AMD Breaks 1GHz GPU Barrier With Radeon HD 4890 144
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.
Dear AMD, intel, nVidia, etc (Score:4, Insightful)
As you may have seen from the sales of netbooks and low-power computers, the future is... wait for it... low-power devices!
Where are the 5W GPUs? Does the nVidia 9400M require more than 5W?
Re:Why is it harder on GPUs than CPUs? (Score:3, Insightful)
GPU's have recently become massively parallel -- not as much need to go too fast in overall clock speed.
Re:Power consumption? (Score:3, Insightful)
if you want TFlops, try the 4870x2 at 2.4TFlops, or NVideas tesla (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVIDIA_Tesla) series, made just for GPGPU which reach over 4TFlops
"Barrier" (Score:3, Insightful)
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Re:Dear AMD, intel, nVidia, etc (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why is it harder on GPUs than CPUs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Err... It's not that black and white, you can't just say that GHz != performance. If you take a card and raise its clock, you'll usually get more performance. If you raise memory speed you'll usually get more performance. The only time you won't is when the one is bottlenecking the other.
All we're learned from CPU wars is that within two different architectures, the faster one isn't necessarily the one with more GHz. But, between two identical designs, more GHz means more performance.
Re:It Was Epic (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not first ?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, 1 GHz is the core speed without overclocking.
False. It's overclocked alright, it just doesn't have to be overclocked by users or the third party manufacturers to run at 1 ghz. From their press release:
Nine years after launching the world's first 1 GHz CPU, AMD is again first to break the gigahertz barrier with the factory overclocked, air-cooled ATI Radeon(TM) HD 4890 GPU -
Re:apples to apples (Score:2, Insightful)
Modern GPUs including every single Nvidia GPU since the G80 series has had a full integer instruction set capable of doing integer arithmetic and bit operations.
CPUs aren't designed to be good at everything, they're designed to be exceedingly good at executing bad code, which is the vast majority of code written by poor programmers or in high level languages.
You can write code for a CPU without worrying specifically about the cache line size, cache coherency, register usage, memory access address patterns and alignment or memory latency on branches or pipeline stalls and the difference in performance compared to optimized code will significant but not unbearable.
GPUs devote significantly less (or in some cases no) die space to things like branch prediction and automatically managed caches. Poorly written GPU code is sometimes almost 2 orders of magnitude slower than well written GPU code, but well written GPU code has much higher potential than what is achievable on modern CPUs. See: CUDA.