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jski
Journeyman III

Hardware question?

Hardware?

I'm working for a mechanical engineering firm that specializes in vibration modeling (mainly for NASA).  We're trying to see if GPGPU computing is a good fit for our applications (models).

We're considering using either a Radeon 3870 or a FireStream 9170 (possibly a Radeon 4850, if it's practical in the near term?).  For the purpose of proving the applicability of GPGPU computing for our model codes, would a dedicated Radeon 3870 suffice or is a FireStream 9170 required?  With the FireStream 9250 on the cusp, I'd prefer to start with the Radeon 3870 (or possibly the 4850) and move over to the FireStream in September.

What's the scoop?

---jski

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jski
Journeyman III

I just noticed the Radeon 4870 announcement today - are there Radeon Linux drivers for it that could be used for GPGPU purposes?  Are am I pushing te raggedy edge?

--jski

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Hi jski,

Depending on your application and its needs in terms of memory, etc., you can also develop on the Radeon 3870.

Support for the Radeon 4850 will be coming in July/August for AMD Stream SDK.

Michael.
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Hi all,

Radeon 4850 seems to be not supported yet but it works for me - on 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04 system, latest fglrx, FireStream SDK Beta. As I've got it yesterday, I had no time to do anything useful yet and just played with some demos.

Sample results (from optimized_matmult_d):

 

Width   Height  Iterations      Time            Gflops        

1024    1024    100             1.235000        161.943320   

1024    1024    1000            9.271000        215.726459   
2048    2048    1000            72.445000       220.857202

4096    4096    100             59.657000       214.559901

 

Note that as 48xx cards are still not (officially) supported, I'd not recommend this configuration to any production purposes but I'd certainly wait for it instead of settling on previous generation chips. Also note that this is a single-precision calculation demo.

My (early) opinion is that RV770 is a really good chip for number crunching (at least for single precision floating point numbers), the only thing I object about the whole card is its heat sink being permanently hot (it's a 1-slot design, so I'm not too surprised about it). But it should change as soon as vendors release non-reference design cards with bigger heatsinks.

Regards,

rle

 

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Ceq
Journeyman III

Thanks for the information on the Radeon 4850, I was planning on buying one but I was concerned about Brook+ working on it before official support.
I'm also curious about 4870 because it has nearly twice the bandwidth, so kernels with low arithmetic intensity should increase performance.
I would appreciate if somebody can run the same benchmark on it and post the results.
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