

 AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs - profquail
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3643

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petercooper
The development of GPUs never ceases to amaze me - they keep pulling some
crazy speed increases out of the bag. It's the usage/market side that pisses
me off - continually horrible integrated graphics in all but the high end
systems and Apple continuing to rip us off to get a decent graphics card in
the Mac Pro.. eugh (£280 for a Mac HD 4870 in the UK.. $460ish).

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sp332
The color scheme reminds me of older Cray supercomputers.
[http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/Cray-039-s-Supercomputer...](http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/Cray-039-s-Supercomputers-
Are-Slowly-Becoming-Hypercomputers-2.jpg) I wonder if there's something about
it that visually indicates "there's a ridiculous amount of parallel computing
power in here"?

Edit: apparently the CM-5 supercomputer had a very similar color scheme as
well.
[http://encarta.msn.com/media_461569032_761563087_-1_1/CM-5_S...](http://encarta.msn.com/media_461569032_761563087_-1_1/CM-5_Supercomputer.html)

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dtf
Funny, SGI used to use racy colours for all their boxen too. Yesterday's
announcement of the plain-Jane Octane III was such a disappointment in that
respect.

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anigbrowl
Cool stuff - glad to see some wins for AMD. Pity the review was so focused on
games stuff - I'd love to have seen some OpenGL results for GPU-enabled
packages like Adobe Photoshop or Luxology's Modo, but games are obviously
where the cutting edge is at...though there's a disruption opportunity for a
manufacturer with enough vision to build an authoring application around an
existing game compositing/ rendering/ physics library.

2.7 billion transistors blows my mind - that's almost 4x what the current
Xeons have. GPU obviously have a totally different architecture. and this at
40nm...with Intel announcing yesterday that they've got working 22nm(!) chips,
the future possibilities are exciting.

