Return of the Math Co-Processor

pixel_pimppixel_pimp
Posted:
in Future Apple Hardware edited January 2014
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,60791,00.html



http://www.clearspeed.com/



Crazy! 25 gigaflop daughter card.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    jeremiah richjeremiah rich Posts: 853member
    Dude, my Mac Classic outperforms that by like 20 times!
  • Reply 2 of 3
    dr. zoidbergdr. zoidberg Posts: 155member
    very interesting. the question is, will we be able to stick it into a mac?
  • Reply 3 of 3
    splinemodelsplinemodel Posts: 7,311member
    GPU's can make 25 GFlops look pitiful. they are the new math co-processors.



    Quote:

    Similar capabilities are already built into Apple's G4 and G5 Macs, which have a floating-point co-processor called AltiVec, which handles complex, data-intensive calculations for the main processor. But whereas AltiVec is four-way parallel, ClearSpeed's chip is 64-way, the company said.



    "You might class it as a big evolutionary step of AltiVec," said Mike Calise, ClearSpeed's president.



    The second generation of the chip will be 128-way parallel, and then 256, and so on, Calise said.



    OK, so that means that no compiler will work with these things, and that few developers will adopt. The market will be niche. On a sem-unrelated note, these are closer to early Cray's in terms of the parallel-ness.



    Next.
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