NVIDIA Announces GRID 2.0 + Tesla M60 and M6 Server Cards

[HKZeroFive]

Tesla M60 and Tesla M6

Launching for GRID 2.0 are the Tesla M60 and Tesla M6. In a departure from the GRID K series, both of the Tesla M series cards are based on the same GPU, NVIDIA’s GM204. The difference between the two cards is now the number of GPUs on a card and the overall form factor.

The larger of the two cards, Tesla M60, is a dual-GM204 solution featuring two fully enabled GM204 GPUs and 16GB of GDDR5 (8GB per GPU). The M60 is a full size, dual slot card similar to the previous generation GRID cards, and is rated for between 225W and 300W depending on the performance and cooling configuration (both passive and active are available). NVIDIA has rated the M60 for up to 32 concurrent vGPU users, or 16 users per GM204 GPU. Notably this is also the first time we’ve seen a dual GM204 card, as one was never released in the consumer market.

Meanwhile the Tesla M6 marks a new form factor for an NVIDIA GRID or Tesla product, coming in an MXM form factor. This card packs a single, partially enabled GM204 GPU with 12 of 16 SMXes (1536 CUDA cores) enabled, paired with 8GB of GDDR5. With only a single GPU it’s essentially rated for half as much work as M60, topping out at 16 users. However in turn it only draws 75W to 100W of power depending on configuration, and more importantly the MXM form factor makes the card suitable for installation in high-density blade servers, something that could not be done with the PCIe cards. Otherwise the card’s specifications are very similar to NVIDIA’s consumer GeForce GTX 980M, and we wouldn’t be surprised if this was the GTX 980M repurposed for server use.

GRID 2.0

Getting back to NVIDIA’s principle announcement then, let’s talk about GRID 2.0. The release of the Tesla cards means that GRID 2.0 offers a slew of performance and density features over GRID 1.0 thanks to the newer hardware. From a performance standpoint NVIDIA is advertising the new Tesla cards as offering 2x the performance of their GRID K-series cards, allowing for either per-user performance to be doubled, or for the number of concurrent users to be doubled. The performance argument is essentially about improving performance at the high-end where GPUs are already allocated on a 1:1 basis, meanwhile improving concurrent user counts ultimately brings down the number of cards required, and thereby the overall cost of servers to support a VDI operation.

More significant for current GRID users, I suspect, will be that GRID vGPU environments now support CUDA. Previously CUDA support was not available within the vGPU, requiring a 1:1 (pass-through) environment to access it. NVIDIA has been pushing hard for over the last half-decade to get GPU compute acceleration (via CUDA) inside professional software packages, and a lack of CUDA vGPU support meant that those programs couldn’t be fully accelerated within a vGPU environment. This change improves that situation, essentially allowing for CUDA users to finally be fully virtualized and run concurrently with each other on a single GPU. However it should be noted that there are some limitations here, with NVIDIA noting that CUDA vGPU support requires using the GRID 2.0 “8GB profile.”

GRID 2.0 also improves on guest OS support for multiple operating systems. New to GRID 2.0, NVIDIA now supports Linux guests, joining the company’s existing Windows support. On the subject of Linux use cases NVIDIA specifically mentions oil & gas users, so we suspect that this is as much for compute/CUDA users as it is for graphical users. Meanwhile GRID 2.0 also introduces formal support for Windows 10 on a “tech preview” basis, allowing Microsoft’s latest OS to be virtualized while retaining the full functionality of GRID.

This looks good for Linux users, looks like they've made massive changes to the first iteration of GRID. Not sure what to think about Tesla M6. Like the article says, it looks very similar to the 980M.

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9574/nvidia-announces-grid-20-tesla-m60-m6-grid-cards

[Sauron]

Unless they roll out fiber themselves this won't be viable for years

[AlwaysFSX]

Unless they roll out fiber themselves this won't be viable for years

Why would fiber have any serious benefit to this other than slightly better latency which is not exactly necessary for its uses? You're not gaming on these things, you're sending CAD workloads to render.

[Sauron]

Why would fiber have any serious benefit to this other than slightly better latency which is not exactly necessary for its uses? You're not gaming on these things, you're sending CAD workloads to render.

 

Isn't this ALSO for game streaming?

[TrigrH]

Isn't this ALSO for game streaming?

[AlwaysFSX]

Isn't this ALSO for game streaming?

You've never seen a Tesla card before, have you? No, it is not also for game streaming because that wouldn't run very well. The article specifically details some GRID uses:

 

GRID 2.0 also improves on guest OS support for multiple operating systems. New to GRID 2.0, NVIDIA now supports Linux guests, joining the company’s existing Windows support. On the subject of Linux use cases NVIDIA specifically mentions oil & gas users, so we suspect that this is as much for compute/CUDA users as it is for graphical users. Meanwhile GRID 2.0 also introduces formal support for Windows 10 on a “tech preview” basis, allowing Microsoft’s latest OS to be virtualized while retaining the full functionality of GRID.

[fredey]

This seems like something linusmedia group would need instead of individul rendering workstations they could just have this.

[HKZeroFive]

Isn't this ALSO for game streaming?

Think corporate businesses. They're managing huge amounts of data, and GRID is sort of a network in which it transfers that data and other such things.

This isn't for the average consumer so you shouldn't have to worry about getting one

[Sauron]

You've never seen a Tesla card before, have you? No, it is not also for game streaming because that wouldn't run very well. The article specifically details some GRID uses:

 

GRID 2.0 also improves on guest OS support for multiple operating systems. New to GRID 2.0, NVIDIA now supports Linux guests, joining the company’s existing Windows support. On the subject of Linux use cases NVIDIA specifically mentions oil & gas users, so we suspect that this is as much for compute/CUDA users as it is for graphical users. Meanwhile GRID 2.0 also introduces formal support for Windows 10 on a “tech preview” basis, allowing Microsoft’s latest OS to be virtualized while retaining the full functionality of GRID.

 

yeah, good point. Although since teslas are slightly modified "standard" gpus they could techincally work just as well - if the drivers were done properly. I was biased by the OTHER grid ^^

[AlwaysFSX]

yeah, good point. Although since teslas are slightly modified "standard" gpus they could techincally work just as well - if the drivers were done properly. I was biased by the OTHER grid ^^

Except you don't get access to any of the drivers for the GRID.

[iStartedTheWar]

This really confused me at first, thought it was for a Tesla Car called the M60.....For a split second I wondered "Why the hell does a car need 16GB of Vram?"

[brownninja97]

The M60 is a pig, get it harhar

[elfensky]

Isn't this ALSO for game streaming?

 

You're confusing it with the Grid Cloud Gaming (which, I think, is a sub-section of Grid) that is available on Nvidia's shield devices.

[asim1999]

Why note dual GM200 cores if they cost so much?