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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 Bytram on Friday April 11 2014, @01:08PM

    by Bytram (4043) on Friday April 11 2014, @01:08PM (#30014) Journal

    If you go to The Linpack Benchmark [top500.org] on the TOP 500 site, there's a link to Frequently Asked Questions on the Linpack Benchmark and Top500 [netlib.org]. At the entry for "What is a Mflop/s?" which you can reach directly [netlib.org], it states:

    What is a Mflop/s?

    Mflop/s is a rate of execution, millions of floating point operations per second. Whenever this term is used it will refer to 64 bit floating point operations and the operations will be either addition or multiplication. Gflop/s refers to billions of floating point operations per second and Tflop/s refers to trillions of floating point operations per second.

    As these are the folks who came up with the list, I defer to their historical and continued use of this definition.

  • (Score: 1) by monster on Friday April 11 2014, @01:18PM

    by monster (1260) on Friday April 11 2014, @01:18PM (#30022) Journal

    Thanks for the clarification, but unless they are being incoherent in their naming, their comment validates my point: It's Mflops (Mega), Gflops (Giga) and Tflops (Tera), even if they put them side by side with their numerical values.

    Anyway, enough nitpicking for now.