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."

Re:Yeah, Intel did that.

[drinkypoo]

Doesn't it matter that Intel's graphics are lame?

For most uses you don't need fast 3d graphics anyway. You just need the features. Or want them. Intel graphics will be enough to give Linux users their cutesy Xgl desktop with shadows and warping and blah blah blah and that will be enough to sell a bunch of intel cards solely because they have open source drivers. In fact my goal in future servers will be to get intel integrated graphics so that I can have the open source drivers.

On a desktop I don't care so much about whether drivers are open source or not. On a server, I care very much. I can use another desktop or desktop OS and get the same functionality, but I might not be able to conveniently jump over to another server.

Stream processing is NOT new

[inio]

Stream processing is not new. There's been academic projects working on massively parallel systems for decades. One particular project I know of is UCSC's Kestrel [ucsc.edu] processor, a 512-way 8-bit stream processor.In the late 90s this thing blew high-end desktops out of the water for linear processing tasks like image convolution and at a fraction of the power.

New Generation

[Ice Wewe]

How much will this new generation of cards cost? I'm all for more power, because 2Ghz just doesn't cut it anymore, but I'm not willing to shell out much more for the card then I would for the CPU. I paid $200 CDN for my AMD3200+ a year ago, so that means that I'd expect at least dual core performence from a videocard that cost me the same amount now. I have a 7900GTX in my system (which cost a fucking fortune!) because I like to do high performence gaming (Transgaming, fix your damn Cedega so I can play on my dual monitor setup! Nothing runs unless I kill X and go with one moniter, which I hate). The only problem is that my CPU isn't on the same level as my video card. The card can render the game fine, but the CPU lags a bit on the AI and other functions. If only the PhyX worked with linux, and didn't have a loud fan.

The HyperTransport protocol only calls for 8GB/s across the bus (I can't recall if thats one direction, or if thats the bidirectional speed). Which means that with SLi (4GB/s bidirectional on each PCIE 16X slot) you're already using all the HyperTransport space. So, I'm wondering, exactly how much more power do people expect to get from these cards. They have half the bandwidth of your CPU, so if your NB is your bottleneck, it's gonna throttle performence even more. The nice thing about AMD CPUs over Intel (flame wars, START!) is that the memory controller is integrated onto the CPU die, which means that the AMD CPU doesn't have to use the FSB (NB) to get to RAM, which means you could use the entire 8GB/s of HT for these purposes. So, if I want to spend $200 on a new card, how much extra performence would I get? Come on ATi, I'm talking a straight comparison.

Example: $200 card will get me the equiv. of a dual core 2.5Ghz 64bit CPU.

Will the CPU be able to access the superfast DDR3/4 of the video card? Or is that reserved for the video card's calculations, whether it be for gaming or processing.

For the love of all things good, please make this thing quiet!