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AMD RV790 Architecture To Change GPGPU Landscape?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Mar 09, 2009 02:32 PM
from the continuing-the-leapfrog-process dept.
Graphics Software Hardware
Vigile writes "To many observers, the success of the GPGPU landscape has really been pushed by NVIDIA and its line of Tesla and Quadro GPUs. While ATI was the first to offer support for consumer applications like Folding@Home, NVIDIA has since taken command of the market with its CUDA architecture and programs like Badaboom and others for the HPC world. PC Perspective has speculation that points to ATI addressing the shortcomings of its lineup with a revised GPU known as RV790 that would both dramatically increase gaming performance as well as more than triple the compute power on double precision floating point operations — one of the keys to HPC acceptance."
+ -
story

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Submission: AMD RV790 Architecture to Change GPGPU Landscape by Vigile (99919)
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AMD RV790 Architecture To Change GPGPU Landscape? 50 Comments More /

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  • OpenCL? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Yvan256 (722131) on Monday March 09 2009, @02:37PM (#27125505) Homepage Journal

    I hope all these new things will be compatible with OpenCL.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      since OpenCL is just an abstraction layer like OpenGL and DirectX most modern hardware already does it just needs driver support

      • Surely not!

        I'd heard it was recently ratified as an ISO standard...

      • Re:OpenCL? (Score:4, Informative)

        by LWATCDR (28044) on Monday March 09 2009, @03:01PM (#27125877) Homepage Journal

        I say HUH?
        OpenCL is supported by Apple but also AMD and nVidia. The standard is being managed by a Not For Profit.
        Compared to CUDA it is actually very open.
        It is currently vapor ware but everything starts out that way for the most part.

        OpenCL is more Closed BS than is CUDA or DX.
        I just hope that it actually becomes a working standard.

          • I blame Apple for the poor signal-to-noise-ratio associated with OpenCL. They announced support for something non-existant and then the whole GPU industry said "me too" to get on Apple's good side.

            According to wiki:

            On June 16th 2008 the Khronos Compute Working Group was formed with representatives from CPU, GPU, embedded-processor, and software companies. This group worked for the next 5 months to finish the technical details of the specification for OpenCL 1.0 by Nov 18 2008. This technical specification

          • What's with the 'tude, do you work for Nvidia or something?

            The truth is, if Nvidia wanted Cuda to be a standard, they should have opened it up to Khronos or whoever to make it generalized. They didn't and it will remain in the niche that it is in.
            I'm no Apple fan, but at least the recognized a huge hole and did something to fill it.
            Would a windows-only GPGPU standard really become the de facto standard? Maybe for games that may use it, but who does HPC on windows?

      • According to wiki and the Khronos Group: "OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is the first open, royalty-free standard for general-purpose parallel programming of heterogeneous systems." The initial specification was released in December 2008. One of their members is Apple who originally proposed it. It is a counterpart to OpenGL but in computing instead of graphics. I supposed you would call "OpenGL=ClosedBS. you must be a SGI fanboi"

          • The fact that it is vaporware

            You call OpenCL vaporware when it was first proposed last June, had the initial draft by November, and was released in December. By my count it's less the 9 months old. I don't know about you but in my world, it might considered vaporware if like that was years instead of months.

              • NOW do you see why OpenCL is already at a disadvantage and why I said OpenGL is kinda pointless? . . . But right now CUDA is out there. . . Having some "open" vaporware is doing NOBODY any good.

                If my memory serves me correctly CUDA only works with NVIDIA GPUs. That basically makes it USELESS on ATI or Intel or any other GPU. Again you call something that has just been released "vaporware" while something that was released in Feb 2007 the defacto standard. So CUDA was released earlier. That does not mea

                • The problem with that argument is in the market we are talking about Nvidia OWNS it, with the Tesla and Quadro platforms, and has had the market pretty much locked for years now. I don't really see any workstation with ATI chips, but I have seen more Quadro setups than I can count. This is like saying "But in only works on Windows!" And? When Windows drops below 60% then that might be an argument. Same as when Nvidia drops below 60% of the workstation market then your argument is valid. But until then you c

                • OpenCL fanboy religion.

                  OF COURSE, open standards are more desirable than closed ones, EXCEPT when the open standard doesn't outperform the market standard OR, in OpenCL's case, DOESN'T EXIST.

                  There are capitalists now that want to make their buck NOW, not wait two years just to find out that they STILL have to wait another X years for something to roll out. If you want to do GPU offload processing, mathematical processing, or the state-of-the-art game NOW, you're stuck with CUDA. If you want to wait for th

  • nVidia rules (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 09 2009, @02:40PM (#27125555)
    ... the "rename the same old shit four times to try and con people"-market, that's for sure.

    • Re:nVidia rules (Score:5, Informative)

      by i.of.the.storm (907783) on Monday March 09 2009, @03:17PM (#27126065) Homepage
      It's sad that this is actually almost true... Geforce 8800GT->9800GT->GT2x0 (I think 250 or something) are all the same GPU...

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by StarHeart (27290) *

        No, they are all of the same base architecture, but aren't the same card. The 8800GT and the 9800GT are pretty close. Probably the biggest difference is some 9800GT cards are 55nm chips instead of 65nm. On the other hand there is a lot of difference between 8800GT and the GTX260. The GTX260 has 32 dedicated double precision processors that the 8800GT does not. My rough understanding is that those double precision processors are roughly equal to 1.5x a Q6600(quad core), or 6 cores. The GTX260 also comes with

      • Actually it's the GTS250, which uses the G92b chip. The changes compared to the other G92 based chips are relatively small though. Hence the similar chip-name.

  • Waiting for: (Score:5, Funny)

    by residieu (577863) on Monday March 09 2009, @02:42PM (#27125585)
    Waiting for GPGPGPUs

  • That's a lot of pages supporting guesswork. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jandrese (485) <kensama@vt.edu> on Monday March 09 2009, @02:46PM (#27125647) Homepage Journal
    So this is what some anonymous guy on the internet thinks might happen? Granted, he has a lot of material in there, but in the end it's all just guesswork. Apparently he's a big fan of cheaper lower end video cards as well, and is hoping that ATI releases one.

    • AMD's double-point floating point performance is already great. What they lack is the rest of it. The programming model is pretty bad compared to CUDA (nobody is using Brook+), and they seem to be basically waiting for OpenCL to fix that. The bottlenecks in most attempts to use AMD chips for GPGPU code are also not really the floating-point units themselves, but the rest of the architecture; it's hard to keep the ALUs fed with your data without a magic compiler, a better programming model, a better architec

    • And, of course, like with most people who do a "My favored company will come out with the bestest thing EVAR!" he's ignoring the fact that nVidia won't sit still. I don't know what's coming next from nVidia. What I do know is they currently have a powerful card for gaming and GPGPU (GTX285) that does support double precision as well as single precision, though DP is much slower. So, fairly safe to say their next generation card will also support DP, and will probably be faster than their current card.

      To me,

  • ...because since I learned that BOINC now supports CUDA (but still has no love for GPGPU), I'm about to ditch my ATI cards for a few Nvidia ones.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Tweenk (1274968)

      CUDA = an Nvidia-specific way to do GPGPU...

      Personally I'm waiting for OpenCL, which would be to GPGPU what OpenGL was for 3D graphics when it was released - essentially a vendor and platform neutral general processing interface to the GPU.

      • Hey -- whatever it's called, I'm just about to make a purchase decision based upon the fact that my hardware isn't supported. Somebody needs to get coding. :P

  • LOLNO (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MostAwesomeDude (980382) on Monday March 09 2009, @03:06PM (#27125941) Homepage

    As far as I know, the RV790 will be in the R600/R700 family and will work almost perfectly with existing R600/R700 code. While I have no guarantees on this, current talks with AMD employees haven't given off any indication that this chipset will be radically different from its cousins.

  • What I want from the GPU (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Belial6 (794905) on Monday March 09 2009, @04:12PM (#27126861) Homepage
    What I want from the GPU is features like what the CPUs have so that the GPU can have multiple VMs running in it. The only reason that I don't run inside of a VM as my primary computing environment is because graphics acceleration pretty much suck in it. When AMD bought ATI I expected virtualized video to be one of their early announcement.

    Imagine if your VMed OS could believe that it had 100% control of the video card, but your video card would display on it's own 'surface', and still use full hardware acceleration for the process. As far as I can tell, video is the only serious stumbling block left in virtualizing the x86 architecture.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fast turtle (1118037)

      VirtualBox is supposed to have started solving this problem. It's beta and still experiemental but if it works well, then it's exactly what I've been looking for as it means I can finally run XP ina Vbox setup under a 64bit Gentoo Linux.

  • I would rather have quality Open Source drivers. Yeah, you through the specs "over the wall", but it would be nice if you were a bit more active. Like giving us an actual Open Source driver. Or patches. Or something. We shouldn't be doing your work for you.

    • GPGPU= General Purpose GPU (Score:5, Informative)

      by frith01 (1118539) on Monday March 09 2009, @02:46PM (#27125663)

      General Purpose GPU's = massively parallel flops operations possible. ( Think matrix math, real time sims, lab testing, SETI, etc).

      Still separate from a CPU, which has additional capabilities.

      For the older folks, think of this as a math co-processor :) [ with it's own fan]

    • Re:Apparently I'm behind on my acronyms... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jandrese (485) <kensama@vt.edu> on Monday March 09 2009, @02:48PM (#27125677) Homepage Journal
      It's basically using your video card as a general purpose processor [google.com]. You might think such an acronym would be hard to find on google, but it turns it it isn't.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Lord Ender (156273)

        It is bad journalism on the part of the slashdot editors to force the readers to google for acronyms. Common, long-standing acronyms, like CPU, are one thing. But GPGPU should absolutely be defined in the summary. I find it hard to believe some people pay money for this site, and that "editors" get paid money for their "editing."

        • I find it hard to believe some people pay money for this site, and that "editors" get paid money for their "editing."

          The small amount I pay to subscribe to Slashdot is just about the best bargain I get on the intertubes. Yes, I often have to google stuff that I find in stories and comments, but now that Firefox lets me just highlight a word or phrase, right-click and google I don't mind a bit. I find that I learn a lot in the process.

          [NOW will you take that black mark off of my soul, Commander Taco?]

          • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

            by Hurricane78 (562437)

            Question: What do you get from the subscription, other than being able to read stories half an hour earlier? (No idea why I would need that.)

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Chabo (880571)

              Back in the days before AdBlock, another benefit to subscribing was the removal of ads.

        • I wouldn't call GPGPU [google.com] a new term. There's been heaps of stories here about it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Slumdog (1460213)

      What in the screaming blue hell is a GPGPU?

      I think you meant "screaming green hell"

    • Just like the parent says: the actual article is a work of fiction and speculation with no hard facts on future products.... merely "what if's".

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