NVIDIA Breathes Life into Kepler with the GK210 Silicon
NVIDIA's "Maxwell" architecture may have got a rather low-key debut with the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, but nobody saw its performance-segment derivative, the GM204 silicon, driving the GeForce GTX 980 and the GTX 970. The new architecture makes its predecessor, the "Kepler" look inefficient in comparison. It looks like NVIDIA still thinks Kepler is competitive to competition from AMD (GCN) and Intel (Knights Corner), in the high-performance computing era.
The problems here are NVIDIA already launched a GK110 based Tesla HPC card, and its big "Maxwell" chip is nowhere in sight. The GM204 has limited memory bandwidth, and its texture-compression mojo can't bail out bandwidth-hogging HPC applications. The solution? Develop a new big silicon based on "Kepler." Enter, the GK210. That's right, the G-K-210. Launched today with the Tesla K80 dual-chip HPC accelerator, this chip could feature design improvements over the GK110, while offering memory bandwidth and sizes not possible on the GM204.
The problems here are NVIDIA already launched a GK110 based Tesla HPC card, and its big "Maxwell" chip is nowhere in sight. The GM204 has limited memory bandwidth, and its texture-compression mojo can't bail out bandwidth-hogging HPC applications. The solution? Develop a new big silicon based on "Kepler." Enter, the GK210. That's right, the G-K-210. Launched today with the Tesla K80 dual-chip HPC accelerator, this chip could feature design improvements over the GK110, while offering memory bandwidth and sizes not possible on the GM204.
