If you’ve been trying to get ahold of one of NVidia‘s new Deskside Tesla C1060’s (not the rack-mount S1070’s) then you may have been finding it somewhat difficult. Several people are reporting the same:
If you haven’t heard, Tesla’s are hard to come by. We have several Pegasus systems that customers have purchased, that we can’t get the units for. All of the distributors and resellers we have spoken to indicate that they are getting a small fraction of their orders filled. We have had units on order over a month. Several more orders, and a hard deadline to get units filled.
John West over at InsideHPC managed to reach someone inside the NVidia powerhouse to get official word on what’s going on:
Due to the large demand we are seeing across the board — a number of large cluster installations, additional demand from OEMs, and the success of a developer promotion we are currently running, we are left in a position of ramping up production to meet demand.
A good problem for a company to have, but not so nice if you’re a user in desperate need of that raw sweet GPGPU-computing goodness.
via NVIDIA updates us on the Tesla shortage | insideHPC.com.
Anyone think that rather than “large demand” this shortage is due to the 40nm production problems we’ve been hearing about with Taiwan Semiconductor. If so, this hurts Nvidia’s bottom line as they buy whole wafers rather than just the good chips.
This is no surprise. As Andrew pointed out, they ran a promotion back in April where you could get a C1060 for half price.
https://vizworld.com/2009/04/nvidia-promotion-50-off-msrp-on-tesla-c1060/