
Nvidia releases $3000 Titan Z - Aeolus98
http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/03/25/titan-z/
======
orik
Most of the current comments are along the lines of "You will only need this
card if you are doing _____". ie "Gaming at 4k", "Parallel Compute".

I think it's pretty clear this is a halo product, but I want to point out that
having two non-crippled gpu's on a stick is an impressive technical
achievement. Sure they will be throttled when the heat constraints kick in,
but I am excited to see this sort of technology trickle down into the next
"Asus 760 Mars" product.

~~~
sillysaurus3
What's a halo product?

~~~
kevinpet
A halo product is something that isn't there to be the real flagship that's
driving the revenue, but instead to be the ultra-cool item that people really
lust after, associate that with the brand, then buy one of the lower end
models.

For example, the Ford Shelby GT500
[http://www.ford.com/cars/mustang/trim/shelbygt500/](http://www.ford.com/cars/mustang/trim/shelbygt500/)
is probably not even turning a profit for Ford, but when someone picks up an
automotive magazine with an article about the car, it makes them more likely
to buy the entry level Mustang at 40% of the cost, or any other Ford product.

~~~
TylerE
The Dodge Viper is probably a better example, as it's a totally custom
chassis, body, etc.

The GT500 still shares a LOT with a production Mustang, and al the economies
of scale that imparts. It's also producded in very high quantities, 5000+
yearly. They're making money or they wouldn't buiild that many.

~~~
rograndom
The Ford GT
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_gt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_gt))
is a better example than the GT500 as well.

I've heard it explained that halo cars help create brand loyalty with an
instinctual response similar to "My dad can beat up your dad" fights on the
schoolyard.

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ThePhysicist
That's pretty impressive. According to the announcement this card will sport 8
Teraflops (or about 112 GIPS), which corresponds to the entire available
computing power on this planet in 1990 _. Let 's play some Counterstrike :D

_[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/xbox-o...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/xbox-
one-our-servers-will-have-more-power-than-all-the-computers-in-1999-us-really-
expert-almost/276131/)

~~~
sillysaurus3
New benchmarking scheme: "Entire available computing power on the planet in
year XXXX"

Awesome.

~~~
Jtsummers
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#Histo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#Historical_TOP500_table)

Another fun one. At 8 Teraflops it makes it equivalent to the top
supercomputer of 2000. So our desktops (in terms of raw computing capability)
are only about 14 years behind supercomputers, and that gap is closing
rapidly.

------
rangibaby
I imagine this is how the Titan Z came about: > We _finally_ have a GPU that
can get 60fps in Crysis at 1080p > What about 4K? > ...

------
mentos
I definitely see a need for graphics cards like these with virtual reality
around the corner.

I haven't bought a new graphics card in 5 years because even next gen games
play well enough. But I can see VR changing that with the need to render the
same scene twice (one for each eye).

I wonder how much money you'd have to drop today to have a rig that can push
4K to each eye? There isn't a headset that can support that yet but I'd
imagine its atleast in the next 5-10 years.

~~~
selectodude
It looks like two GeForce Titan Blacks in SLI can do one 4K screen. So if you
did two monitors each with its own SLI, it would work for about $4000 in GPUs
as of right now.

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TrainedMonkey
This card is more expensive than all the hardware in my current PC, and I am
running pretty high end gaming rig with 900D, GTX 680, 3700K, xonar, 16 GB of
RAM, roomy SSD, velociraptor, Johny Guru 5 star rated PSU, and custom built
water cooling.

~~~
fourmii
Out of interest, what do you play on this rig?

~~~
soperj
probably 2048.

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breischl
I don't track gaming GPU requirements that much, but this strikes me as past
high end. Is this even useful for gaming, or is it really aimed at doing
crypto, cryptocurrency mining, simulations, etc?

~~~
bvk
The thing to note about this card is that it's a dual-GPU card - two chips
with some sort of intra-card PCIE bus between them. You could get equivalent
gaming performance by buying two of the GTX 780 Ti for about $1500. That level
of performance is roughly what you want if you want to game at 4k resolutions
at 60 FPS, so there are gaming applications for this card, even if it falls
into "insanely high-end". The niche for this sort of card is in mini-ITX and
similarly small computers, where there isn't enough room for a pair of cards
and the builder wants "throwing money away" levels of performance.

That said, the selling point of the Titan cards is that their GPUs don't have
the same restrictions put on their general-purpose compute performance as the
standard gamer cards. NVIDIA locks this performance on their geforce cards in
order to protect their lucrative GPGPU business, so this is really more of an
entry-level card for scientific computing and other applications.

Cryptocurrency mining would be an obvious application, but a quirk of NVIDIA
and AMD's differing architectures means that AMD cards are vastly more
powerful at the specific functions needed to mine cryptocoins.

~~~
macavity23
While a few years ago this card would have been great at mining cryptocoins,
nowadays no gpu is ever going to be worth it as ASICs are 2-3 orders of
magnitude faster and more efficient.

[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison)

ASIC won't play skyrim @ 4k though... :)

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higherpurpose
Dual-GPU...so not very good for VR gaming. The _only_ reason you'd want such
an expensive high-end GPU is to be future proof with VR gaming at 4k/120fps.
But dual-GPUs aren't great for VR gaming.

Nvidia needs another card between the normal Titan and this one, that's a
single card, and is targeted at VR gaming, and costs $1500 at most.

~~~
DontGiveTwoFlux
Why is Dual-GPU not ideal for VR?

Intuitively, one GPU per eyeball sounds like a good fit.

------
wmf
Pascal seems a lot more interesting:
[http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/nvlink-pascal-
stac...](http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/nvlink-pascal-stacked-
memory-feeding-appetite-big-data/)

(Although I am dreading having to type all those begins and ends.)

------
krsunny
I wonder how much bit coin you could mine with a whole rack of these.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
Not a whole lot. Nvidia cards are not as efficient at mining compared to AMD
ones.

1\. Single gtx titan gets 300 mh/s [0].

2\. There are two gtx titan chips in this card, so let's say 600 mh/s.

3\. A rack should fit around 60 of these. This gives us 36 gh/s (gigahashes a
second).

4\. According to this[1] calculator you will get a whooping 0.00361597 BTC per
day, which would be worth around $2.12. Tomorrow expected payout drops to
$2.09. Electricity should cost you at least an order of magnitude more.

[0] [http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-titan-
perfor...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-titan-performance-
review,3442-10.html)

[1]
[http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator](http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator)

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Aqwis
It mentions supercomputers, but also gaming. Supercomputers aren't known for
being particularly good for gaming, to put it that way. Is this product just a
new gaming GPU, or is it aimed at a different market, even altcoin miners?

~~~
United857
Real-time shading/rendering is essentially a massively parallel operation --
the exact type of problems that GPUs (and supercomputers in general) are good
for.

In fact, many of the top supercomputers today use GPUs.

~~~
boyaka
Yep. And it would probably be good for altcoins indeed. It just can't be a
good bitcoin miner because the ASICs are already out there. If an altcoin can
be mined with an ASIC (I believe the purpose of some, like litecoin, are not
to be?) then it is near pointless to mine with a GPU (unless in a pool).

Also, I would assume the reason behind supercomputers not being good for
gaming is that they are parallelized in ways other than the chips on the GPU
(entire machines are networked together via various interfaces). The software
behind distributing the processing between several machines, or whatever
aspect makes it super, is probably what limits the ability of supercomputers
to run video games :0

~~~
dragontamer
The best performance/watt altcoin miner is the NVidia 760 right now, although
the R9 290x has a case for being the best well-rounded altcoin miner (Once you
factor the fact that you'll need 3 or 4x the 760s to keep up with a single R9
290x).

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kenrikm
I'm on 660TIs in SLI which are not the newest horse in the stable and can run
just about anything out maxed (16x AA etc.) @ 1080p. You won't need this card
unless you're going multi monitor and / or retina level.

~~~
izzydata
Am I the only one that hates the term "retina"? Just give a resolution. It is
way more meaningful than pointless apple magic lingo.

~~~
jjoonathan
If it takes "retina" to get rid of "HD," no amount of silliness will keep me
off its bandwagon.

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makmanalp
Wow, I bet the cost / benefit ratio on this one is not so great for most
applications. Just wait a year till a minutely pared-down version is available
for 10% the price.

~~~
binxbolling
I will eat a shoe if this is available in 12 months for $300.

~~~
hackerpolicy
Be glad this is not reddit.

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Aeolus98
IMHO the only reason you'd want this is to save on a PCIe slot when you
absolutely _need_ the double-precision floating point operations to run at
full speed.

------
aperrien
About how many FLOPS is this thing? The specs portion of their webpage doesn't
cover that, and I'm curious about using it for CUDA purposes.

~~~
skriticos2
8 tera-flops

[http://images.anandtech.com/doci/7894/GTC-2014-028_575px.jpg](http://images.anandtech.com/doci/7894/GTC-2014-028_575px.jpg)

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trhway
>TITAN Z is engineered for next-generation 5K and multi-monitor gaming

5K? "all the way to 11" or somebody just didn't proof-read the copy?

~~~
dpe82
Pro video cameras record beyond 5K - eg. RED Dragon does 6K. Shortly (probably
at NAB this year) we'll be seeing theater projectors and studio monitors at
that resolution.

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imperialdrive
The only reason to by this card is to get full QHD/4K porn in 3D, to pass the
time while simultaneously mining bitcoin.

~~~
skriticos2
The Bitcoin network is currently hashing at nearly 500 exa-flops (estimated).
This thing has what, 8 tera-flops? Not very effective.

~~~
trhway
interesting what human computing endeavor has first crossed 10-20 exa-flops -
the estimate of computing power of the brain. 500 exa-flops is something that
would be enough to emulate the brain.

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augbot
Mmmmmm, OpenCL.

