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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
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.
CUDA = an Nvidia-specific way to do GPGPU...
Personally I'm waiting for OpenCL, which would be to GPGPU what OpenGL was for 3D graphics when it was released - essentially a vendor and platform neutral general processing interface to the GPU.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
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
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.