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.'"
Why doesn't ATi (or nVidia for that matter) make CPUs?
They obviously could make some very powerful chips.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
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
That's 1GB of unified memory, so less than 1GB is available for textures ; (
... etc.) so I couldn't resist blabbing about high-end kit that's off topic.
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
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 ; (