PCIe Gen2 debuts with Tesla GPGPU monster

Nvidia held an Analyst Day earlier today, and decided to spice things up with the official launch of a line-up with which this company hopes to jumpstart the GPGPU market in a spectacular manner.

For starters, the name of product line-up is none other than (Nikola) Tesla, the renowned revolutionary scientist born in my home country. Nvidia didn't choose the name by accident, since it expects that Tesla will flame up the world in the same manner Nikola did in the early years of the last century.

What happens when a 8800GTX board looses video outputs? GPGPU monster, that's what happens

Tesla line-up consists of discrete GPGPU-card, desktop supercomputer and enterprise class 1U, 3U and 5U units. For optimal GPGPU performance, there should be one X86 processing core per one GPGPU processing unit, so for four GPGPU units, a four-core processor is a must.

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.

Wanted to see how does a GPGPU card look in 1U form factor?

All in all, Nvidia continues what ATI started last year with Fire Stream. Nvidia also mentioned that there are dual-GPGPU boards coming, which is a technical pre-announcement of the GeForce 8950GX2, a dual GPU G80 board. These two should come to life when Nvidia finishes up their mobile version of G80 chip, that is placed for notebooks with GPU part set at 22 Watts or higher. µ