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posted by n1 on Thursday April 10 2014, @07:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the will-it-play-crysis-though dept.

A $1,499 supercomputer on a card? That's what I thought when reading El Reg's report of AMD's Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card which is rated at 11.5 TFlop/s(*). It is water-cooled, contains 5632 stream processors, has 8 GB of DDR5 RAM, and runs at 1018MHz.

AMD's announcement claims it's "the world's fastest, period". The $1,499 MSRP compares favorably to the $2,999 NVidia GTX Titan Z which is rated at 8 TFlop/s.

From a quick skim of the reviews (at: Hard OCP, Hot Hardware, and Tom's Hardware), it appears AMD has some work to do on its drivers to get the most out of this hardware. The twice-as-expensive NVidia Titan in many cases outperformed it (especially at lower resolutions). At higher resolutions (3840x2160 and 5760x1200) the R9 295x2 really started to shine.

For comparison, consider that this 500 watt, $1,499 card is rated better than the world's fastest supercomputer listed in the top 500 list of June 2001.

(*) Trillion FLoating-point OPerations per Second.

 
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  • (Score: 1) by GlennC on Thursday April 10 2014, @08:06PM

    by GlennC (3656) on Thursday April 10 2014, @08:06PM (#29680)

    All that power, and it's on a graphics card?

    I'm sure there's a market for it. I'm just as sure I'm not part of that market.

    --
    Sorry folks...the world is bigger and more varied than you want it to be. Deal with it.
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 10 2014, @09:13PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday April 10 2014, @09:13PM (#29717) Journal

    The market would be scientific computing. That is, using the graphics card as parallel computing coprocessor. The fact that it also has video out (if it has, there are actually cards that don't) is irrelevant for that purpose.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Thursday April 10 2014, @09:24PM

      by opinionated_science (4031) on Thursday April 10 2014, @09:24PM (#29723)

      not entirely irrelevant. There is a use in molecular simulation to vizualise the system in question, and even to "steer" it while running.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Kymation on Thursday April 10 2014, @09:32PM

      by Kymation (1047) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 10 2014, @09:32PM (#29728)

      The manufacturer's page doesn't list video output in the specifications. Odd. The picture of the card shows five output connectors, so I suspect that it does actually have video out though.

  • (Score: 1) by _NSAKEY on Thursday April 10 2014, @09:55PM

    by _NSAKEY (16) on Thursday April 10 2014, @09:55PM (#29735)

    The more hardcore guys who post on hashcat.net's forum will probably have 4 of these running in one box within a week of the card's launch. Granted, it will take more than one power supply, but the kind of person who would bulk order these cards is also the same kind of person who has used multiple PSUs in the same rig before.

    • (Score: 1) by opinionated_science on Thursday April 10 2014, @10:19PM

      by opinionated_science (4031) on Thursday April 10 2014, @10:19PM (#29739)

      it would be useful for those of us want to scientific calculations, if they would run the benchmarks for computation for their rigs!! I would wager a few scientists would have a crack at replicating the best performing designs.

      We might get the vendors to start optimizing for reproducible calculation, rather than marketing numbers...

  • (Score: 2) by zim on Friday April 11 2014, @05:20AM

    by zim (1251) on Friday April 11 2014, @05:20AM (#29877)
    I AM part of that market! But the money is not part of me... So :(

    But hey. I can buy one in a few years when they're the new $150 card.