Nvidia Tesla vs 480 for CUDA programming

Question

I am doing research on CUDA programming.
i have the option to buy a single NVidia Tesla or buy around 4-5 NVidia 480?
what do you recommend?

Answer 1

Teslas are for more enterprise solutions (where you can expect the Tesla HW to be around for a long time), which the 480s will be here and then no longer in stock within a year (e.g. the GTX 295 is out of stock already). 4-5 480s have more horsepower than 1 Tesla, but that is only beneficial if you can actually leverage the multiple GPUs simultaneously and efficiently.

I work on Jacket, the GPU engine for MATLAB. Jacket has multi-GPU support and would be able to run some problems (say for instance, a bunch of for-loops) better on multiple 480s. However, other problems where multiple GPUs don't matter, will be better on the Tesla which has more memory and higher single card throughput.

Lot's of parameters to consider... good luck!