Keith75
10-06-2005, 04:31 AM
The real innovation however is just an idea at this time, but promises to have a major impact on the industry, if brought to reality. Heye mentioned that ATI plans to open the hardware architecture of the X1000 to allow third party developers to write non-graphics-related applications to run on the graphics processor. The company calls this feature "dynamic load balancing."
Compared to a Pentium 4 CPU, which delivers a floating point performance of 12 GFLOPs and a bandwidth of just under 6 GByte per second, a graphics processor is a calculation monster: According to ATI, an X1800 XT chip reaches 83 GFlops and 42 GByte per second. The full performance of a graphics may not always be needed - especially in dual-graphics environments - and users will be able to relocate processing power to other applications. According to ATI, these applications could include scientific applications such as fluid dynamics, but also entertainment-related functions such as physics or 3D audio processing. Similar features have been demonstrated by academic projects in the past on ATI and Nvidia platforms, but dynamic load balancing as described by ATI officials promises a whole new use of graphics processors.
The company expects GPU specific third-party API's to become common within a few years - with one of the most promising being physics processing: ATI believes that graphics chips provide enough power to cover the features that are currently promoted by Ageia. If ATI's vision comes true, Ageia's business model of a physics board for every gaming PC may become unnecessary before the startup's technology has reached a critical market penetration.
Compared to a Pentium 4 CPU, which delivers a floating point performance of 12 GFLOPs and a bandwidth of just under 6 GByte per second, a graphics processor is a calculation monster: According to ATI, an X1800 XT chip reaches 83 GFlops and 42 GByte per second. The full performance of a graphics may not always be needed - especially in dual-graphics environments - and users will be able to relocate processing power to other applications. According to ATI, these applications could include scientific applications such as fluid dynamics, but also entertainment-related functions such as physics or 3D audio processing. Similar features have been demonstrated by academic projects in the past on ATI and Nvidia platforms, but dynamic load balancing as described by ATI officials promises a whole new use of graphics processors.
The company expects GPU specific third-party API's to become common within a few years - with one of the most promising being physics processing: ATI believes that graphics chips provide enough power to cover the features that are currently promoted by Ageia. If ATI's vision comes true, Ageia's business model of a physics board for every gaming PC may become unnecessary before the startup's technology has reached a critical market penetration.