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A $1,499 Supercomputer on a Card?

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

Bytram writes:

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 opinionated_science on Thursday April 10 2014, @08:20PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Thursday April 10 2014, @08:20PM (#29687)

    well I was looking for LINPACK numbers as I found this:

    http://devgurus.amd.com/message/1285375#1285375 [amd.com] (OpenCL 8 GPU DGEMM (5.1 TFlop/s double precision). Heterogeneous HPL (High Performance Linpack from Top500).)

    They got > 5Tflops DP using 3 older Radeon cards, and it was posted Mar 2014, so and update will be interesting.

    One thing that LINPACK helps, is it gives a measure of *some* useful work to relate practical performance characteristics. Ok not ideal, but stops the marketing fluff getting in the way ;-)