ATI's 1GB Video Card

Signify writes "ATI recently released pics and info about it's upcoming FireGL V7350 graphics card. The card features 1GB of GDDR3 Memory and a workstation graphics accelerator. From the article: 'The high clock rates of these new graphics cards, combined with full 128-bit precision and extremely high levels of parallel processing, result in floating point processing power that exceeds a 3GHz Pentium processor by a staggering seven times, claims the company.'"

Comments

Re:use as a cpu?

[Kenshin]

I'm thinking:

a) Tough market to crack. AMD's been around for years, and they're still trying to gain significant ground on Intel. (As in mindshare.) May as well spend the effort battling each other to remain at the top of their field, rather than risk losing focus and faltering.

b) These chips are specialised for graphics processing. Just because you can make a kick-ass sports car, doesn't mean you can make a decent minivan.

So?

[Tebriel]

Other than high-end graphics work, what the hell will this mean? Are you seriously saying that we will be seeing games needing that must video memory anytime soon? Hell, they have a hard enough time getting people to buy cards with 256 MB of RAM.

Re:So?

[Bitter and Cynical]

Other than high-end graphics work, what the hell will this mean?

Nothing. These cards are not meant for gaming, in fact if you did try and use it for gaming you'd be very upset. The FireGL line is a workstation card meant for things like CAD or Render farms that are very memory intensive and require a high level of precision. Its not meant for delivering a high frame rate and no gamer would stick this card in his machine

Re:use as a cpu?

[somersault]

the problem is that the graphics accelerators work in a very limited domain, so the gfx cards engineers can concentrate on the things that it needs to be fast at (floating point calculations, tranferring memory contents efficiently). Normal CPUs have a much wider scope, and while I'm sure the engineers that design/upgrade x86 processors do try their best to make the chips fast, they have to spread their work around, and make sure that every area is decent, rather than one area spectacular. Also graphics cards are fairly self contained, while processors have their motherboard/chipset (which for intel would include the memory controller) to dictate which type of RAM they can use, and how much bandwidth the whole system has etc.

The thing is that you couuuuld make an x86 that runs using GDDR3 etc, but it would be rather expensive, and nobody (well, no majority market anyway) is going to pay to produce that, if only a few thousand people can actually afford it. In time the costs will come down, but until then we common folk just have to stick with whatever AMD/Intel/Whoever are producing.

But anyway, the main point I made, maybe not in a very technically accurate way, was that it's easier to build something that performs well in one area, than to build something that does everything amazingly well (without costing the earth to buy it).

This is anthrocentric

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm tired of hearing this anthrocentric nonsense about chips.

GPUs are not faster than CPUs because the engineers can "concentrate on one area" instead of "spreading their work around". It's not that the floating point performance of the x86 would be faster if only Intel had the time to pay attention to it. That's ridiculous.

GPU tasks are highly parallel. CPU tasks are not. nVidia can toss 24 pipelines onto a chip and realize a huge performance gain. Intel can't, because much of the time those pipelines will be empty waiting for the results of the other lines.

This fundamental difference is what separates the two domains, not it being "easier to build something that performs well in one area, than to build something that does everything amazingly well (without costing the earth to buy it)."

You need to keep your science and your homey folk wisdom separate.