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AMD Demonstrates "Teraflop In a Box"
UncleFluffy writes "AMD gave a sneak preview of their upcoming R600 GPU. The demo system was a single PC with two R600 cards running streaming computing tasks at just over 1 Teraflop. Though a prototype, this beats Intel to ubiquitous Teraflop machines by approximately 5 years." Ars has an article exploring why it's hard to program such GPUs for anything other than graphics applications.
We've run several PC clusters and IBM mainframes that didn't have a 1TF of capacity. You don't want know much power went into them. Yes, our modern blade-based clusters are more condensed, but they're still power hogs for dual and quad core systems.
Blue gene is considered to be a power efficient cluster and the fastest, but it still draws 7kw per rack of 1024 cpus. At 4.71 TF per rack, even Blue Gene pulls 1.5kw per teraflop.
Yes, it's a pair of video cards, and not a general purpose cpu, but your average user doesn't have ability to program and use a Blue Gene style solution either. They just might get some real use out of this with a game Physics Engine that taps into this computing power.
This is cool.
The Internet has no garbage collection
Don't forget that you need at least a 60MHz (yes, sixty megahertz) ADC and DSP pair to do what was suggested. The cost of building useful supporting electronics around a DSP capable of implementing a direct sampling receiver at 60MHz would be prohibitive in the range $ridiculous-$ludicrous.
h tml
...priceless
Maybe there aren't any DSP available and low cost, if you aren't a hardware designer:
400 MHz DSP $10.00 http://www.analog.com/en/epProd/0,,ADSP-BF532,00.
14-bit, 65 MSPS ADC $30.00 http://www.analog.com/en/prod/0,,AD6644,00.html
Catching non-designers talking smack