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AMD Breaks 1GHz GPU Barrier With Radeon HD 4890

Posted by timothy on from the sheer-necessity dept.

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.

8 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. It Was Epic by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?!"

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    My work here is dung.
  2. So this means... by smooth+wombat · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    Oh wait...

    --
    We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
  3. Re:AMD CPU too by LoRdTAW · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Why is it harder on GPUs than CPUs? by G3ckoG33k · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Why is it harder on GPUs than CPUs? by KillerBob · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
    2. Re:Why is it harder on GPUs than CPUs? by mikael · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

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      Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  5. Re:apples to apples by wjh31 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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)

  6. uhhh by nomadic · · Score: 4, Funny

    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???