Posted on Saturday, November 20 2010 @ 0:00 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
NVIDIA's Tesla business unit product manager Sumit Gupta doesn't consider Intel's MIC architecture as a threat. He points out that developing a new GPU architecture costs $500 million to $1 billion a year and doesn't see how Intel can make this an economic investment without having a graphics business:
After Intel Corp. failed to develop its own discrete graphics processor code-named Larrabee, it said that it would concentrate on creation of many-core chips aimed specifically at HPC market. But according to Nvidia, whose Tesla compute boards power three out of top five supercomputers in the world, the high-performance computing (HPC) is not the primary market for graphics chips. As a result, it hardly makes sense to develop a chip specifically to power supercomputers.
"I do not see the economic model [with MIC]. We are able to produce those [Tesla] GPGPUs because the ultimately there is one GPU for GeForce consumer graphics, Quadro professional business. It costs $500 million to $1 billion to develop those new products every year, it is a hyge investment. Unless you have that [consumer and professional] economic engine in the background, I cannot imagine how one could make a GPU without having a graphics business," said Mr. Gupta.
Source: X-bit Labs
