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AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs

14 points by profquail 17y ago

petercooper 17y ago
The development of GPUs never ceases to amaze me - they keep pulling some crazy speed increases out of the bag. It's the usage/market side that pisses me off - continually horrible integrated graphics in all but the high end systems and Apple continuing to rip us off to get a decent graphics card in the Mac Pro.. eugh (£280 for a Mac HD 4870 in the UK.. $460ish).
- sp332 17y ago
  The color scheme reminds me of older Cray supercomputers. http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/Cray-039-s-Supercomputers-Are-Slowly-Becoming-Hypercomputers-2.jpg http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/Cray-039-s-Supercomputer... I wonder if there's something about it that visually indicates "there's a ridiculous amount of parallel computing power in here"? Edit: apparently the CM-5 supercomputer had a very similar color scheme as well. http://encarta.msn.com/media_461569032_761563087_-1_1/CM-5_Supercomputer.html http://encarta.msn.com/media_461569032_761563087_-1_1/CM-5_S...
  - petercooper 17y ago
    Well spotted!
  - dtf 17y ago
    Funny, SGI used to use racy colours for all their boxen too. Yesterday's announcement of the plain-Jane Octane III was such a disappointment in that respect.
- ROFISH 17y ago
  I don't know this for sure, but I heard you can put a consumer video card in a Mac Pro. You cannot boot from it, nor use it in OS X (due to both lack of drivers and EFI support), but it will work in Windows via Boot Camp.
  - petercooper 17y ago
    Yeah, you're right, although I've looked into it and it's often far from easy (especially with power cable and slot requirements for PCIx channels and double width cards). I was going to get the ridiculously expensive HD 4870 from Apple but there were a lot of complaints about it simply not working in Windows under Boot Camp which freaked me out a bit. Supposedly Apple's response to that was they don't "support" that..
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- shinratdr 17y ago
  I bit the bullet and paid almost that much for a reflashed PC ATI 4870, but with 1GB of VRAM as opposed to the Apple stock card's 512. I resent all the obstacles I encountered getting a decent graphics card & Windows 7 64-bit on my Mac Pro 1,1, but now that it is done I'm quite happy with it. The card performs very well in both Windows & OS X. The whole "no 64 bit SL kernel on EFI32" however is more than I can deal with. I can work around 64 bit Windows not booting properly & and the Boot Camp drivers denying installation on a 1,1 Mac Pro. I can pay a stupid amount for a decent graphics card because Apple provides NO upgrade option for 1,1 owners, not even an expensive one. But as it stands, there is simply no way to work around the 64 bit kernel problem. I'm not interested in using it now, but from the way things look I'll never be able to use it on this machine, even when Apple makes it default. The moral of this is never trust Apple to be reasonable or care at all about a product they can't hype up or sell to millions of people. Upgrades fall into this category. Only buy a Mac if you really like OS X. If you are looking for the absolute best of both worlds, Apple will cripple you intentionally & unintentionally along the way in ways you can't even predict. I'm not defending it, I hate it & it sucks. But its true. Good thing I really like OS X. Oh and if you do buy the card, do tell me if it still causes your mouse to freeze every 3 seconds with dual 3rd party monitors. Thats a fun one to troubleshoot, especially right after a 400 dollar purchase! Oh, Apple.
anigbrowl 17y ago
Cool stuff - glad to see some wins for AMD. Pity the review was so focused on games stuff - I'd love to have seen some OpenGL results for GPU-enabled packages like Adobe Photoshop or Luxology's Modo, but games are obviously where the cutting edge is at...though there's a disruption opportunity for a manufacturer with enough vision to build an authoring application around an existing game compositing/ rendering/ physics library. 2.7 billion transistors blows my mind - that's almost 4x what the current Xeons have. GPU obviously have a totally different architecture. and this at 40nm...with Intel announcing yesterday that they've got working 22nm(!) chips, the future possibilities are exciting.

14 points by profquail 17y ago

The development of GPUs never ceases to amaze me - they keep pulling some crazy speed increases out of the bag. It's the usage/market side that pisses me off - continually horrible integrated graphics in all but the high end systems and Apple continuing to rip us off to get a decent graphics card in the Mac Pro.. eugh (£280 for a Mac HD 4870 in the UK.. $460ish).

sp332 17y ago
The color scheme reminds me of older Cray supercomputers. http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/Cray-039-s-Supercomputers-Are-Slowly-Becoming-Hypercomputers-2.jpg http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/Cray-039-s-Supercomputer... I wonder if there's something about it that visually indicates "there's a ridiculous amount of parallel computing power in here"? Edit: apparently the CM-5 supercomputer had a very similar color scheme as well. http://encarta.msn.com/media_461569032_761563087_-1_1/CM-5_Supercomputer.html http://encarta.msn.com/media_461569032_761563087_-1_1/CM-5_S...
- petercooper 17y ago
  Well spotted!
- dtf 17y ago
  Funny, SGI used to use racy colours for all their boxen too. Yesterday's announcement of the plain-Jane Octane III was such a disappointment in that respect.
ROFISH 17y ago
I don't know this for sure, but I heard you can put a consumer video card in a Mac Pro. You cannot boot from it, nor use it in OS X (due to both lack of drivers and EFI support), but it will work in Windows via Boot Camp.
- petercooper 17y ago
  Yeah, you're right, although I've looked into it and it's often far from easy (especially with power cable and slot requirements for PCIx channels and double width cards). I was going to get the ridiculously expensive HD 4870 from Apple but there were a lot of complaints about it simply not working in Windows under Boot Camp which freaked me out a bit. Supposedly Apple's response to that was they don't "support" that..
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
shinratdr 17y ago
I bit the bullet and paid almost that much for a reflashed PC ATI 4870, but with 1GB of VRAM as opposed to the Apple stock card's 512. I resent all the obstacles I encountered getting a decent graphics card & Windows 7 64-bit on my Mac Pro 1,1, but now that it is done I'm quite happy with it. The card performs very well in both Windows & OS X. The whole "no 64 bit SL kernel on EFI32" however is more than I can deal with. I can work around 64 bit Windows not booting properly & and the Boot Camp drivers denying installation on a 1,1 Mac Pro. I can pay a stupid amount for a decent graphics card because Apple provides NO upgrade option for 1,1 owners, not even an expensive one. But as it stands, there is simply no way to work around the 64 bit kernel problem. I'm not interested in using it now, but from the way things look I'll never be able to use it on this machine, even when Apple makes it default. The moral of this is never trust Apple to be reasonable or care at all about a product they can't hype up or sell to millions of people. Upgrades fall into this category. Only buy a Mac if you really like OS X. If you are looking for the absolute best of both worlds, Apple will cripple you intentionally & unintentionally along the way in ways you can't even predict. I'm not defending it, I hate it & it sucks. But its true. Good thing I really like OS X. Oh and if you do buy the card, do tell me if it still causes your mouse to freeze every 3 seconds with dual 3rd party monitors. Thats a fun one to troubleshoot, especially right after a 400 dollar purchase! Oh, Apple.

anigbrowl 17y ago

Cool stuff - glad to see some wins for AMD. Pity the review was so focused on games stuff - I'd love to have seen some OpenGL results for GPU-enabled packages like Adobe Photoshop or Luxology's Modo, but games are obviously where the cutting edge is at...though there's a disruption opportunity for a manufacturer with enough vision to build an authoring application around an existing game compositing/ rendering/ physics library. 2.7 billion transistors blows my mind - that's almost 4x what the current Xeons have. GPU obviously have a totally different architecture. and this at 40nm...with Intel announcing yesterday that they've got working 22nm(!) chips, the future possibilities are exciting.