AMD Breaks 1GHz GPU Barrier With Radeon HD 4890

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.

It Was Epic

[eldavojohn]

AMD Breaks 1GHz GPU Barrier

I was diligently working at XYZ Corp a few buildings down when Incident One happened in their lab. At first, I was just sitting in my cubicle when suddenly we felt a severe shuddering of space & time around us. Then a few seconds later everyone heard a loud "Ka-BOOM" and everyone stood up to see what was going on outside. The buildings directly adjacent to the AMD lab had all their windows blown out and every car alarm within a square mile was going off. Some scientists with their hair blown straight back and carbon scoring randomly on their faces and white lab coats were seen to climb out of the rubble of AMD's R&D building. They immediately began dusting themselves off, high-fiving each other and patting each other on the back laughing and ecstatic. Then they headed towards the liqueur store down the street to pick up some champagne. Shortly after it was discovered that 1Ghz is the frequency at which æther vibrates when it is at rest so once you pass it, you leave a wake of æther behind your time cone. Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking are due to give a speech at "GPU Ground Zero" this week, I hope to make it.

If I were working marketing for AMD, I would be pointing out how switching from base ten to base eleven, twelve, thirteen, etc provides a theoretically unlimited amount of newsworthy advertisements in broken barriers. "We just need to make it to 2,357,947,691 hertz and we'll be the first to claim we've broken the 1 Ghz (base11) barrier! Where the hell was the report that we broke base9 last year?!"

So this means...

[smooth wombat]

one will finally have a graphics card capable of playing Duke Nukem Forever.

Oh wait...

Re:apples to apples

[wjh31]

last time i checked, a graphics card will get about 100x more Flops than a similarly priced CPU, give or take an order of magnitude (hey, im an astrophycist, order of magnitude is good enough)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

uhhh

[nomadic]

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."

Wait, let me get this straight. Graphics card manufacturers are actually attempting to make their graphics cards perform better? Why was I not informed of this before???

Re:It Was Epic

[Anarchduke]

AMD Broke the 1 GHz barrier on their CPU, and now they break the 1GHz barrier on their GPU.

It doesn't matter what base you use, AMD owns that achievement.

According to AMD top researchers, whether it was base-9, base-10, or base-11 doesn't matter. According to AMD,

"All your base are belong to us."

Re:Power consumption?

[Pope]

Personally, I'd recommend you make it a cold water heater, and get more bang for your buck!

Re:It Was Epic

[binarylarry]

jiga what?

Asymptotic, my ass

[Cajun Hell]

Everyone thought it would be 999MHz this year, 999.9 MHz the next year, 999.99999 MHz a few years later. It looked uncrossable! Well done, AMD!