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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: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 10 2014, @09:13PM
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
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
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.