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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: 2, Insightful) by VanessaE on Thursday April 10 2014, @11:03PM
Ok, fifteen hundred bucks if you BUY IT NAOW! Sure, we all know it'll come down to a more reasonable price eventually, but what about on the back end, *after* you buy it? 500 watts just for just a GPU, assuming that's when it's maxed out? I'm sorry but last I knew, hardcore gamers who would buy such a card tend to play for hours on end, let alone folks who would buy them for mining coins, and that kind of power usage is just insane.
My three computers, four decent DFP monitors, and all their ancillary gadgetry all combined use between 790 and 815 watts (according to my Kill-a-Watt) when they're all running at full blast, and they are *not* low-end hardware at all.