[Beowulf] nVidia revealed as evil

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Fri, 5 Jan 2018 22:52:19 +0000, you wrote:

>There has been a conversation going on on the AMBER mailing list for some time, related to this and specifically to the Volta card in some way, since AMBER performs best on the consumer grade stuff and doesn’t require the enterprise class features (I guess the reason for the performance difference is that the next gen consumer cards come out first?).

Actually, the consumer cards (at least for the last generation or so)
have been released last.

Volta has not yet been released in a consumer form - the cheapest
available so far is the Titan V (direct from Nvidia only) at $3k I
believe.  Speculation is that consumer Volta may come out this year,
but there is no pressure on Nvidia given AMD's troubles in the GPU
market.

The big difference is that of course most of the work is being done on
consumer hardware because that's what the developers and researchers
can afford.  Secondarily, the new feature Volta offers is still to
recent to be properly supported (and some software may get no benefit
from it) because affordable hardware isn't yet available to allow
developer access to the new Tensor cores that Volta offers.

>Anyhow, I spoke to an NVIDIA rep about it at SC17 and he kind of said “we are happy you’re buying whatever chip of ours). I said, sure, maybe, but I understand you’re putting the screws to the systems vendors so how are we supposed to buy them. Didn’t get a real concrete answer.

I would think if Nvidia isn't careful this could provide an opening
for AMD.