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

It Was Epic

[eldavojohn]

AMD Breaks 1GHz GPU Barrier

I was diligently working at XYZ Corp a few buildings down when Incident One happened in their lab. At first, I was just sitting in my cubicle when suddenly we felt a severe shuddering of space & time around us. Then a few seconds later everyone heard a loud "Ka-BOOM" and everyone stood up to see what was going on outside. The buildings directly adjacent to the AMD lab had all their windows blown out and every car alarm within a square mile was going off. Some scientists with their hair blown straight back and carbon scoring randomly on their faces and white lab coats were seen to climb out of the rubble of AMD's R&D building. They immediately began dusting themselves off, high-fiving each other and patting each other on the back laughing and ecstatic. Then they headed towards the liqueur store down the street to pick up some champagne. Shortly after it was discovered that 1Ghz is the frequency at which æther vibrates when it is at rest so once you pass it, you leave a wake of æther behind your time cone. Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking are due to give a speech at "GPU Ground Zero" this week, I hope to make it.

If I were working marketing for AMD, I would be pointing out how switching from base ten to base eleven, twelve, thirteen, etc provides a theoretically unlimited amount of newsworthy advertisements in broken barriers. "We just need to make it to 2,357,947,691 hertz and we'll be the first to claim we've broken the 1 Ghz (base11) barrier! Where the hell was the report that we broke base9 last year?!"

Re:It Was Epic

[Anarchduke]

AMD Broke the 1 GHz barrier on their CPU, and now they break the 1GHz barrier on their GPU.

It doesn't matter what base you use, AMD owns that achievement.

According to AMD top researchers, whether it was base-9, base-10, or base-11 doesn't matter. According to AMD,

"All your base are belong to us."

So this means...

[smooth wombat]

one will finally have a graphics card capable of playing Duke Nukem Forever.

Oh wait...

Re:AMD CPU too

[LoRdTAW]

Digital Broke that with the DEC Alpha (Was it DEC at that time?). Wasn't popular but it was a desktop CPU for high end workstations.

Why is it harder on GPUs than CPUs?

[G3ckoG33k]

Why is it harder to raise the clock frequenceies on GPUs than CPUs? Is more code in use at the same time per unit area, or?

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.

Re:Why is it harder on GPUs than CPUs?

[mikael]

You have so much data being churned around. The high end GPU's have 240+ stream processors, compared to a handful for a mobile phone. Then there is the constant punting of video data from the VRAM chips to the LCD screens (width x depth x RGB x bits/channel Hertz. VRAM is like standard RAM memory except there is a special read channel to allow whole rows of memory to be read by the video decoder simultaneously as it is being read/written by the GPU. It would be possible to
raise the clock frequency, but they would need a larger heatsink. If you visit the overclocking websites, you will see some of the custom water cooling systems that they have. Early supercomputers like Cray used Fluorinert.

Re:Why is it harder on GPUs than CPUs?

[powerlord]

Pity there isn't a GPU socket on the motherboard the same as the CPU socket. Then we COULD use those big honking CPU cooling solutions (or some derivative of them), provided the case were designed to accommodate the board. You could also get high speed runs between memory (perhaps it could have its own bank), and the CPU.

Pity some CPU maker couldn't come along, buy a GPU maker, and make something like this.

(of course existing GPU solutions in slots are MUCH easier to upgrade, which is something against this sort of solution, unless they come out with a form factor that combines Chip+Cooling solution (similar to the old Slot1/A)

Re:AMD CPU too

[LoRdTAW]

Sorry. It was Compaq who owned the Alpha at that time. It was still DEC who designed it though.

Dear AMD, intel, nVidia, etc

[Yvan256]

As you may have seen from the sales of netbooks and low-power computers, the future is... wait for it... low-power devices!

Where are the 5W GPUs? Does the nVidia 9400M require more than 5W?

Re:apples to apples

[wjh31]

last time i checked, a graphics card will get about 100x more Flops than a similarly priced CPU, give or take an order of magnitude (hey, im an astrophycist, order of magnitude is good enough)

uhhh

[nomadic]

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."

Wait, let me get this straight. Graphics card manufacturers are actually attempting to make their graphics cards perform better? Why was I not informed of this before???

Re:Power consumption?

[Pope]

Personally, I'd recommend you make it a cold water heater, and get more bang for your buck!

Re:AMD CPU too

[hairyfeet]

Actually as a PC repairman I can tell you the "trick" with AMD, and it is this- always buy a generation or two behind. I have sold many ATI and Nvidia cards as well as AMD PCs with ATI chipsets, and as long as you stay a generation or two behind you're good to go. My dual core Kuma with 780V chipset is solid as a rock

So what I tell my customers is this: If you want to spend top dollar and be on the bleeding edge, go Nvidia. Their drivers will be rock solid even for the card they just released. With AMD/ATI always get a generation or two behind and NEVER upgrade the drivers! Unlike Nvidia whose drivers are pretty painless to upgrade, upgrading to the latest Catalyst drivers usually end up bring nothing but instability and headaches. Now I don't know if this "trick" work with Linux, as I'm a Windows only shop. But I have found in Windows if you follow this rule you'll be good to go and save a few bucks as well. The "bang for the buck" ratio is very good on AMD/ATI which is why I just built my first AMD PC since the old Barton Core. You just have to be careful not to get too close to the bleeding edge with ATI, as out of the box their new drivers always suck.

Asymptotic, my ass

[Cajun Hell]

Everyone thought it would be 999MHz this year, 999.9 MHz the next year, 999.99999 MHz a few years later. It looked uncrossable! Well done, AMD!