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AMD and Nvidia fighting for GPU
By Robert | November 15, 2007
Nvidia and AMD are currently trying hard to expand the use of GPU in different other areas, besides gaming. ATI announced some time ago that Folding@home will work on their GPUs and this got users to realize that GPU has potential of being used in other gadgets and not only in video games.
Nvidia did their first announcement on this subject in connection to their Tesline line of GPGPUs in June, as they launched the Tesla C870, the S870 and the D870. When analyzing everything core deep, most of them were Nvidia 8 series graphic cards (besides the minus of DVI outputs that allows graphics to be sent to the display of a personal computer). Tesla C870 appears as a high end, quad-GPU system with external possibility. The Tesla line is currently utilized for different reasons including medical imaging and rendering farming. This is based on the fact that GPUs are actually very efficient when it comes to parallel processing, needed in the fields mentioned above.
We also saw AMD announcing a GPGPU, the FireStream 9170, marketed as the first GPU that offers double precision floating point. The FireStream is working on an ATI GPU, capable of processing in parallel with 320 stream cores. It also features 2 GB of GDDR3 RAM memory. According to AMD, this makes it possible for up to 500 GFLOPs to be provided in single precision performance.
Now we see that Nvidia wants to top AMD with announcing the new Tesla S870 GPU cluster on display at SuperComputing 2007, held in Reno next week. The company claims that the new model comes with increased speed and it is the first to reach the high features it will have. Meanwhile, the war between AMD and Nvidia is opened to any winner.
Topics: Hardware Reviews |
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