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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."
What a day for world history! It will be remembered forever!
why this announcement would come out on Yahoo! Finance
No, seriously, I just come here for the articles.
Without the pretty graphs how will I know what's going on?!
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I always knew ati would finnish first.
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NVidia will make a competitve model, with blackjack, and hookers.
The team, optimistic that higher speeds could ultimately be achieved with the Radeon X1800 XT, attained the record speeds using a custom-built liquid nitrogen cooling system that cooled the graphics processor to minus-80 degrees Celsius.
It seems we may have a ways to go before it can be done with standard air cooling. I actually didn't think that operating temperatures for these processors went down to -80C.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
If I could only go back in time and add liquid nitrogen to my 8088 processor. I know I could have gotten it up to 5.33 mhz, no problem. NetHack benchmarks would have been off the chart.
What are you talking about? I'm sure I will have next October 26 off to celebrate Overclocked Radeon Broke 1GHz Barrier Day. Heck, this may even become Overclocked GPU Awareness Week.
Sampsa Kurri told in a Finnish forum that it was over 1 GHz only in 2D mode. They are trying to run it with same clocks later. ATI left some tiny details away from their press release... ;P
Cuz you know it's like way better to play Quake IV at 953 Frames Per Second. Totally!
That's just sad... that video card now has more clockspeed and more memory than my own main computer.
It'll just about be able to handle Windows Vista... :-)
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Well, while the CPU people are finally doing dual core processors (essentially, two instruction pipelines in one die, plus cache et al), the GPU people have something like 24 pipelines in a single graphics chip. Why is it that the CPU people have such lame parallelism?
To answer both questions. Graphics are trivial to parallelize. You know to start with that you'll be doing essentially the same code for all pixels, and each pixel is essentially independent from its neighbours. So doing one or twenty at the same time is mostly the same, and since all you need is to make sure the whole screen is rendered, each pipeline just needs to grab the next unhandled pixel. No syncronization difficulties, no nothing. Since pixel pipelines don't stop each other doing syncing, you effectively have a 24 GHz processor in this beast.
On the other hand, you have an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (damn, that's a needlessly big, numbery name). It has two cores, each running at 2.4 GHz (2.4 * 2 = 4.8, hence the name, I believe). However, for safe use of two processors for general computing purposes, lots of timing trouble has to be handled. Even if you do have those two processors, a lot of time has to be spent making sure they're coherent, and the effective performance is well below twice that of a single processor at twice the clock speed.
So, if raising the speed is easier than adding another core, and gives enough performance benefits to justify it, without the added programming complexity and errors (there was at least one privilege elevation exploit in linux that involved race conditions in kernel calls, IIRC), why go multiple processor earlier than needed? Of course, for some easily parallelized problems, people have been using multiprocessing for quite a while, and actually doing two things at the same time is also a possibility, but not quite as directly useful as in the graphics card scenario.