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ATI's Stream Computing on the Way

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Sep 20, 2006 01:52 PM
from the mysterious-hardware-rollouts dept.
Graphics Software Hardware
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."
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  • So sick of x86. Look at all the cool stuff the graphics card makers are coming up with. Intel needs to buy NVidia to get real innovation done. I'm sure they have cool stuff cooking up, though. Let's get engineers going and let's get innovating!

    • Re:World beyond x86 (Score:4, Funny)

      by tomstdenis (446163) <tomstdenisNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday September 20 2006, @02:10PM (#16148135) Homepage
      Except that GPGPUs are not a competitor for x86. Tell me how fast your C compiler will work on that nvidia or ATI card.

      If you're gonna beef up and make more general a GPU you might as well all it a Cell ... oh wait. IBM did that.

      NEXT!

      Tom
    • I think people became immunized to CPU makers hype after the first intel MMX that was supposed to replace modems and graphics cards etc...

      Graphics card manufacturers have yet to cease pumping the 8hit. It is however peculiar that ATI would announce a technology that could potentially devalue their parent companies (AMD) product. I suppose next AMD will announce more Graphics processing capabilities on their CPUs. Whats good for the Goose right?
      • I doubt it's going to devaluate the AMD product. I think it's going to start a new trend in computing, being able to choose what kind of horsepower you want in your server/workstation. One cpu, one fpu, or one cpu, three fpu's, three cpu's, one fpu, or even more. Need more floating power? Stick in another streaming processor. Or even another special purpose processor...
        And all based and connected through Hypertransport.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by AKAImBatman (238306) *
          We need to get rid of the variable length encoding. The very basis of x86 is a running joke for anyone who is clued.

          Oh really? Then perhaps you'd care to clue the rest of us in? I see very little impact from the x86's VLE instruction set. Only if you make assumptions about the underlying core based on the instruction set (which would not be a wise thing to do) could I see that VLE as an issue.

    • Re:World beyond x86 (Score:5, Informative)

      by ErikTheRed (162431) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @02:31PM (#16148312) Homepage
      So sick of x86. Look at all the cool stuff the graphics card makers are coming up with. Intel needs to buy NVidia to get real innovation done. I'm sure they have cool stuff cooking up, though. Let's get engineers going and let's get innovating!
      Intel's buying power [yahoo.com] (Total Current Assets - Total Current Liabilities): around US$ 8.5B

      NVidia's current market cap [yahoo.com]: US$ 10.83B

      And that's assuming Intel won't have to write down a ton of their current inventory (all their old Netburst crap). They'd have to issue a ton of new stock to pay for the purchase - I don't think their shareholders would go for it.
    • "So sick of x86. Look at all the cool stuff the graphics card makers are coming up with. Intel needs to buy NVidia to get real innovation done."

      This makes no sense. Your logic is:

      1) x86 sucks. Intel makes x86.
      2) Graphics card makers are doing great stuff. NVidia is a graphics card maker.
      3) Intel designed the x86, so therefore Intel's product designs suck.
      4) NVidia is making cool stuff, so NVidia's designs are good.

      Your conclusion: Intel should buy NVidia so innovation can start.

      Your conclusion is in dire

        • Re:Yeah, Intel did that. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by drinkypoo (153816) <martin.espinoza@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 20 2006, @02:12PM (#16148167) Homepage Journal
          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.

            • They don't lack DVI support. I've seen many IBM err Lenovo Thinkcentres shipped with DVI output (a card in the ADD slot).

              Some newer models even have a direct DVI output. And for the lower end machines you could always get a card for 30 bucks which enable DVI output through the ADD slot.
                • Dual Monitor works, but you won't have Dual DVI.

                  I also don't think they offer dual link DVI, but honestly, i didn't find any facts regarding this (thank you for those wonderfully detailled product descriptions).

                  However, these products are intended for the corporate market. I've never seen a demand for Dual DVI or Dual Screen without a demand for a discrete graphic card (think CAD, etc.).
                • Dual monitors is really annoying to me. You need at least three IMO, not so much because I feel one needs more area, but because it's best to have one front and center. But then, you can have two, and have one there; this is a necessity for games. If you want to do multi-monitor gaming, you definitely need three monitors, because having a seam down the center of your view is simply unacceptable. Currently though I actually have three systems on my desk at work; I have a HPQ nw9440 Core Duo laptop in the mid
            • Right, but you don't need dual link on a server. If you're sitting at the server, you're doing something wrong.

  • Did a double take on that title... (Score:3, Funny)

    by DaveM753 (844913) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @01:56PM (#16148023) Homepage
    Not "Steam Computing"...

  • Stream eh? (Score:3, Funny)

    by ZipR (584654) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @01:56PM (#16148024)
    Perhaps they're following Valve's lead and are introducing 'episodic' computing.
  • Fantastic hardware, I'm sure. But since they won't release the specs, then we'll all have to rely on their drivers. God job that ATI have such a stellar record when it comes to releasing stable, reliable drivers on Linux.
    • Is there any indication the driver situation will improve with the buyout by AMD?
    • Not to diss linux, but I can see why ATI only gives a small portion of their effort to linux drivers (and that effort I hear has improved of late). The majority of their cards are direct X and geared at... windows gamers. It's their bread and butter. That they provide linux drivers at all is a nicety. Many manufacturers of consumer goods for the pc don't give any linux support. Sadly for the linux community, the only way the linux effort will improve is if more big time games come to linux. Right now if you
  • General purpose graphical processing unit. If only there were some kind of unit that would process instructions centrally, it could be used for all sorts of things! We could call it... hmmm... a central processing unit? Naw, that just doesn't have enough zazz. Seriously, this is about as silly as trying to sell "physics acceleration cards". I don't want general processing to have to be stuck going through a PCI bus. Yuck.

    • Re:GPGPUs... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by shawnce (146129) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @02:15PM (#16148192) Homepage
      The point of a thing like this is to ship data in bulk to the VRAM attached to the GPU. Then have the GPU grind away on that data using the large memory bandwidth available on the adapter. Then once finished pull the data back off the adapter. Also note that PCIe is much much better then any prior PCI/AGP bus for feeding this type of thing.

      • I've always thought of data projection queries in terms of Z-buffer processing. It would be interesting to see what a GPGPU could do for such queries.

        For example, pricing, products, and services often have start and end date-times. Given a particular date, the effective pricing is most recently started data set that hasn't expired yet. It sounds easy in english, but it tends to be a rather bruatal set of unions and hierarchical-join queries to implement.

        But given the I/O intensive nature of such pro

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Nah, Think about it a bit more. AMD buys ATI, AMD has hypertransport, ATI has chips capable of running 48 specialised threads *alongside* your normal cpu, admittedly initially PCIe (which isnt that shabby), but eventually they *have* to put it on hypertransport, with direct access to ram yada yada yada. I can see database servers LOVING this, and scientific visualisation software, 3d renderfarms etc. etc.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cowscows (103644)
      It sounds to me that it's not entirely general purpose, just a recognizing of the fact that optimizing for the sorts of operations that graphics have benefitted from can easily be shifted to some other specific applications.

      So that there are, for example, some specific common database operations that could be significantly more efficient with some optimized hardware. It's just that there's not necessarily a big enough market to design, test, produce, and sell cards designed just for that and make a profit.
    • They could shorten it to GP2U later on.
  • It seems that GPGPU applicatoins are turning the GPU into something similar to the old math coprocessors, but for parallelizable, SIMD math.

    I predict that they will eventually go the way of the FPU.
      • Exactly. GPGPU is basically hijacking graphics hardware to perform parallelizable vector operations. However, the GPU isn't general enough for many applications. Hardware is improving in this regard, but if GPGPU actually takes off, it would really make more sense to have a generic vector processor. However, this could also happen by improving the SIMD abilities of the current round of hardware, like Altivec and SSE.
      • Exactly right. If you want to do a lot of massively parallel calculations, design a CPU to do it. Don't ship tons of data back and forth on slow[er than than the memory to CPU] bus.

  • GPGPU primer (Score:5, Informative)

    by daVinci1980 (73174) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @02:19PM (#16148219) Homepage
    (Full disclosure: I work for a major manufacturer of 3-D accelerators.)

    There's lots of good sites that talk about GPGPU [gpgpu.org]. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has an okay article on the subject as well, and NVIDIA has a primer (PDF) [nvidia.com] on the subject. But the summary of this article is a bit overly broad.

    GPGPU isn't about moving arbitrary processing to the GPU, rather it's about moving specific, computationally expensive computing to the massively parallel GPU.

    Effectively, the core idea of GPGPU solutions is that you compute 256x256 (or another granularity) of solutions entirely in one pass.

    NVIDIA has several examples [nvidia.com] on their website, specifically the GPGPU Disease and GPGPU Fluid samples. The Mandelbrot computation they have there could also be considered an example. (More samples here [nvidia.com]).

    GPGPU has already been utilized to perform very fast (comparable to the CPU) FFTs. In an article in GPU Gems 2 (a very good book if you're interested in doing GPGPU work), they indicate that a 1.8x speedup can be had over performing FFTs on the CPU. I've heard that there are now significantly faster implementations as well.
    • In radioastronomy correlations and FFT's is a large part of the computations we do. Some tests we've done on Nvidia 7900's shows those could be sped up by a factor of 300 over a general CPU. The big problem is bandwidth.
      The amount of processing and bandwidth needed for these new telescopes comming online is staggering. For LOFAR we're using a IBM BlueGene with 12.000 Cores (Stella, nr.12 in the top500), using a 144Gb/s connection, and for SKA the nummbers are going to be orders of magnitude larger. The pos
  • If "Stream Computing" is even half as revolutionary as "Blast Processing," [wikipedia.org] count me way the hell in!

    SEGA!!!

  • We could have had this long ago if not for the fact that the AGP bus is slow as hell when moving data from graphics card memory back to main memory/CPU.

    Sure, you could do computations in graphics memeory, if you didn't mind waiting forever to read the results back.

  • Good for them (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gillbates (106458) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @02:25PM (#16148267) Homepage Journal

    In the original PC, the VGA interface gave the CPU a direct window into the video memory. Your CPU was your GPU as well - the only thing the graphics card did was convert the raster of bytes in a certain location to a signal recognizable by the monitor. As such, the hardware wasn't optimized for the kinds of operations that would become typical in the games that followed. So video card manufacturers began a mitigation strategy which involved moving the computationally complex parts of rendering off to the video card, where the onboard processor could render much more quickly and more efficiently than the CPU itself. The drawback of this approach was that to take full advantage of your video hardware you had to run a certain buggy, unstable, and rather insecure operating system. Typically, the drivers were written only for Windows. Reinstalling Windows became a semi-annual ritual for serious gamers.

    But, if ATI is successful in standardizing the GPGPU architecture, we may be able to take advantages of the video hardware on platforms other than Windows. While Linux has typical suffered a dearth of FPS games because of the lack of good hardware rendering support in the past, this has the potential for Linux to become the next serious gamer's platform.

    Which is a good thing, IMHO.

    • . The drawback of this approach was that to take full advantage of your video hardware you had to run a certain buggy, unstable, and rather insecure operating system. Typically, the drivers were written only for Windows. Reinstalling Windows became a semi-annual ritual for serious gamers.

      It's totally Microsoft's fault that Linux is not interesting to most gamers, or that GPL doesn't allow proprietary drivers to be used on Linux. Yea. Totally Microsoft's fault.

      As for gamers, they have lots of stupid rituals
  • That "stream computing" sound to me like "Citrix on steroids", i. e. dumb terminals which get high-quality, real-time graphics and sound
  • And who really needs this much extra processing power? If you already have an Athlon X2, or Core 2 Duo, how often have you maxed out your processor? How much of this is just bragging rights and penis extending?
    • Seriously? Wow, i mean just wow. Either you are considerably shortsighted, young, or just plain dumb.

      Core 2 Duo? Look at those of us who use VMware, any sort of video rendering, or multi-tasking on a general level and we kill those processors in a heartbeat.

  • We've had stream computing for several years on both platforms see "Metaprogramming GPUs with Sh" by McCool and DuToit. What is significant is that this follows the Purchase by AMD. Leveraging the purchase and providing closer coupling of the CPU and the GPU (HyperTransport?) for GPGPU could allow them to steal the march on Intel the same way they did with the 64 bit instruction set.

  • Stream processing is NOT new (Score:3, Interesting)

    by inio (26835) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @03:22PM (#16148769) Homepage
    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.
  • 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.

    This sounds like the GPU-based programs that OS X uses to perform Core Graphics and Core Video operations.
  • 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
    • I imagine if such a thing existed there would be considerable demand for it. However, I'm no expert in CPU design but somehow I doubt that Intel is able to just slap 100 Pentium 2s on one die and have it work just like that. There were no plans for the possibility of multiple cores when that CPU or its interface with the motherboard was designed. A new core would likely have to be engineered from the ground up -- which is pretty much what ATI is doing.
    • the logic of just making a p2 smaller via newer tech isn't right.. some things shrink and some things don't.. also you have to look at the timming issues for the paths..

      then you have to figure out how to stick them all on one die.. and have to talk to each other..

      and while you can make somethings smaller .. what about the cache...

      a video card doens't have to fit in a 1-2 in ^2 area.. it can be a full length ATX card with GB's of fast ram and multi core specilized proccessors..

      a CPU .. like intel and amd ha

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by kfg (145172) *
      Pond Computing, Lake Computing or Ocean Computing?

      They lack gravitational potential energy. Yeah, you can try to play around with extracting energy from the temperature gradiants of a lake or ocean (ponds don't have any worth worrying about), but it's just easier to stick a turbine in a stream to make the computer go; and unlike my heavy piston on a rope floating in a leaky sand filled cylinder engines the Sun carries the water back up to the upper reseviour for you.

      KFG

    • There's plenty of those tasks. There's just not a heck of a lot to be done about it. The apparent recent focus on paralel tasks is partly because chip makers are running out of easy ways to make non-parralel tasks any faster. But it's relatively easy to do the same task more times in parralel at the same speed. Which probably doesn't help until the software gets re-written to take advantage of that, assuming it can be.

      On the other hand, my impression is that a lot of tasks that seem like they can't bene

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