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Nvidia 480-Core Graphics Card Approaches 2 Teraflops
An anonymous reader writes "At CES, Nvidia has announced a graphics card with 480 cores that can crank up performance to reach close to 2 teraflops. The company's GTX 295 graphics cards has two GPUs with 240 cores each that can execute graphics and other computing tasks like video processing. The card delivers 1.788 teraflops of performance, which Nvidia claims is the fastest single graphics card in the market."
218 GFlops
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT072405191325&p=2
A single 8800 kill the cell and the video processor in the ps3 combined
One of the benefits of the technology war is that it produces good midrange and low end technology as well. This is particularly true in the case of graphics cards since they are so parallel. They more or less just lop off some of the execution units and maybe slow down the clock and you get a budget card.
Whatever your budget is, there's probably a good card available at that level. Now will it be as fast as the GTX 295? Of course not. However they'll be as fast as they can be at that price/power consumption point.
Don't pitch because some people need/want high end cards. Enjoy the fact that they help subsidize you getting good, cheap midrange cards.
If you want serious suggestions, tell me your budget range and what you want to do and I'll recommend some cards.
The specs are very specific (lol, get it?).
I take it you havn't seen full-length graphics cards yet? 280's, 8800 GTX's, GX2's, etc, aren't full length cards, but they're close.
These are full length cards: http://management.cadalyst.com/cadman/Review/AMD-ATI-FireGL-V8600-and-FireGL-V8650-Graphics-Car/ArticleStandard/Article/detail/526886?contextCategoryId=6631
You can tell the difference by them not only being longer, but having that retention connector at the end (right side of the pictures) which helps steady the card.
Apart from, you know, link length.
The most important thing to understand is that these aren't actually 'cores' in the same sense that your Core 2 Duo has two of them. They're shader units. It works more like SIMD than parallelization, only instead of something like SSE that can perform a single operation per clock across 4 packed floating point values it performs the operation on thousands of them.
If they could slap a billion or a million or even a thousand shader units on a card without actually reducing performance they would, but they can't. At a certain point the bottleneck becomes link length. You can overcome it by increasing voltage but then heat becomes the issue. This is a large part of the reason transistor count is tied to transistor size. NVIDIA isn't "failing" in this respect, they're just succumbing to the laws of physics.
If they could improve performance by slapping 20 or 4 or even 2 of the *actual* cores on each card they would, but they can't. Because it's not an actual processor, it doesn't have fancy features like three levels of cache and a TLB and branch prediction and out-of-order execution. But even if they were engineered to work this way, you can't improve PC performance by slapping in a thousand Core 2 Quads either. A part of the reason Xeons have so much cache is so you can mitigate the penalty of having 8 processors using commodity RAM, but eventually you run up against that bottleneck. Shared resources become saturated much faster than most people expect.
The most efficient way of improving graphics performance is with SLI because you are replicating all of the hardware, the memory and the bus the *actual* core depends on. For the exact same reason, you can extract the most performance out of each CPU core by putting each one in a different machine.
Apparently the US National Bureau of Standards decided in the 1960s that Jiggawatt was the one true pronunciation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga
And jif is only correct for the same reason, the developers decided "Choosy developers choose Jif" was a hilarious slogan they could use internally for the gif format.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gif#Pronunciation
So yes, Jigabit, Jigabyte, Jigawatt, those are how we are legally supposed to pronounce them, atleast in the US.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
http://hothardware.com/Articles/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-295-Unleashed/