Re: For those who missed it -another PC milestone

From Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@xxxxxxxxx>, in uk.politics.misc on
Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:30:04 +0100 :

FACE wrote:
From Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@xxxxxxxxx>, in uk.politics.misc on
Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:23:47 +0100 :

FACE wrote:
From Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@xxxxxxxxx>, in uk.politics.misc on
Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:33:36 +0100 :

FACE wrote:
From Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@xxxxxxxxx>, in uk.politics.misc on
Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:28:20 +0100 :

FACE wrote:
From Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@xxxxxxxxx>, in uk.politics.misc on
Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:53:41 +0100 :

FACE wrote:
From Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@xxxxxxxxx>, in uk.politics.misc on
Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:39:25 +0100 :

http://tinyurl.com/4y9ktt

AMD is shipping a graphics chip for use in PCs that can run at 1TFLOP ie
one million million floating point operations per second. And their
rival nVidia has released software to make this generally available as a
PC resource on their own chips. So PCs just jumped in effective power by
about a factor of 50.
From article lead:

"AMD Ships Teraflops Line Of Graphics Cards

AMD's new line of graphics cards is capable of a trillion calculations per
second, double the computing power of the company's previous generation of
high-end cards. "

In any event, this is a graphics card, not a processor. In fact, the
performance of the graphics card will be dependent on relayed information
emanating from central processor unit input.....

So where did your comment "So PCs just jumped in effective power by
about a factor of 50." come from?

(Or just put a check mark here __ to agree that you overstated all of
this........)
Because nVidia have also supplied a programming language extension, CUDA
that makes the parallel processing power available to applications other
than graphics.
CUDA was originally released February, 2007. It apparently only works with
Nvidia GPUs. However, your tinyurl article was about an AMD graphics card
release that was double the previous fastest AMD cards' processing power.
Nvidia is mentioned in passing in the article as a major AMD rival.

Please point to the reasoning for your saying "So PCs just jumped in
effective power by about a factor of 50."

Don't you think that your apology to S3 Graphics Co., Ltd., is in order?
Other companies eg AMD are following.
Not too big on periods or commas are you? Does your ISP limit you on
punctuation marks?

BTW, Please point to the reasoning for your concluding statement of "So PCs
just jumped in effective power by about a factor of 50."

(I use BTW because my ISP limits my whies and "b the wa" has two.)

FACE
Standard PC CPU offers around 10 GFLOPS of user programmable processing
Well that is wonderful, but please point to the reasoning for your original
concluding statement about this graphic card release that was: "So PCs just
jumped in effective power by about a factor of 50."
Factor of 100 then.

The article said it was *twice* as fast as their previous card.
But that is one component only -- and it is actually peripheral in most
cases.



BTW, what is a gigaflop of user programmable processing? I always
understood kilo- mega- giga- tera- peta- flops to be expressions of
floating point operations per second, but not processing per se since a
"process" can be composed of many thousands of flops -- actually it is
layers deeper than that and the "flop" becomes a low-level basic building
block leading to a thing called "command"......... Things like RISC was
meant to reduce the flops necessary for processing supposed to simplify
this, OS's like Windows bloats it.
FLOPS are the benchmark 'unit' for measuring supercomputer processing
power. Mainly because a FLOP is the most complex operation/instruction.


Wrong.

So, can you point to how many flops comprise an instruction and then how
many instructions comprise a command and all the in-betweens for
housekeeping so that the sentence you gave can make quantitative sense?

Let's hear it, I am all ears.................
Not really, which is why FLOPS are used. In a computer almost every
other instruction is usually much simpler.

See above.

OK - so how do *you* believe supercomputer power is measured?
Let's see some examples. And don't bother with Whetstones and Dhrystones.

So, you want to burn children, do you?!

The answer to your question may be FLOPS but would more likely be MIPS or
BIPS or whatever more related to a real world rather than a theoretical one.

I am posting an excerpt that is nice for my side, which was that the 1
teraflops graphics card was not a very big deal......

Consider the old saying that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link
and apply it to computers........

(Hint: substitute computer for chain; fast for strong; slowest for weakest;
component involved for link.)

I don't know the age of this, but you may find it interesting...............

Excerpt:

"FLOPS in isolation are arguably not very useful as a benchmark for modern
computers. There are many factors in computer performance other than raw
floating-point computation speed, such as I/O performance, interprocessor
communication, cache coherence, and the memory hierarchy. This means that
supercomputers are in general only capable of a small fraction of their
"theoretical peak" FLOPS throughput (obtained by adding together the
theoretical peak FLOPS performance of every element of the system). Even
when operating on large highly parallel problems, their performance will be
bursty, mostly due to the residual effects of Amdahl's law. Real benchmarks
therefore measure both peak actual FLOPS performance as well as sustained
FLOPS performance.

[The writer left out "intra-system communication" which is important.]

For ordinary (non-scientific) applications, integer operations (measured in
MIPS) are far more common. Measuring floating point operation speed,
therefore, does not predict accurately how the processor will perform on
just any problem. However, for many scientific jobs such as analysis of
data, a FLOPS rating is effective.

....


Records

Today Blue Gene is the world's fastest computer, at 360 TFLOPS. On June 26,
2007, IBM announced the second generation of its top supercomputer, dubbed
Blue Gene/P and designed to continuously operate at speeds exceeding one
petaflop. When configured to do so, it can reach speeds in excess of three
petaflops. In June 2006, a new computer was announced by Japanese research
institute RIKEN, the MDGRAPE-3. The computer's performance tops out at one
petaflop, over three times faster than the Blue Gene/L. MDGRAPE-3 is not a
general purpose computer, which is why it does not appear in the TOP500
list. It has special-purpose pipelines for simulating molecular dynamics.
MDGRAPE-3 houses 4,808 custom processors, 64 servers each with 256 dual-core
processors, and 37 servers each containing 74 processors, for a total of
40,314 processor cores, compared to the 131,072 needed for the Blue Gene/L.
MDGRAPE-3 is able to do many more computations with few chips because of its
specialized architecture. The computer is a joint project between Riken,
Hitachi, Intel, and NEC subsidiary SGI Japan."

Excerpt from http://www.answers.com/topic/flops?cat=technology

[note above -- specialized architecture. -- That's for specialized
applications. It can be "tuned" to do a much smaller set of operations and
have those simplified. If you are familiar with RISC (Reduced Instruction
Set Code) you know how important that can be.]

FACE
.

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