Posted on 07/17/2008 10:35:27 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
The latest round of graphics card dueling between AMD and Nvidia isn't just over high-end gamers. The vendors will also exchange blows for the hearts and wallets of your friendly neighborhood medical imagers, seismic modelers, and computational fluid dynamicists.
AMD is refreshing the FireStream processor line with a new general purpose GPU (GPGPU) that boasts more than one teraflop of processing power.
Instead of handling gaming or graphics operatins, GPGPUs are built to crunch hundreds of parallel calculations per clock cycle. They promise massive speed improvements over a CPU in mathematical workloads of the scientific, educational and high performance computing variety.
AMD claims developers are reporting up to a 55x performance increase on financial analysis codes as compared to using a CPU alone.
AMD's new card succeeds the FireStream 9170, released last November and capable of 500 gigaflops for single precision performance. The FireStream 9250 is capable of 1 teraflop for single precision calculations, or 1 trillion floating-point operations per second.
Nvidia is similarly rolling out its 240-core Tesla-10 Series GPGPU chip that's also capable of 1 Teraflop of computational muscle.
The FireStream 9250 comes with 1GB of GDDR3 (Graphics Double Data Rate 3) memory — which is actually half of what was previously offered in the FireStream 9170. The 9250 includes double-precision floating point hardware performing at more than 200 gigaflops.
The 9250 fits in a single PCI slot, making it compatible with most desktops, workstations, and larger servers. It's power consumption is about the same as its predecessor, demanding less than 150 watts and a power efficiency rate of eight gigaflops per watt. That's in line with Nvidia's PCIe slotted device that eats up about 160 watts.
AMD plans to ship the FireStream 9250 and accompanying development kit in Q3 for $999. ®
the tech just keeps coming.
We need tera-flop chips just to keep track of all of Obambi’s flip-flops during his “move to the center” — he must be in the tera-flop range by now! /s
Hoobaby, are my VisiCalc recalcs ever gonna fly... BTT
A technique for cracking computer passwords using inexpensive off-the-shelf computer graphics hardware is causing a stir in the computer security community.Look for Vlad to port his program to AMD's chip.Elcomsoft, a software company based in Moscow, Russia, has filed a US patent for the technique. It takes advantage of the "massively parallel processing" capabilities of a graphics processing unit (GPU) - the processor normally used to produce realistic graphics for video games.
Using an $800 graphics card from nVidia called the GeForce 8800 Ultra, Elcomsoft increased the speed of its password cracking by a factor of 25, according to the company's CEO, Vladimir Katalov.
The toughest passwords, including those used to log in to a Windows Vista computer, would normally take months of continuous computer processing time to crack using a computer's central processing unit (CPU). By harnessing a $150 GPU - less powerful than the nVidia 8800 card - Elcomsoft says they can cracked in just three to five days. Less complex passwords can be retrieved in minutes, rather than hours or days.
It is the way a GPU processes data that provides the speed increase. NVidia spokesman Andrew Humber describes the process using the analogy of searching for words in a book. "A [normal computer processor] would read the book, starting at page 1 and finishing at page 500," he says. "A GPU would take the book, tear it into a 100,000 pieces, and read all of those pieces at the same time."
Or you could just use a rainbow table. Only takes a couple minutes to grab all the passwords off a non-encrypted hard drive.
You do need to season your passwords with a little salt. This fact escaped the creators of Windoze, the same ignoramuses who forgot that \ is the escape character, and / is the file path separator, not the option introducer.
M$ were likely concerned with copyright infringment.
One stated objective of Snow Leopard, version 10.6 of OS X for the Mac projected for less than a year from now, is to include provision for facilitating the exploitation of the number crunch capability of graphics processors by writers of applications.
This fact escaped the creators of Windoze, the same ignoramuses who forgot that \ is the escape character, and / is the file path separator, not the option introducer.
What do you mean? Every one knows directories were always meant to be enclosed in angle brackets with dots between the levels, like DKA0:[MAIN.SUB.SUB]FILE.EXT
Does anyone have double-precision timings?
Cheers!
So roughly a 1000-fold performance increase from Crays in the mid-1980's (about 24 years).
Not Moore's law, but not bad.
Cheers!
Hmm... don’t know what to say. I personally build all of my systems, and for the last 3 years they have all been AMD AthlonX2. Running a 6400 chip on this machine, at the moment..
I have had 5 ATI cards... and all of them were crap. They didn’t live up to their expectations and burned out within a month. Considering how much each of these cards cost, it wasn’t worth the time and effort.
On the other hand, I have also been using nVidea cards for several years too. I have never had a problem with them, with exception to overheating sometimes... which I would then install a ‘hitech’ fan onto the card... then no problems. nVidea drivers are also easy (much easier) to get and install... (with exception of when the x64 OS came out... had to wait a couple of months for them to catch up, not sure about ATI there, since I gave up on them a few years ago..)
So... now do I have to worry that AMD is going to stop producing MBs that support nVidea? I don’t want to go back to ATI... and I still prefer AMD to INTEL...
I guess, if it comes down to it, I would go back to INTEL and keep the nice nVIDEA cards :/
GeForce 8800 UltraYeah baby!! I am running a 8800 GTS512 ;)
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