Embeddable Fermi heads out to OEMs

As Timothy Prickett Morgan reported in The Register yesterday, NVIDIA’s Fermi chips have been winging their way out to OEMs to be slotted onto blades and into workstations for the next crop of “personal supercomputing” announcements

nVidia logoThe Fermi graphics cards and GPU coprocessors that are based on them were both previewed last November at the SC09 supercomputing conference. The Fermi graphics chips previewed had 512 cores, but for reasons that Nvidia has not explained – and which probably involve chip yields and heating issues – the GeForce graphics cards and Tesla 20 coprocessors that have started shipping only have 448 working cores. And that means their floating-point performance is a little lower than expected.

The C2050 and C2070 cards were already shipping, and the S2050 and S2070 pizza box appliances aren’t shipping yet (but reported to remain on track for this quarter). This week’s news is about the Tesla M2050 embedded GPU coprocessor

…based on the C2050 card as the name suggests and which is rated at the same 515 gigaflops of double-precision and 1.03 teraflops single-precision floating point performance, has begun shipping through OEM server partners. Appro and Super Micro were the first to announce systems using the M series GPUs. (You have to hunt around the Nvidia site to find the M2050 spec sheet, so let me save you the trouble.)

If you’re interested, Timothy Prickett Morgan does a dive into the Appros and SuperMicro offerings (we covered SuperMicro here as well).