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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."
No, seriously... can anything run it at full options yet?
Tibbon
tibbon.com
1.21 Jiggawatts
Yet again, Nvidia showed ATI that it, indeed, has the biggest penis.
That's just great and all but when can I get a video card that doesn't take up half my case and melts down after 6 months of use? Not to mention, doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Color me doubtful but I suspect it's 480 stream processors which isn't anywhere NEAR the same thing as the "cores" on the CPU or even the core of the GPU.
Why has the press suddenly started to call stream processors "cores"? Marketing?
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
Can someone please post the link to a how-to guide for convincing your wife/girlfriend of the necessity of owning a graphics card with dual 240-core GPUs? Or, if you are a girl who acknowledges said necessity without a fight, please post a link to your Facebook profile. Thank you in advance.
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.
Until NVIDIA starts supporting the development of open source drivers I'm sticking with ATI, no matter how many Blazing Cores of Might NVIDIA might fit onto their chips. While ATI's closed source drivers have their fair share of bugs, and it will be some time before there are good 3D open source drivers for their more recent cards, at least the development has started and ATI has been aiding it, not hobbling it.