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AMD RV790 Architecture To Change GPGPU Landscape?
Vigile writes "To many observers, the success of the GPGPU landscape has really been pushed by NVIDIA and its line of Tesla and Quadro GPUs. While ATI was the first to offer support for consumer applications like Folding@Home, NVIDIA has since taken command of the market with its CUDA architecture and programs like Badaboom and others for the HPC world. PC Perspective has speculation that points to ATI addressing the shortcomings of its lineup with a revised GPU known as RV790 that would both dramatically increase gaming performance as well as more than triple the compute power on double precision floating point operations — one of the keys to HPC acceptance."
I hope all these new things will be compatible with OpenCL.
... the "rename the same old shit four times to try and con people"-market, that's for sure.
Waiting for GPGPGPUs
So this is what some anonymous guy on the internet thinks might happen? Granted, he has a lot of material in there, but in the end it's all just guesswork. Apparently he's a big fan of cheaper lower end video cards as well, and is hoping that ATI releases one.
I read the internet for the articles.
General Purpose GPU's = massively parallel flops operations possible. ( Think matrix math, real time sims, lab testing, SETI, etc).
Still separate from a CPU, which has additional capabilities.
For the older folks, think of this as a math co-processor :) [ with it's own fan]
It's basically using your video card as a general purpose processor. You might think such an acronym would be hard to find on google, but it turns it it isn't.
I read the internet for the articles.
What in the screaming blue hell is a GPGPU?
I think you meant "screaming green hell"
FreeBSD bounties
...because since I learned that BOINC now supports CUDA (but still has no love for GPGPU), I'm about to ditch my ATI cards for a few Nvidia ones.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
As far as I know, the RV790 will be in the R600/R700 family and will work almost perfectly with existing R600/R700 code. While I have no guarantees on this, current talks with AMD employees haven't given off any indication that this chipset will be radically different from its cousins.
~ C.
It is bad journalism on the part of the slashdot editors to force the readers to google for acronyms. Common, long-standing acronyms, like CPU, are one thing. But GPGPU should absolutely be defined in the summary. I find it hard to believe some people pay money for this site, and that "editors" get paid money for their "editing."
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
AMD's double-point floating point performance is already great. What they lack is the rest of it. The programming model is pretty bad compared to CUDA (nobody is using Brook+), and they seem to be basically waiting for OpenCL to fix that. The bottlenecks in most attempts to use AMD chips for GPGPU code are also not really the floating-point units themselves, but the rest of the architecture; it's hard to keep the ALUs fed with your data without a magic compiler, a better programming model, a better architecture, or some combination of those.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The small amount I pay to subscribe to Slashdot is just about the best bargain I get on the intertubes. Yes, I often have to google stuff that I find in stories and comments, but now that Firefox lets me just highlight a word or phrase, right-click and google I don't mind a bit. I find that I learn a lot in the process.
[NOW will you take that black mark off of my soul, Commander Taco?]
You are welcome on my lawn.
Question: What do you get from the subscription, other than being able to read stories half an hour earlier? (No idea why I would need that.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Well, waiting for cheapie GPGPUs, anyway.
yes
Yes.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
What I want from the GPU is features like what the CPUs have so that the GPU can have multiple VMs running in it. The only reason that I don't run inside of a VM as my primary computing environment is because graphics acceleration pretty much suck in it. When AMD bought ATI I expected virtualized video to be one of their early announcement.
Imagine if your VMed OS could believe that it had 100% control of the video card, but your video card would display on it's own 'surface', and still use full hardware acceleration for the process. As far as I can tell, video is the only serious stumbling block left in virtualizing the x86 architecture.
Some guy who does not know very much posts a long speculation article, all speculation done with his limited undertanding. And then this is posted as news.
RV790 is just higher-clocked RV770. There are no more shader units. There are no shader units converted to 64-bit. it's just ~10% clock speed increase, giving about 10% more performance.
RV800 will come at end of the year, that will have much power.
Back in the days before AdBlock, another benefit to subscribing was the removal of ads.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
Both. Nvidia for linux, ATI for windows.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
And, of course, like with most people who do a "My favored company will come out with the bestest thing EVAR!" he's ignoring the fact that nVidia won't sit still. I don't know what's coming next from nVidia. What I do know is they currently have a powerful card for gaming and GPGPU (GTX285) that does support double precision as well as single precision, though DP is much slower. So, fairly safe to say their next generation card will also support DP, and will probably be faster than their current card.
To me, this just seems like fanboy rambling. Yes I'm sure ATi's next card will be better than their current cards. What of it? Unless you've got specifics AND specifics of what their competitor is doing, you can't really say how it'll change things. I mean even if you found out that ATi was making a card that was 10x as fast as their current one, that wouldn't mean anything unless you also knew nVidia wasn't.
We'll know what happens..... When it happens.
Until my CAD programs use DirectX, I won't call it 'standard', sure most games on Windows use DirectX, but that doesn't mean OpenGL pointless.
Just like the parent says: the actual article is a work of fiction and speculation with no hard facts on future products.... merely "what if's".
His predictions about double precision appear to be based on a misunderstanding about how the 4800 series works. Here's what he says about it: "That 680 GFLOPs would be assuming AMD converts 2/5 of the stream units to double precision. Now, if AMD were to convert 3/5 of those units to double precision, a single card could do slightly over 1 TFLOP." He seems to believe that 1/5 of the stream units support double precision, and they could simply convert some additional ones to support it as well. But that isn't the case. In fact, it has no double precision units. Instead, it can have four single precision units work together to act as one double precision unit. That's how they were able to support double precision without using a lot of extra silicon. Actually having dedicated double precision units would require far more silicon, and would be a major change.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
I wouldn't call GPGPU a new term. There's been heaps of stories here about it.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I would rather have quality Open Source drivers. Yeah, you through the specs "over the wall", but it would be nice if you were a bit more active. Like giving us an actual Open Source driver. Or patches. Or something. We shouldn't be doing your work for you.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Some more information how RV7x0 calculates 64-bit floating point:
All shader processors in RV7x0 are natively 32-bit. There are 5 ALU's in each shader processer. When RV7x0 calculates an 64-bit MUL operation, it does it by using 4 of those 32-bit ALU's together. When RV7x0 calculates an 64-bit ADD operation, it combines 2 32-bit ALU's together.
That's why RV7x0 has floating point MUL throughput of 1/5 of it's 32-bit MUL thoughtput. There is no "group of 64-bit ALU's" like the article thinks.
traditionally yes, but actually they aren't as bad these days as everyone says...