While the new Maxwell architecture leads the company's gaming portfolio, Nvidia has re-spinned the previous-generation Kepler GPU in order to produce the GK210 that powers the new Tesla K80 card for GPGPU accelerated computing applications.
The new GK210 is a modified version of the GK110B found in the Tesla K40, but with doubled-up register file and shared memory cache. The goal is to give applications more resources to enable more registers per thread without compromising the total number of threads that an SMX can process, reducing latencies and improving efficiency.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | Tesla K80 | Tesla K40 | GeForce GTXTitan-Z |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | GK210 | GK110B | GK110B |
| CUDA Cores | 4,992(2 x 2,496) | 2,880 | 5,760(2 x 2880) |
| Nominal/Boost Core Clock | 562/875 MHz | 745/875 MHz | 705/876 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 1250 MHz GDDR5 | 1500 MHz GDDR5 | 1750 MHz GDDR5 |
| Memory bus | 384-bit | 384-bit | 384-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 240 GB/s x2 | 288 GB/s | 336 GB/s x2 |
| Memory Amount | 24 GB (2 x 12 GB) | 12 GB | 12 GB (2 x 6 GB) |
| Single Precision FP perf. | 8.74 Tflops | 4.29 Tflops | 8 Tflops |
| Double Precision FP. perf. | 2.91 Tflops | 1.43 Tflops | 2.6 Tflops |
| TDP | 300 W | 235 W | 375 W |
| Cooling | passive | passive | active |
Note that the GK210 processors in the K80 have two of their 15 SMX blocks disabled, limiting the card to 4,992 CUDA cores (2,496 per GPU). This might not look as impressive as the Titan-Z, but keep in mind that the Tesla K80 is passively-cooled, with a tighter focus on performance-per-watt and limited at a 300 Watt TDP.
Of course, the Tesla K80 has other tricks up its sleeve, like an astonishing 24 GB of total graphics memory onboard, or 12 GB per GPU. At 5 GHz effective over a 384-bit memory interface, the GDDR5 RAM provides an aggregate 480 GB/s of bandwidth (240 GB/s per GPU). It's highly doubtful that we'll see a GeForce card ever carry the GK210, but when we asked, the company didn't rule out the possibility of a future Titan card powered by this graphics processor.
With two GPUs, it's no surprise that performance is significantly higher than that of the single GPU-equipped Tesla K40 card released last year. The Tesla K80 is available now for "high-performance computing, computational science, supercomputing, enterprise, complex data analytics and machine learning applications", according to Nvidia. The card has no MSRP, as the company let us know that OEMs set the price, but we can expect it to be significantly more expensive than the Tesla K40 12GB card that currently ranges between $3800 and $6400 on Amazon.com.
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