[Beowulf] GPU's - was Westmere EX

[Prentice Bisbal]

On 04/07/2011 03:26 PM, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
> 
> On Apr 7, 2011, at 6:25 PM, Gus Correa wrote:
> 
>> Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>
>>> GPU monster box, which is basically a few videocards inside such a
>>> box stacked up a tad, wil only add a couple of
>>> thousands.
>>>
>>
>> This price may be OK for the videocard-class GPUs,
>> but sounds underestimated, at least for Fermi Tesla.
> 
> Tesla (448 cores @ 1.15Ghz, 3GB ddr5) : $2.200
> note there is a 6 GB version, not aware of price will be $$$$ i bet.
> or AMD 6990 (3072 PE's @ 0.83Ghz, 4GB ddr5) : 519 euro
> 
> VERSUS
> 
> 8 socket Nehalem-ex, 512GB ram DDR3, basic configuration, $205k.
> 
> Factor 100 difference to those cards.
> 
> A couple of thousands versus a couple of hundreds of thousands.
> Hope i made my point clear.
> 
> 

You can't do a direct comparison between a CPU and a GPU. There are many
things that GPUs can't do (or can't do well) that are still better done
on a CPU. Even NVidia acknowledges in most of their promotional and
educational literature.

One example would be a code with a lot of branching.

--
Prentice