A massively parallel future
Posted on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 at 1:30 PM by Malcolm
AMD has fired the first shots around a massively parallel computing architecture in the form of the ATi Radeon HD 4800 series GPGPU featuring a mind-blowing 800 cores (or shader units). A GPGPU, or General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit, blurs the distinction between CPU and GPU and promises to usher in an entirely new paradigm for programmers to learn. The future has arrived in a chip that delivers more than one teraflop of computing power, and, best of all, it has arrived in the form of a $200 (6,700 baht) mid-range graphics card.