AMD Demonstrates "Teraflop In a Box"

UncleFluffy writes "AMD gave a sneak preview of their upcoming R600 GPU. The demo system was a single PC with two R600 cards running streaming computing tasks at just over 1 Teraflop. Though a prototype, this beats Intel to ubiquitous Teraflop machines by approximately 5 years." Ars has an article exploring why it's hard to program such GPUs for anything other than graphics applications.

Never thought of that

[arlo5724]

I might be (read: am mostly) retarded but I never thought of using a graphics processor for anything else, but with the super cards around the corner it makes sense that some normal processing jobs could be farmed out to the GPU when its not being occupied with graphics duties. Does anyone know where I can find some extra info on this, or to what extent this is being implemented? My curiosity is piqued!

Re:Not misleading at all

[sumdumass]

Isn' the reason this is so interestiong because you cannot have a Intel Core 2 Extreme with 2 x nVidia GTXs in a dual SLI arrangement using CUDA pushing a tflop at this present time?

Maybe soon but I thought it isn't _now_!

OOOoooo

[fyngyrz]

it's hard to program such GPUs for anything other than graphics applications

It might be hard, but then again, it might be worthwhile. For instance (I'm a ham radio operator) I ran into a sampling shortwave radio receiver the other day. Thing samples from the antenna at 60+ MHz, thereby producing a stream of 14-bit data that can resolve everything happening below 30 MHz, or in other words, the entire shortwave spectrum and longwave and so on basically down to DC.

Now, a radio like this requires that the signal be processed; first you separate it from the rest, then you demodulate it, then you apply things like notch filters (or you can do that prior to demodulation, that's very nice) you build an automatic gain control to handle amplitude swings, provide a way to vary the bandwidth and move the filter skirts (low and high) independently... you might like to produce a "panadapter" display of the spectrum around the signal of interest where the is a graph that lays out signal strengths for a defined distance up and down spectrum... you might want to demodulate more than one signal at once (say, a FAX transmission into a map on the one hand, and a voice transmission of the weather on the other.) And so on - I could really go on for a while.

The thing is, as with all signal processing, the more you try to do with a real-time signal, the more resources you have to dedicate. And this isn't audio, or at least, not at the early stages; a 60+ MHz stream of data requires quite a bit more in terms of how fast you have to do things to it than does an audio stream at, say, 44 KHz.

Bit signal processing typically uses fairly simple math; a lot of it, but you can do a lot without having to resort to real craziness. A teraflop of processing that isn't even happening on the CPU is pretty attractive. You'd have to get the data to it, and I'm thinking that would be pretty resource intensive, but between the main CPU and the GPU you should have enough "ooomph" left over to make a beautiful and functional radio interface.

There is an interesting set of tasks in the signal processing space; forming an image of what is going on under water from sound (not sonar... I'm talking about real imaging) requires lots and lots of signal processing. Be a kick to have it in a relatively standard box, with easily replaceable components. Maybe you could do the same thing above-ground; after all, it's still sound and there are still reflections that can tell you a lot (just observe a bat.)

The cool thing about signal processing is that a lot of it is like graphics, in a way; generally, you set up some horrible sequence of things to do to your data, and then thrash each sample just like you did the last one.

Anyway, it just struck me that no matter how hard it is to program, it could certainly be useful for some of these really resource intensive tasks.

Re:Compatibility

[level_headed_midwest]

The chips are a much different ISA, so there's no way that binaries that will run on G80 hardware will run on an R600. Heck, even the ATi R400 series (x700, x8x0) is not binary-compatible with the current R500 x1000 units.Maybe ATi will make a CUDA compiler, but I am guessing that since folks have already gotten going using the R500 hardware (see: http://folding.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu] I doubt that AMD/ATi will make a big effort to use a competitor's technology. Please correct me if I am incorrect, but I am not aware of any groups or programs that use NVIDIA hardware as number-crunchers yet.

Also

[Sycraft-fu]

There's a real difference between getting something to happen on a quasi-DSP like a GPU and on a real, general purpose processor like a CPU. If GPUs were full out CPU replacements, well then we wouldn't have CPUs any more, would we? The problem is that they are very very fast, but only at some things. Now that's fine, because that's what they were designed for. They are made to push pixels really fast and if they can do anything else, well bonus. However it does mean that they aren't a general purpose computing replacement.

Also, the more specialized you get your DSP, the easier it is to get speed out of it. I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to design (I'm sure they already exist) a very narrow purpose DSP that does over 1 trillion floating point ops per second. However that's real different than having a CPU that will do the same, and do it across many kinds of ops.

So as nifty as shit like this might be, it is real disingenuous to pretend that they've "beat" Intel. Intel isn't talking about a graphics card, they are talking about their CPUs. By the numbers my GPU has always been faster than my CPU, as well it should. There'd be no point in paying for specialized hardware if I had general purpose hardware that was faster.

Re:OOOoooo

[try_anything]

You can buy a decent FPGA development board and turn it into a DSP for the price of a high-end graphics card. It isn't a trivial project to get started with, but it might be easier than using a GPU. Plus, the skills and hardware from this project will take you much farther than GPU skills.

Get started here [fpga4fun.com] and find some example DSP cores here [opencores.org].

Re:General Purpose Programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if someone got an MP3 encoder working on one of these hot new chips, the more general purpose programmers would be delivering supercomputing to the desktop on these chips.

I'm still waiting for realtime raytracing GPUs [openrt.de].

Re:OOOoooo

[PetiePooo]

I'm curious what you mean by "forming an image of what is going on under water from sound (not sonar... I'm talking about real imaging)".

I think he's talking about something more along the lines of what they're calling a 3D/4D ultrasound. That doesn't mean much unless you've recently had a child, so here's an example from GE [gehealthcare.com] (requires flash). For a non-flash example, just google for 4d ultrasound [google.com] and try a few of the links...

The images are not in color, and sometimes you lose detail as an elbow (think whale) gets too close to the transducer. But with more processing power and better transducers, kinks like that should go away...