Today’s opening keynote at NVIDIA’s GTC had a number of interesting announcements (details to follow in other articles) but the “star” of the show was the upcoming Tesla K20.

Destined to spend its life in HPC systems and supercomputers, the K20 is based off on a Kepler GK110 core which is billed as the “largest, fastest” processing core ever designed.  It features a threefold increase in double precision performance over a comparable Fermi core and also incorporates high level dynamic parallelism, and Hyper Q technology.

Hyper Q allows these new Kepler parts to process up to 32 concurrent work queues (versus the single work queue for Fermi), allowing its massively powerful parallel abilities to stay fully engaged, optimizing efficiency.

From the information that Hardware Canucks has seen, the GK110 core is geared strictly towards high performance computing solutions rather than the desktop GeForce product space since it incorporates functionality that won’t be necessary for gaming or low level GPGPU compute.  But that doesn’t mean it can’t be scaled according to NVIDIA’s needs in other markets (namely for GeForce and Quadro products) but for the time being it looks like NVIDIA is targeting their flagship at high margin niches.

According to NVIDIA, this Kepler derivative will be the first highly virtualized GPU delivered to market, allowing it to render frames and stream them instantaneously without being connected to an external display.  This means it can be used in cloud computing applications, possibly allowing for game streaming over a broadband internet connection to a remote device.  As with the GeForce-branded chip, this one will be very efficient, making it possible to deploy Tesla-based clusters on much larger scale.

Stay tuned for more info as we can properly dissect the various nuances of this new chip.