Data comparison of NVIDIA GRID Tesla P4 and P40

For my book about NVIDIA GRID I created a Data comparison table of the two graphics cards P4 and P40. From my point of view the P4 is a real underestimated card. After my presentation at NVIDIA GTC Europe this year NVIDIA added the P4 to their comparison slides – thanks for listening. During DCUG TecCon I showed my Data comparison table and got some real positive feedback. So I thought it’s worth to publish the comparison in a blog post:

*NVIDIA doesn’t publish list prices – so I picked list prices from one server vendor.

Current server generations allow either the usage of six P4 or three P40. As you can see the price of the P4 is much lower. On the other side the available CUDE Cores on the P40 are higher. Thus one user could get a higher peak performance on a P40 card. On the other hand you have more CUDE cores available on all P4 cards compared to all P40 cards. With the P4 cards you are limited to 48 vGPU Instances – the P40 allows up to 72.

There is another fact most people don’t think about. Citrix uses H264 in it’s HDX 3D Pro Protocol. When a user now connects to a VM one stream is created for every monitor he is using. In many offices nearly every user already has two monitors – resulting in two streams. If you now connect 72 users to a P40 and every user has two monitors – it would require 144 streams. However there are only 75 available. This can lead to a reduced performance for the user. In contrast the P4 has 150 streams available – for 48 vGPU Instances.

In addition the maximum power of all six P4 is 300W lower than three P40 resulting in lower cooling requirements and power needs for the Data Center.

I hope you like the comparison – if you think something is wrong or missing please contact me.