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: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

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.