both the GPU side and Memory side, there are significant performance penalties, hence the GFLOPS number is significantly lower than on Quadro / GeForce cards.
- ECC will be disabled on GeForce cards and most likely on Quadro cards
- The capacitors used are of highest quality
- Power regulation is completely different and optimized for usage in Rack systems - you can use either a single 8-pin or dual 6-pin connectors
- Multiple fault-protection
- DVI was brought in on demand from the customers to reduce costs
- Larger thermal exhaust than Quadro/GeForce to reduce the thermal load
- Tesla cGPUs differ from GeForce with activated transistors that significantly increase the sustained performance, rather than burst mode.
Since Andy is the General Manager for Tesla business, he has no contact with the Quadro Business or GeForce Business units, thus he was unable to answer what the developments are in those segments.
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