Government processing power becomes affordable
By TJ Kirchner
ATI recently released its new Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 graphics cards. NVIDIA also released its new model, the GeForce GTX 280. Both of these cards are capable of calculations measured in teraflops (a trillion floating point calculations in a second) and making video games like Crysis look beautiful in HD.
According to Gizmodo, the ATI Radeon HD 4850 has 512MB DDR3 RAM, clocked at 1986 MHz. Furthermore, it has 800 stream processors, 965 transistors, 40 texture units, and a clock speed of 625 MHz. Plus, to top it off, it supports Crossfire / DirectX 10.1.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 also has some impressive hardware, with 240 parallel cores, each capable of going 1.3 GHz. That’s about 0.933 TFLOPS for single precision computations and 90 for double precision. Also, the chip has about 1.4 billion transistors in it too.
The ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards are giving people the power of a super-computer at a semi-affordable price. It was in 1997 that the government spent $33 million to develop ASCI RED, the first super-computer capable of doing teraflop computations.
Now, we have the opportunity to put that same processing power in our desktop computers. According to Wired, analysts believe that we’re going to see an explosion in independent research, now that ordinary people can tap into this processing power.
However, the biggest hurdle these graphics cards have to overcome is not in its hardware but its software. Programmers have to be able to take advantage of the chips’ parallel architectures.
Fortunately, several technical firms are joining together to create a standardized procedure for programming parallel computing tasks. The Open Computing Language, or OpenCL, companies like ARM, IBM, Imagination, Nokia, Motorola, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Texas Instruments are banning together to create this standard. Even Apple has said that it will use this specification in its next operating system, Snow Leopard.
Although, if you plan to buy one of these goliath graphics cards, be prepared to get a full size case to fit them in. The NVIDIA card is 10.5L x 4.4W x 1.5H. You have been warned1.
1. Thanks Jon for heads up.
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on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
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