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[midnightguy]

first we had the Physics Processing Unit (PPU) as a way to increase the processing power of PCs beyond the standard CPU + GPU.

now comes the floating point Co-Processor!

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050620_114721.html

Co-processors to accelerate desktop PC to 50 GFlops

By Wolfgang Gruener, Senior Editor

June 20, 2005 - 11:47 EST

San Jose (CA) - Yet another sign that the good old workstation may not be extinct: Clearspeed will demonstrate on Tuesday a co-processor PCI-X add-in card that has promises a floating point performance to 50 GFlops - about 10x the performance of a regular desktop PC.

High-end desktop PCs recently took on the role of the traditional workstation in recent years. Fierce competition in hardware and software pushed speed levels of performance PCs in a region that made it difficult for expensive workstation systems to highlight their added benefits. New innovations however set the workstation apart from a consumer desktop and could be able to bridge the widening gap to supercomputers.

If I recall, it kinda sounds like what there was in the 1980s when you could add an Intel floating point co-processor to your PC to beef up your 286 or 386.


Now, why not a CELL instead, and get a few hundred GFLOPs instead of 50 Gflops? who knows. maybe these 50 Gflop Co-Processors will be easier to use? or maybe its 50 Gflops of double precision floating point (Cell gets about 30 Gflops of DP FP) which is unlikely. I think the former is more likely.. lots of unknowns

 

[mrklaw]

what would that offer normal people though? Would it actually speed up normal applications?

Sounds like it'd be good for games, but then you'd want it on the graphics card.

 

[midnightguy]

more:

http://www.techspot.com/news/17882-Clearspeed-coprocessor-addin-card.html

Clearspeed co-processor add-in card
by Derek Sooman on Tue 21 Jun 2005, 08:34 AM
Fancy having your PC's performance boosted into the 50 GFlops range? Well, Clearspeed is today demonstrating a new PCI Express product that promises to boost floating point performance to just that. The new add-in card will be available for desktop PCs and utilises a chip called CSX600 which Clearspeed claims is the world's fastest 64-bit floating point processor, delivering a sustained performance of 25 GFlops. Clearspeed's product will use two such chips, to deliver 50 GFlops.

What makes Clearspeed's card attractive is the fact that it can be installed in an existing computer within minutes and immediately can result in added performance for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Speed increases however are purely limited to floating point operations and mainly address traditional workstation environments - such as scientific applications in the biological or network simulation segment. According to Clearspeed, enthusiasts can also take advantage of the added performance, especially with professional audio and precision rendering software. Per card, such applications can gain about 5x to 10x in speed, the company said.

 

[Ruzbeh]

Now, why not a CELL instead, and get a few hundred GFLOPs instead of 50 Gflops? who knows. maybe these 50 Gflop Co-Processors will be easier to use? or maybe its 50 Gflops of double precision floating point (Cell gets about 30 Gflops of DP FP) which is unlikely. I think the former is more likely.. lots of unknowns

Cell isn't so good for PCs, according to Steve Jobbs. I was so excited about Cell taking over x86, but it seems Sony hyped it too much.

 

[Borys]

If those "majic" PPU and Co-processor cards can give me games 10 times more detailed than Far Cry or Half-Life 2 in 2006 instead of 2010 I say bring it on.

 

[mashoutposse]

great, only 1950 more to go

 

[Zaptruder]

Cell isn't so good for PCs, according to Steve Jobbs. I was so excited about Cell taking over x86, but it seems Sony hyped it too much.

Isn't good as a primary processing unit... but I don't think he considered the option of using it as a co-processing unit.

 

[monkeyrun]

Cell isn't so good for PCs, according to Steve Jobbs. I was so excited about Cell taking over x86, but it seems Sony hyped it too much.

according to my understanding, Steve thinks Cell is pretty powerful at the moment, but not enough for him to make that kind of commitment.

and Cell probably doesn't even have a road map (it probably goes something like 2006 Cell - 3.xGhz, 2011 Cell - OMFG 1000 X 3.x GHz), so it's as good as dead to apple.

 

[Nerevar]

Cell isn't so good for PCs, according to Steve Jobbs. I was so excited about Cell taking over x86, but it seems Sony hyped it too much.

People actually thought that was going to happen? Wow.

 

[akascream]

People actually thought that was going to happen? Wow.

Yeah, it's amazing, but people still listen to Sony. KK in particular.

 

[mrklaw]

according to my understanding, Steve thinks Cell is pretty powerful at the moment, but not enough for him to make that kind of commitment.

and Cell probably doesn't even have a road map (it probably goes something like 2006 Cell - 3.xGhz, 2011 Cell - OMFG 1000 X 3.x GHz), so it's as good as dead to apple.

Thats still about 15x better than the PPC roadmap at the moment...