AMD announces teraFLOPS graphic chip
By Davey Winder in Editorial
How many cores do you need in a graphics chip? The answer, according to AMD, would appear to be at least 800. That’s how many it has managed to stuff into the ATI Radeon HD 4850. The world’s first teraFLOPS graphics card.
Unlike many of these cutting edge ‘wow’ announcements that reach my ears, the 4850 is actually also available to buy right now. Trouble is, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I guess I could whizz through my open folders using that flashy Vista control/tab system. I could probably fly around in Second Life at new heights, well maybe not.
Like all things, the need for such speed will arrive eventually. And there are those who will argue that getting aboard the teraFLOPS graphics bus now makes for a sensible ride to cushion the bumps ahead. Me, I’ll stick with my slow old graphics chips from a couple of years ago. You know, the ones that somehow manage to allow me to get through a full day working at the screen without once feeling the need to scream “for goodness sake, I wish my graphics card was more powerful than my computer itself.”
Odd that. But I bet I am not alone.
“The ATI Radeon 4800 series represents a 2X performance jump over the ATI Radeon HD 3800 GPU, the biggest generational increase since the game-changing launch of the Radeon 9700 in 2002,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. “AMD made a strategic decision to focus on GPU designs that maximized our efficiency and allowed us to provide enthusiasts, performance and mainstream users with the most compelling value proposition at every price point. The ATI Radeon 4800 series sets a new industry standard in key metrics such as performance-per-watt, performance-per-mm2 of chip die size, and performance-per-dollar.”
Great, well done lads, that’s really good to know.
“It is remarkable that we are now able to build high performance gaming PCs with over one teraFLOPS of compute power inside,” said Patrick Cooper, director of Product Planning, Alienware. “With that kind of performance and the addition of visual enhancements made possible by DirectX 10.1 and tessellation, gamers can now achieve cinema-quality realism. It’s an incredible step forward in gaming and Alienware is looking forward to introducing the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series in the near future.”
Right, so it’s a game thing. I see. I have an Xbox Elite for that, does HD gaming really, really well. As does my PS3 funnily enough…
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