OK so you don't need a new car... and have a spare $3199 lying around for the little one,
but where are you going to plug your monitor in?

;)
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Not into a Tesla, that's for sure ;)

MrS
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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Unless there is a second release wave/series, akin to the GF400 and GF500 series (1024 rather than 960, similar to the 512shaders up from 480), I don't think crunchers will be looking to these cards. Even then it could be 9 months or more. With top supercomputers looking more and more to GPU's, they just won't come our way. All it takes is a few super computers to be interested and every Tesla is gone. Anyway, at $3500 and up they are probably not financially viable outside the supercomputer market. Even if one could do 3times the work of a GTX690 it still costs more than 3times a GTX690 and needs to be supported by more expensive hardware.

To me it seems more likely that a Quadro product will turn up with a design more similar to the Tesla's than GF600'S. Maybe wishful thinking but the Quadro 6000 and 7000 are basically beefed up GTX470's - a generation or two old. So the line up needs a refresh.
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Obviously buying Teslas for BOINC won't be an option.

However, saying that GK110 is not any better than GTX680 at GPU-Grid is simply wrong. It's got 15/8 the amount of shaders, i.e. in the largest configuration 87.5% the performance at similar clock speeds. Stock clock speeds will be lower, but so will be the voltage -> higher efficiency than a stock GK104 using Turbo Mode.

MrS
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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

While I expect we're going to see a consumer card based on GK110 I would not bet on it being the fastest possible configuration with 15 SMX. So we may very well see 14 or 13 SMX and the reduced performance this results in.

And you're right, clock speeds of a huge chip are generally lower than for a smaller chip. Some signals have to travel further and the possibility of exceptionally slow transistors being somewhere where it hurts overall clock speed increases.

However, the example you've choosen is not good to show this off :p
Fermi was, like previous chips since G80, a high frequency design. This allowed the shaders to be clocked significantly higher than the rest of the chip. Kepler drops this in favor for more power-efficient transistors and hence can't reach quite the clock speeds of the predecessors, even using a more advanced process technology. And GF110 was actually the physically huge chip (~550 mm²), whereas GK104 has a comparably moderate size (~350 mm² if I remember correctly).

A better example would be G92b and GT200: same process node (55 nm), rather similar architecture, but 1.8 GHz versus 1.4 GHz stock speeds. Part of this difference was a power-limitation of the big chip, though.

I'd agree if we speculated that GK110 might reach ~100 MHz less than GK104 at the same voltage, but I wouldn't expect a more dramatic difference.

MrS
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It makes sense to buy a PC with 4 Nvidia Tesla K20X for better crunching?

We have tested on a K20 and it is on par with a GTX680, a bit less.
The K20X should be a bit faster.

I am not considering the price component of course.

gdf