October 15, 200718 yr G92 and RV670 are GPGPU monsters Tesla and FireStream to get double-precision number-crunching By Theo Valich: Friday, 12 October 2007, 9:37 AM ACCORDING TO THE LATEST information leaking from the Far East, both RV670 and G92 are conceptually almost identical to its predecessors R600 and G80, with one major change. This change will not affect 3D performance, so you might want to skip the talk about higher 3Dmark scores. This change touches on the GPGPU (General Purpose computing on GPUs) concept. Ever since reading a certain brilliant book named GPU Gems (Vol. 1), I've been a staunch supporter of GPGPU. Now, it seems the idea is finally coming to life, since having double-precision units is a key requirement to rely on results calculated by the GPU. We learned that G92 and RV670 are sporting dual-precision units (128, 112 or 96 to be available in G92, RV670 will have 320 units), albeit it is unknown what type of Binary Floating-Point formats are these units supporting. Who is supporting IEEE 754 format, 32-bit or 64-bit - time will tell. Tesla and FireStream cards based on these GPUs will be quite interesting, when they appear. With around 350-450 GFLOPS available per card, there is little doubt that RV670 and G92 might be the GPUs that will break out the GPGPU ghost out of the mysterious place. Truth to be told, ATI seems to have slight advantage, due to multi-GPU capabilities (CrossFire X: 2GPU, 3GPU, 4GPU setups). We'll see. ?
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