Worth buying a Tesla for development? Take advantage of current promotion?

Hi,

I would like to start some CUDA development - not immediately, but in the next couple of months (since I don’t have a suitable PC to install the card in yet). Is it worth getting a Tesla C870 now with the current developer promotion at PNY that ends soon? Here are some questions I have.

  1. What will the regular Tesla price be?

  2. Will a new better Tesla be coming out soon? Is this best development platform?

  3. Will new nVidia cards be coming out soon that have more power/memory at a lower cost? e.g. 9800 GX2.

  4. Is it worth then getting 2 for developing multi-GPU applications?

I do need as much memory as possible for my application.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Did any of you take advantage of the promotion program?

Thanks!
Kiwiguy

If you need the memory, then it is definitely worth getting the Tesla boards. To get 1.5GB on a non-Tesla product you will need to buy the Quadro 5600 - which is quite a bit more expensive than the C870.

Tesla is the right thing to buy if you want to go for “computation”. It is intended for computation and it does NOT even have graphic ports to connect your monitor.

Also note that, NVIDIA is planning to release a double-precision version of Tesla before end of this year or probably sometime in the middle. Since you are anyway going to start after 2 months, you can very well RENT or TRIAL a TESLA board initially and then wait and buy the “double-precision” one.

Where did you get that info?

ATI has already released it. So, I dont think NVIDIA would be far behind. Thats my guess. I think NVIDIA promised it last year and could not. So, they would deliver it this year. This is what one of my colleagues told me. May b, it could be rong…

I am sorry about that. May b, one should not count on it.

Well, A search in this forum revelaed it now:

[url=“The Official NVIDIA Forums | NVIDIA”]The Official NVIDIA Forums | NVIDIA

Check out Mark harris’ post.

Actually, it was promised by end of 2007. See this thread:
[url=“http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=28383&hl=late+2007”]The Official NVIDIA Forums | NVIDIA

ok, My friend was right. :-)

Thanks for the replies. I’m only using single precision at the moment.

Also, I just noticed that PNY has extended their promotion until 29 Feb 2008, so I guess I have another month to make a decision.

Cheers,
Kiwiguy