From PC World: Nvidia’s PC graphics chips may draw all the attention, but supercomputing chips are driving the company’s GPU technology ahead.
The company on Monday announced an updated Tesla K80 graphics card, which is its fastest graphics product to date. Tesla is used in some of the world’s fastest supercomputers to solve pressing scientific questions.
The K80 is based on technology similar to that used in GeForce PC graphics cards, but with some memory and throughput tweaks. The graphics card can be used by engineering companies to simulate visual models, or by oil and gas companies for geological research to find the best drilling sites. Tesla has also been used in servers to deliver virtual desktops to remote clients.
The K80 delivers 8.74 teraflops of single-precision performance compared to 5 teraflops on Nvidia’s flagship GeForce GTX 980 desktop graphics card. The K80 also has two times the performance and memory bandwidth of its predecessor, the K40, which was announced around the same time last year.
In 2016, Nvidia is promising even faster graphics products based on Pascal architecture, a new on-chip communication technology. Through a new interconnect called NV-Link. GPUs will be able to exchange data faster, which will facilitate better performance. Nvidia says NV-Link is five times faster than the PCI-Express 3.0 interconnect, which is used in most servers and PCs.
View: Article @ Source Site
