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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Lazarus on Thursday April 10 2014, @08:14PM
It's a pretty bad deal for a graphics card, but an excellent one for a high-speed computing platform.
(Score: 1) by Bytram on Friday April 11 2014, @02:34AM
Excellent value, indeed! So it was called the ASCI White [wikipedia.org] made by IBM and installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. (ASCI = Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative.) LLNL has a great write-up [llnl.gov] about it including this picture [llnl.gov].
The ASCI White system contained 8,192 375MHz processors; had 6 TB of memory and 160TB of disk storage in about 7,000 disk drives. It weighed 106 tons, needed 3 MW of electricity to run, and needed another 3 MW for cooling. The system cost $110 million and was installed in a 20,000 sq ft computer room.
By comparison, the Radeon R9 295x2 card comes up rather short on memory and storage, but compares quite favorably when looking at weight, power consumption, price, and size. =)