ATI's Stream Computing on the Way

SQLGuru writes to tell us that ATI has announced plans to release a new graphics product that could provide a shake-up for high performance computing. From the article: "ATI has invited reporters to a Sept. 29 event in San Francisco at which it will reveal 'a new class of processing known as Stream Computing.' The company has refused to divulge much more about the event other than the vague 'stream computing' reference. The Register, however, has learned that a product called FireStream will likely be the star of the show. FireStream product marks ATI's most concerted effort to date in the world of GPGPUs or general purpose graphics processor units. Ignore the acronym hell for a moment because this gear is simple to understand. GPGPU backers just want to take graphics chips from the likes of ATI and Nvidia and tweak them to handle software that normally runs on mainstream server and desktop processors."

RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

I know its slashdot, but.......

ATI has only recently allowed developers to tap into its CTM (close to the metal) interface, which lets software interact directly with the underlying hardware.

Presumably, ATI will announce an even more open stance at its event next week.

Does still leave room for doubt though.

GPGPU primer

[daVinci1980]

(Full disclosure: I work for a major manufacturer of 3-D accelerators.)

There's lots of good sites that talk about GPGPU [gpgpu.org]. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has an okay article on the subject as well, and NVIDIA has a primer (PDF) [nvidia.com] on the subject. But the summary of this article is a bit overly broad.

GPGPU isn't about moving arbitrary processing to the GPU, rather it's about moving specific, computationally expensive computing to the massively parallel GPU.

Effectively, the core idea of GPGPU solutions is that you compute 256x256 (or another granularity) of solutions entirely in one pass.

NVIDIA has several examples [nvidia.com] on their website, specifically the GPGPU Disease and GPGPU Fluid samples. The Mandelbrot computation they have there could also be considered an example. (More samples here [nvidia.com]).

GPGPU has already been utilized to perform very fast (comparable to the CPU) FFTs. In an article in GPU Gems 2 (a very good book if you're interested in doing GPGPU work), they indicate that a 1.8x speedup can be had over performing FFTs on the CPU. I've heard that there are now significantly faster implementations as well.

Re:World beyond x86

[ErikTheRed]

So sick of x86. Look at all the cool stuff the graphics card makers are coming up with. Intel needs to buy NVidia to get real innovation done. I'm sure they have cool stuff cooking up, though. Let's get engineers going and let's get innovating!

Intel's buying power [yahoo.com] (Total Current Assets - Total Current Liabilities): around US$ 8.5B

NVidia's current market cap [yahoo.com]: US$ 10.83B

And that's assuming Intel won't have to write down a ton of their current inventory (all their old Netburst crap). They'd have to issue a ton of new stock to pay for the purchase - I don't think their shareholders would go for it.