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  • Senti - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link

    I would be way more happy if released OpenCL 1.2 drivers. Seriously, even Intel supports 1.2 now.
  • Fallen Kell - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link

    Agreed.
  • p1esk - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link

    Regarding GPU powered Neural Network simulation - it's interesting that they used regular gaming GPU cards - not $3.5k Tesla, not $1k Titans, and not even current top of the line $600 780GTX gaming cards - they used last generation 680GTX ($400) cards.
    Makes one wonder why would anyone doing NN simulation want to buy 10x more expensive Tesla K20 cards?
  • ShieTar - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link

    May depend on the exact usage scenario of the network if you can get any additional value out of ECC memory and double precision calculations. When you can get a significant scientific project to run on about 100 GPUs, the price-difference between $400 and $1k only comes to 60k$, that's not very if you consider that they probably pay at least 500k$ a year on salaries for the scientists working with the system.
    Also keep in mind, this kind of system is rarely planned and purchased on short notice. They probably started the planning before Titan and the 780 came out.
  • wumpus - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link

    It's a neural net. It probably could get away with 16bit values but probably uses 32bit values to map to the hardware better. It has no use for 64bit double precision floating point (the big difference between the 780 and Titan). Also as a neural net, it should be highly resistant to data corruption on its own (you don't expect wetware to return the answer with 12 nines reliability, more like one or two).

    The only reason they were using a 780 instead of several 660s or similar boards was due to the need to do as many calculations on the same board as possible and limit communications between boards. I'm willing to bet that the next generation will simply buy the best single-point TFLOP/$ and use algorithms that don't rely so heavily on inter-board communication, but they didn't want make a big bet that would work on their first try. They knew in advance they didn't need the Titans or Telsas, however.

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