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

O.O~!

[KajiCo]

...

If only I didn't have to sell my car to buy one :/

Whoa.

[RoffleTheWaffle]

Okay, if this thing is seven times more powerful than a three-gigahertz Pentium processor, why the hell aren't these guys making CPUs alongside their GPUs? Seriously, GPUs have gotten to the point at which they are just as if not more powerful than standard CPUs, and with quantities of RAM to match a whole PC. The news of this new and extremely powerful GPU - should it stand up to the hype - alongside news that NVidia has developed a physics coprocessing technique using SLI leads me to believe that GPUs may soon no longer be just GPUs, but complete co-computing units to which graphics, physics, and other demanding tasks could be offloaded. That might be interesting.

damn.

[popeguilty]

Now I have to change my pants.

Re:This is anthrocentric

[somersault]

But broadly speaking, science is still about tradeoffs etc. If Intel or AMD started developing GPUs to integrate into their chips, they would have to spread their resources thinner, unless they just bought in more people (but that's still trading one resource for another). It *is* easier to design a system that only does graphics, or sound, or networking, or any single task, rather than a generic processor. Yes, graphics calculations can be processed in parallel much more effectively than the event driven application logic that most apps tend to use, but for most non-trivial situations/problems in life, you can either just make a general product that does general things at an acceptable rate, or you can make a product that does one thing, and does it well. There is some overlap in there, depending on how you spread your resources (and how much overall time/money you have to throw at everything). Homey folk wisdom tends to work for everything..