Overclocked Radeon Card Breaks 1 GHz

dacaldar writes "According to Yahoo Finance, noted Finnish over-clockers Sampsa Kurri and Ville Suvanto have made world history by over-clocking a graphics processor to engine clock levels above 1 GHz. The record was set on the recently-announced Radeon® X1800 XT graphics processor from ATI Technologies Inc."

Comments

Re:Benchmarks?

[Mr. Sketch]

Graphic showing 3DMark score of 12419:
http://www.muropaketti.com/3dmark/r520/12419.png

Pictures of their setup/methods:
http://www.muropaketti.com/3dmark/r520/ghz/

Re:GPU to excel CPU

[Jerry Coffin]

The performance of GPU's seem to grow faster than those of CPU's. I remember someone had proposed to use GPU's to proces generic data. It would be 12 times faster than a CPU.

Go here for several examples of this -- far from simply having been proposed, it's been done a fair number of times.

The thing to keep in mind with this is that while the GPU has a lot of bandwidth and throughput, most of that is due to a high degree of parallelism. Obviously 1 GHz hasn't been a major milestone for CPUs for quite a while, but CPUs are only recently starting to do multi-core processing, while GPUs have been doing fairly seriously parallel processing for quite a while.

Along with that, the GPU has a major advantage for some tasks in having hardware support for some relatively complex operations that require a fair amount of programming on the CPU (e.g. multiplying, inverting, etc., small vectors, typically has a single instruction to find Euclidean distance between two 3D points, etc.)

That means the GPU can be quite a bit faster for some things, but it's a long ways from a panacea -- you can get spectacular results applying a single mathematical transformation to a large matrix, but if you have a process that's mostly serial in nature, it'll probably be substantially slower than on the CPU.

Along with that, development for the GPU is generally somewhat difficult compared to development on the CPU. Writing the code itself isn't too bad, as there are decent IDEs (e.g ATI's RenderMonkey) but you're working in a strange (though somewhat C-like) language. Much worse is essentially a complete lack of debugging support. Along with that, you have to take the target GPU into account in the code (to some extent). I just got a call in the middle of a meeting this morning from one of my co-workers, pointing out that some of my code works perfectly on my own machine, but not at all on any his. I haven't had a chance to figure out what's wrong yet, but I'm betting it stems from the difference in graphics controllers (my machine has an nVidia board but his has Intel "Extreme" (ly slow) graphics).

--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

Because it's worth zilch without...

[GrAfFiT]

...the pictures of the rig : here they are, 3DMark05 included.

Re:GPU to excel CPU

[Mostly a lurker]

A good question! This excerpt from a recent article in Extreme Tech seems relevant:

The third future project at ATI is dramatically improved support for the GPGPU scene. These are researches, mostly academic, that are tapping into the massive parallel computing power of graphics processors for general computing tasks, like fluid dynamics calculations, protein folding, or audio and signal processing. ATI's new GPU architecture should be better at GPGPU tasks than any that has come before, as it provides more registers per pipeline than either ATI's old architecture or Nvidia's new one. This is a sore spot for GPGPU developers but not really a limitation for game makers. The improved performance of dynamic branching in the new architecture should be a huge win for GPGPU applications as well. Developers working to enable general purpose non-graphics applications on GPUs have lamented the lack of more direct access to the hardware, but ATI plans to remedy that by publishing a detailed spec and even a thin "close to the metal" abstraction layer for these coders

Re:Benchmarks?

[diablomonic]

have a look at xtremesystems.com/forums, this is where they talked about it first (I was reading it there a couple of days ago). at that stage they had graphics core at 1.0 something ghz and memory at 2.0 something ghz, but it was only stable in 2d mode. the highest they could get in 3dmark at that stage was around 12400 and yes, that was with the overclock backed off a bit to 800 and something

in other words... still impressive (no other chip has been able to overclock to 1ghz, even in 2d mode) but not quite what you were hoping for

Re:Huzzah!

[Anonymous Coward]

note that before you go celebrating too much, the 1ghz speed was only stable in 2D MODE: the 3dmark score is for when they had backed off the overclock to about 880, see here

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php ?p=1104977#post1104977 sampsa is asked Were you able to run any benchmarks at that speed or was that a Windows stable shot???? Anyway that is still hella fast with no artifacts. sampsa's response Just a Windows shot in 2D.

so still impressive, but not what they describe