GRID visual Computing Appliance

[glorybound]

Do you have a spare 25 grand laying around? Good! Because Nvidia just released its GRID visual Computing Appliance. It's meant for animators and designers and it costs $24,900. Oh, and there's a yearly $2400 software license fee. The device contains 192GB of RAM, 16 threads of CPU and 8 GPUs. There is also a 16 GPU model, but you'll have to contact Nvidia to find out what that costs. Remember - if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/20/nvidias-grid-vca-now-available/

[stevesideas]

I think I'd rather spend money on a render farm build. Seems overpriced and pointless to me.

[Morbid Angel]

I don't understand...25k for what 16 cpu threads? or 8 gpus? 192 gb of ram is not relevant to the gpu so whats the point? I mean if you go in and build 2 quad sli rigs and fit 4 titans into each that would be $6k per rig, so $12 k, and no need to ever pay for anything else...does not make sense.

[vlado]

From what I could understand, the idea is to use these as remote workstations with up to 16 concurrent users. So you won't be using this as a workstation directly - instead, you'd have a number of users logging in over a network and using Max, Maya, iray, V-Ray RT GPU or whatever with full GPU acceleration. It's running VMWare or something to partition the actual hardware into separate virtual machines.

I don't know how useful that will be though.

Best regards,
Vlado