AMD Breaks 1GHz GPU Barrier With Radeon HD 4890

MojoKid writes "AMD announced today that they can lay claim to the world's first 1GHz graphics processor with their ATI Radeon HD 4890 GPU. There's been no formal announcement made about what partners will be selling the 1GHz variant, but AMD does note that Asus, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GECUBE, Gigabyte, HIS, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE, XFX and others are all aligning to release higher performance cards." The new card, says AMD, delivers 1.6 TeraFLOPs of compute power.

Comments

Re:Why is it harder on GPUs than CPUs?

[KillerBob]

Heat. Because of the form factor, you can't put a massive heatsink on a graphics card, certainly not the kind that you see on high end desktop CPUs.

GPUs are also generally a completely different architecture than a CPU... they're usually massively parallel and optimized for working with enormous matrices, whereas a CPU is significantly more linear in its operation, and generally prefers single variables.