Now we have the 8800 XT (well I have one on order now) and CUDA support… what about getting really serious and stuffing a couple of Tesla cards in those PCIe slots? I hope we wont have the same EFI hiatus as the graphics cards… what about drivers and all that? I can see the mac pro as a very serious scientific workstation if we can do all of this.
Or is the future of desktop HPC Linux? I must admit I hate having the nicest box in the industry and having to be at the back of the queue for support. Is this a case of the bleeding edge? Good old Apple… pushing the dinosaurs along… must be a bit like herding cats.
BTW what is the status of EFI support on the Nvidia range - or is that another topic?
Has anyone gotten a Mac to work with a Tesla C870? The sticky post at the top of the forum states that the v1.1 Beta is only for the GeForce8600M GT, Quadro FX5600 or GeForce 8800GT.
I’ve got one of the older 8-CPU MacPro’s and a C870 that I would like to try out on it – but I don’t want to waste my time if its not going to work. I really don’t want to have to turn on that hulking noisy dell precision 690 just to play with this card.
Does nVidia have an estimate of when they will release a version that states it is compatible. Is there a public Issue Tracker somewhere so I can find out when this issue will be fixed? Some transparency in the development process would be nice.
It is not going to work due to EFI problem ( C870 is missing EFI support).
Even the FX5600 needs to be an “Apple FX5600”, a standard card will not work.
Tell me about it… :( As the owner of a first generation Mac Pro I’m still waiting for a 8800XT card with the right firmware… never mind anything more exotic. Meanwhile back in Linux land… my 400 dollar box is running rings around this expensive toy. I’m buying my next system from Nvidia External Media
Is this entirely hardware based? I use a pre-2008 Mac Pro with 2 quad-core xeons but run linux (fedora) instead of Mac OS X. Does this get around the problem? Or can I really still only use the 8800 GT for cuda?
Yes this is an firmware issue AFAIK you need a CUDA capable card with the 32bit EFI for the first generation Mac Pro and 64bit EFI for the latest Mac Pros - the good news is that the 8800 GT is now available in both versions. At the moment the Mac Pro is not a viable deskside supercomputer platform which is a shame given that Apple are sticking their necks out with EFI - but this means a card manufacturer has to support three different firmware versions (including good old bios) - you’d have to ask yourself the obvious commercial question… Maybe we can now persuade Apple to do us some Tesla cards - assuming there are OEM arrangements for these. My guess is that there will be something even more sexy around the corner…
