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Teraflop Computing Barrier Poses No Problems For AMD

by Navin Maini on 3 March 2007, 13:48

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD)

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A system containing AMD's next generation Stream Computing technology and featuring a dual-core Opteron CPU, was the basis of a teraflop beating system demonstrated at a recent press event in California.

DailyTech reports that AMD's upcoming R600 GPU is the source of power for AMD's next generation Stream Processors and that the system, dubbed as 'Teraflop-in-a-box' was running Windows XP Professional.

The system demonstrated had a floating-point calculations capability of 1 trillion calculations per second - Certainly an impressive feat generated by a fusion of technologies.

AMD's Dave Orton said 'Today, teraflop computing capability is largely reserved for the supercomputing space. But now that “Teraflop-in-a-Box” is a reality, AMD can deliver an order of magnitude increase in performance'. AMD itself expects applications ranging from commercial to scientific to benefit from the R600 Stream Processors.

There is currently no information regarding availability of the technologies demonstrated, or any pricing points.

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Posted by bluesatin - Sun 04 Mar 2007 21:25
That sounds interesting, it says something about stream processing.

Sounds similiar to what GPUs are like at the moment, they're already capable of massive amounts of Flops if I remember correctly.

I can remember seeing somewhere GFX cards would be a better alternative to CPUs in supercomputers due to their floating point calculation potential

Bear in mind this makes little sense to me and my be utter rubish so take it with a pinch of salt :)
Posted by Funkstar - Sun 04 Mar 2007 21:53
GPU's can be used for non-graphic processing, but apparently they are a nightmare to code for in that way
Posted by kalniel - Mon 05 Mar 2007 11:20
Very good AMD, but Intel did this on a single chip… :p
Posted by Andrzej - Mon 05 Mar 2007 11:45
Just goes to show how weak-arsed CPUs are when it comes to ‘massively parallel data and no real branching’

Around December 2005, ATI managed to fire up a pair of X1900 cards in CrossFire

Using a particularly generous (but still scientifically ‘accurate’) counting system - they managed to clock over 1 TeraFLOP in a single system

Now the CPU guys are claiming a similar thing X years later

However, the GPUs were chugging along at around 600MHz - whereas the CPUs going for performance like this seem to be in the 3-4Ghz range

I guess we are left imagining a world where either :-
1) CPU-style processors become much more parallel
2) GPU-style processor clocks ramp up 300-400%

…then all we'd be missing is an operating system and word processor to make them look pig-slow

:)