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

use as a cpu?

[Toba82]

Why doesn't ATi (or nVidia for that matter) make CPUs?

They obviously could make some very powerful chips.

Re:use as a cpu?

[moosesocks]

I understand that CPUs and GPUs have dramatically different roles.

However, how difficult would it be to write an operating system that offloaded floating point operations to the GPU, and everything else to the CPU.

Seems like that would be making the most efficent use of available resources..... (then again, isn't that the idea of the Cell processor?)

Re:use as a cpu?

[ajs318]

There doesn't seem to be a market for a new CPU architecture.

One could make a blisteringly fast, ultra-RISC processor that completes every R-to-M instruction in one clock cycle {read the instruction from memory on the rising edge ["tick"], let the logic matrix outputs stabilise during the high period and write the result to memory on the falling edge ["tock"]} and every M-to-R or M-to-M in two {an extra tick is needed to read the operand from memory and the intervening tock is wasted; unless you can read on both edges, then M-to-R can be done in one cycle, with the logic matrix stabilising during the low period. M-to-M still takes two and might be better "faked" using two instructions; M-to-R followed by R-to-M, which would keep the instruction set simpler}. You could even do several R-to-R instructions in parallel, if you had more than one logic matrix {or a partitionable logic matrix} and a register bank designed so as to support multiple independent reads and writes. But such a machine wouldn't be at all architecture-compatible with anything else, and you would need effectively to run a kind of interpreter or emulator all the time to deal with the instruction sets of existing processors.

And that is what the modern Athlon-type processors do anyway: a RISC processor is emulating an old CISC processor. I personally have a sort of gut feeling that this is unnecessarily slow: code that was optimised for the "outward" CISC instruction set may not be truly optimal on the underlying RISC processor, since it might occasionally have to take a diversion to do something which the CISC instruction specification required, but which was not necessary in this particular instance {e.g. setting a flag which will never be read}. Saving even apparently just a few clock cycles in this way might well result in a performance gain, especially if it can be done in a heavily-used loop -- particularly somewhere like the kernel, libc or the shell.

However, every new processor architecture -- or, for that matter, every new way of using an existing processor architecture -- requires recompilation of existing software. In the Open Source world, that's somewhere between trivial and a non-issue. But in the Closed Source world, it's a showstopper.

Re:use as a cpu?

[default luser]

Because the Pentium 4 was never made for powerful floating-point thoroughput using plain old x87 FP instructions. To give it better floating-point performance, a 128-bit vector unit (SIMD) was strapped on. With it, the Pentium 4 can perform 4 32-bit floating point operations every 2 cycles.

This is the one part of the Pentium 4 chip that is very much like the parallel execution units of a video card. If you want to maximize performance of the SIMD unit, you want a simple program with packed SIMD instructions. The key point is, the video card can do that better.

follow Nvidia into Physics?

[arjovenzia]

With all that beef behind them, i sure hope they will follow Nvidia (i actually have no doubt that they will) in offloading physics to the GPU. http://www.rojakpot.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=303 &pgno=0

it would be nice not having to purchase a top-notch CPU, GPU, and PPU (Physics Processing Unit) in the future, rolling the PPU and GPU together

Re:Not bad...

[KajiCo]

3D Artists, Game Developers, Scientists who do three dimensional simulations, Weather forcasting models, Engineers who do real time simulations.

They're not really for gaming as much as they are for developing stuff.

next thing you know...

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI might just add a CPU on the card in order to boost gaming performance and delivery the best gaming experience

ATI works great for me with Linux

[deek]

Flogging generic statements like "ATI sucks for Linux", is not very accurate. A better way of putting it is "ATI sucks for some cards under Linux".

I can certainly say that my laptop, with its ATI Radeon Xpress 200M chip, works wonderfully under Linux. Yes, I'm talking about their binary driver distribution. Using the latest version of their drivers. I'm also using the Xorg 6.9 xserver. It's fully 3D accelerated, as shown in the following command:

$ glxinfo | grep OpenGL
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: RADEON XPRESS 200M Series SW TCL Generic
OpenGL version string: 2.0.5695 (8.23.7)

I'm aware that the binary driver doesn't work with some ATI cards, especially some of the top range ones. But for what I use, it's brilliant. The installer is a little easier than the Nvidia one too. Thanks ATI, you've done a great job, from my perspective.

Can i reallocate that memory as system memory?

[mOOzilla]

Can i reallocate that memory as system memory?

Width of the floats?

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Signify: full 128-bit precision

TheRaven64: or researches doing GPUPU things. To people in the second category, it's not a graphics card it's a very fast vector co-processor (think SSE/AltiVec, only a lot more so)

Traditionally, ATi floating point numbers were only 24-bits wide [i.e. only "three-quarters" of single precision, which is 32-bits].

nVidia, IBM Sony Cell, and Altivec support only 32-bit floats.

MMX supported no floats whatsoever. SSE supported 32-bit floats. SSE2 & SSE3 support 64-bit floats. x86 supports 80-bit floats.

So what is this 128-bit stuff all about?

I don't suppose there's a chance in hell that these could be quad-precision floats, could they?

Re:"workstation cards" what r they 4?

[Mithrandir]

I work a lot with the visualisation end of the market and recently have been working with NASA on the CEV project(s). Some models that we deal with are in the gigabyte file size just for the geometry for a single subassembly. This card would make viewing some of these things far easier as you can preprocess and schlepp almost all the geometry to the video card as a VBO and never have to pass it over the bus again. Makes for tremendous performance gains.

Re:what... teh.....fuk

[dbIII]

the workstation it plugs into will probably have a minimum of 8GB of RAM

Will it really need that much system memory? The first SGI workstation I saw had double the amount of video memory to system memory.

256 MB is small

[emarkp]

Try rendering medical image data as a 3D texture (well three textures actually, one for each primary image). With 300 images, 256KB per image, x3 textures, that comes out to 225MB just for the textures. I deal with datasets like these routinely, and more video memory is a welcome development.

Re:"workstation cards" what r they 4?

[LookoutforChris]

As a fellow Pro/ENGINEER user this is not my experience. What version are you using and how big are your models? The latest version is a hog (as always). I can't imagine using it on an old Dell with a FireGL and doing anything very complicated. I have to admit I'm not a fan of ATI cards, their OpenGL support seems to be very flaky. But I like the larger memory on these new cards and the price is good. Price wise this card would seem to compare favorably to a top model WildCat Realizm or a top model nVidia Quadro.

Finally!

[LookoutforChris]

That's 1GB of unified memory, so less than 1GB is available for textures ; (

It took them long enough; this is definitely the direction to go.

Almost 4 years ago Silicon Graphics gave a final revision hurrah to their best graphics product: InfiniteReality. A pipe sported 1GB dedicated texture memory, 10GB of frame buffer memory, 8 channels per pipe, and 192GB/s internal memory bandwidth.

And an Onyx system could have up to 16 pipes! That's 8.3M pixels per pipe, or 133M pixels from a full system! And all in 48-bit RGBA. And those are just the raw numbers, there were a great many high end features only found on InfiniteReality. Don't ask what it costs ; )

Sorry for the passionate post. It seems that Slashdot is very PC-ish and narrow in its viewpoint (Imagine a Beouwolf of... Can it run Doom3 ... etc.) so I couldn't resist blabbing about high-end kit that's off topic.

I've had the pleasure of using a small Onyx system. Too bad SGI is dead dead dead. Still they provide a good target for everyone to shoot for. Some day the above power will be available for a few hundred dollars for the average person. Though I think it will be atleast 5 years before the quality and features of InfiniteReality4 are at a consumer level. And never will we have workstations like SGI's again ; (