Re:Racking Mac Pros
by elif on Wednesday May 06, 2015 @04:28PM
(#9501574)
I'm not trying to lure you down the flops per dollar rabbithole... but when i was researching the mac pro before purchasing, putting together a computer with GPUs providing the same flop performance was something like 80-90% of the cost of the mac pro. the D700's are really good. This is just an anecdote based on my memory, so take with a grain of salt, but the comparison is probably not as bad as you are imagining.
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This is what I found as well, and allude to in other comments in the thread. Particularly when you look at GPGPUs like the NVidia Tesla, they are generally pretty terrible when priced per-gflop because they live in a niche market that wants to handle finite element analysis and supercomputing tasks.
Image processing doesn't require double precision, so we don't need GPUs tuned for it, which means we can use Fire Pro's and similar workstation or server grade cards.