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AMD has a clever advertising campaign going on right now for their upcoming 8-core Desktop CPU in the form of an online Comic called “Operation Scorpius: The Legend of FX”.  The story of 8 heroes, a core of master ninjas, who come together to fight enemies in the OVerlord Syndicate and “free technology users everywhere”.  It even includes “Agent Ruby”, whose reputation for “graphic destruction” needs no introduction.

Available online as a downloadable PDF or online viewing in their flash widget.

Operation Scorpius.

Graphics amd, comic, cpu

iSGTW has a great writeup from Jan Zverina on the advantages of CPU’s and GPU’s, correctly seeing that each of them have their own areas of expertise and use and neither of them will die completely.  They look at recent advances in the TeraGrid systems and how GPUs are offering huge advances in a few areas.  Toward the end they speak with some of the developers of the AMBER computational chemistry code.

“GPUs are, for the first time, giving us the increases in capability we have been desperate for since the beginning of the multicore era,” says Walker.  “I’m confident that we will soon be achieving throughput with GPU-enabled AMBER that is at least an order of magnitude better than we could ever hope to achieve with CPU-based clusters.”

via GPUs versus CPUs, Part 1 | iSGTW.

Hardware, Science cpu, gpu, teragrid

A new whitepaper from Intel brings in some statistics and stories from Luxology, Luxion, and Modo on the power of CPU’s for ray-tracing and how they can smoke any GPU on the market with CPU-only solutions.

“Modern GPUs offer a brute force solution to ray tracing, but the memory available to GPUs is relatively limited compared to the system memory available to 64-bit CPUs such as Intel Core i7 and Xeon processors. That means that GPUs typically can’t handle the huge scene files required in full-scale production rendering, which may involve tens of millions of polygons and hundreds of high-resolution texture maps. And CPUs offer greater flexibility in terms of shading complexity and plug-in shaders, which may or may not have been ported to run on a GPU.”

These are the same arguments I’ve been hearing for the last year or so.  And I have to admit they’re right, if not a bit short-sighted.  It’s my belief that most of the arguments they use are going to fall apart soon.

• They always talk about the power of Moore’s law in CPU’s.  Well, that same law applies to GPU’s too, they’re going to get faster just like CPU’s will.  Even more so, most likely, as they not only optimize individual cores but add more cores as a rate exponential to CPU’s.
• They always talk about Memory limitations.  There was a time where CPU’s had rather restrictive memory limitations (the fabled “640k is enough for anyone” comment?).  GPU’s will continue to grow in memory.  In fact, Sandy Bridge and Fusion offer the first step towards eliminating the distinction between GPU and CPU memory.
• They always talk about the limited instruction set.  This one isn’t likely to change, and will always be a hindrance to GPU computing.  However, newer algorithms come along at a steady pace showing that you don’t really need the type of complex branching mechanisms of CPU’s, since the GPU has enough horsepower to just compute both sides of the condition and drop the unnecessary one.

In fact, I think within the next 5 years we may see the distinction between CPU and GPU disappear almost entirely, as they both wind up on the same die (similar to how Processor and Math Co-Processor eventually merged several years ago).

It’s a good whitepaper tho, full of some concrete numbers on attempts to GPU-ize code unsuccessfully and benefits achieved from using some of Intel’s newest CPU-optimization technology.

Check it out, and see what you think?

via Why CPU is better than GPU for rendering from Intel with Luxology, Keyshot and Maxwell. – SolidSmack.com.

Science cpu, gpu, intel, luxion, luxology, modo, whitepaper

Last year, NVIDIA told the world about its upcoming GPUs in 2011 and 2013. These GPUs are codenamed Kepler and Maxwell, respectively. Kepler will be released sometime in 2011, and will be manufactured on a 28nm process. Kepler would be approximately 2.7 times faster than the Fermi C2070.

The follow-on GPU to Kepler will be the Maxwell. Maxwell will be released sometime in 2013, and will be manufactured on a 22nm process. Maxwell is approximately 7.6 times faster than the Fermi C2070.

NVIDIA has also told us about Project Denver, which combines a GPU and an ARM CPU in one. The question is, when will that be available? Will it be on Kepler, or will it be on Maxwell? Hexus.net has provided the answer in an interview with NVIDIA’s Tegra General Manager, Mike Rayfield .

Lastly we asked about Project Denver: the surprising announcement that NVIDIA will be designing a CPU in partnership with ARM, with a view to using it in high-end computers. We asked Rayfield to elaborate.

“As well as licensing Cortex A15, we also have an architectural license with ARM to produce an extremely high performance ARM CPU, which be combined with NVIDA GPUs for super-computing,” he said. When we asked for timescales, Rayfield revealed: “The Maxwell generation will be the first end-product using Project Denver. This is a far greater resource investment for us than just licensing a design.”

Hexus also speculates that NVIDIA may launch Tegra 3 at Mobile World Congress next month. Tegra is, of course, a system-on-a-chip developed for mobile devices such as smartphones

via : Exclusive: NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 primed for MWC launch @ Hexus.net

Hardware arm, cpu, denver, gpgpu, gpu, hpc, maxwell, nvidia

While this is primarily a visualization site, occasionally we dip into other hardware aspects as they may affect the work we do. For example, we have talked about SSDs in the past, especially with regards to PCI-Express based solutions. Faster access to storage means less time waiting when loading large files, or many small files. Thus we bring you the latest rumor on an Intel chip that we have been salivating over for some time now.

The Nehalem-EX is an eight core chip based on the Nehalem architecture. The -EX tag stands for EXpandable server market. That is, this chip will go into four socket machines, which means that you will have 32 real cores on which to perform your rendering. The Nehalem-EX will be sold as high-end Xeon chips. The current high-end Xeons are the 5500 series. The new chips will occupy the 6500/7500 series range.

The X6550 will have eight cores running at 2.00 GHz, with 18 MB of L3 shared cache and two QuickPath interfaces running at 6.4 GT/s. This CPU has a TDP of 130W.

The X7550 will have eight cores running at 2.00 GHz, with 18 MB of L3 shared cache and four QuickPath interfaces running at 6.4 GT/s. This CPU has a TDP of 130W.

The L7555 will have eight cores running at 1.86 GHz, with 18 MB of L3 shared cache and four QuickPath interfaces running at 5.8 GT/s. This is a lower power version with a TDP of 90W.

The X7560 will have eight cores running at 2.26 GHz, with 18 MB of L3 shared cache and four QuickPath interfaces running at 6.4 GT/s. This CPU has a TDP of 130W.

In case you are wondering, GT/s stands for gigatransfers per second. You can think of this as billions of bits per second. This is the raw data rate without any encoding.

Personally I am looking forward to system with four sockets filled with Nehalem-EX (32 cores), with a Fermi or two in it.  That way when I start rendering, the entire town will brown-out.

via : Intel to release 8-core Xeons this month | Guru3D

via : Intel to Begin Nehalem-EX Shipments This Month | Guru3D

Hardware cpu, intel