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Grex Hardware Item 183: what's old is new again...
Entered by eprom on Tue Mar 21 00:14:55 UTC 2006:

AMD ponders maths boost to quad-core Opterons

By Tony Smith
15th March 2006 15:33 GMT

AMD is in talks with UK co-processor company Clearspeed in a bid to
boost the performance of future multi-core x86 CPUs, it has emerged.
It's not hard to see why. Clearspeed's current CSX600 design can provide
a huge floating point boost.

Clearspeed's co-processors accelerate compute-intensive maths library
operations in much the same way GPUs accelerate graphics operations.
They not only bring their own processing horsepower to the table, but
free the CPU up for other tasks. Time was when maths co-processors were
commonplace add-ons to integer maths-focused CPUs.

The CSX600, launched in June 2005, contains an multi-threaded array of
96 processor cores each with 6KB of memory and sharing 128KB of
scratchpad RAM. Clearspeed says the part consumes no more than 10W yet
delivers 250,000 1024-point complex floating point operations each
second. The company targets high-performance computing applications -
the kind of area AMD is keen to get Opteron chips into.

Interestingly, it's not just AMD who's taken an interest in Clearspeed.
Last week, Intel co-published a paper on using Clearspeed's twin-chip
Advance board to boost Intel Math Kernel Library operations significantly.

Clearspeed last year also announced a huge supercomputer win in Japan by
teaming with Sun on what should become the country's largest cluster.


source:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/03/15/amd_clearspeed_opteron_maths_co-pro
/

5 responses total.

#1 of 5 by eprom on Tue Mar 21 00:22:32 2006:

Coincidently there was a blurb mentioned on Slashdot today about Nvidia,
a graphics card maker, planning to move the physics processing thats
done by the CPU onto their GPU, which supposedly will improve the
performance of the frame rate by a factor of 10x.

#2 of 5 by ball on Tue Mar 21 19:27:38 2006:

Perhaps we need a PPU?

#3 of 5 by eprom on Wed Mar 22 00:06:23 2006:

that would be interesting if, like graphic cards, you could buy new
Plug-n-Play 'physics cards' as they become obsolecent by smaller and faster
semiconductor chips.

#4 of 5 by ball on Wed Mar 22 05:01:14 2006:

...at least until they're cheap enough that they get shoved
into the chipset along with most other things.

#5 of 5 by gull on Fri Mar 24 22:32:12 2006:

It always strikes me as weird that in British English, "maths" is 
plural, but "sport" is singular.

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