Posts tagged with ATI Radeon
Dreaming of Dumplings 2
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 1:04 PM
Loading ...Last year I wrote about how I find that visits to Asia always challenge assumptions – my recent visit to China earlier this month reinforced that feeling.
The main reason for the trip was to participate in the China launch of our VISION Technology from AMD retail merchandising approach. Held in Beijing, it was a great opportunity to extend the idea of VISION ― talking directly to the everyday consumer about daily usage (as opposed to the gadget geeks who want to talk about technology), and in one of the fastest-growing consumer markets in the world.
The China team customized the logo and as you can see they added some Chinese characters and as ever they used the language to help bring deeper meaning to the concept of VISION. Translated (they tell me) the symbols mean “see” and “feel”.
Looks (and sounds) good to me.
Following the launch and some customer meetings, we then headed to Shanghai. This was my first visit to the city and I have to say it’s somewhere that I could live. If Beijing is like Washington, D.C. then Shanghai is more like New York. We had a great dinner downtown in an “ex-pat” area but I was not tempted by the American steakhouse ― there are some things we just do better in Texas, and steak is one of them.
While in Shanghai we visited the Shanghai Supercomputer Center. Not only do they have one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, the Dawning 4000A based on the AMD Opteron™ processor, they have a very excellent museum ― although their “historical” section includes machines I have sold during my career (a sign of age, alas).
4 of the Top 5
Elsewhere in China they are using AMD GPUs to break new records, helping make four out of the top five most powerful supercomputers in the world ones based on AMD technology.
The Tianhe-1, which is the 5th most powerful supercomputer in the world, is a very large cluster of 5120 ATI GPUs based on the RV770 architecture (the processor you will find in the higher-end ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 series of cards). Not only is this is the first petaflop GPU cluster, it is the first to break into the Top Ten list, as well as AMD’s first large-scale deployment employing ATI Stream Technology in technical applications. The system also used Intel-based x86 CPUs – which proves that we design our technology to leverage open and interoperable standards.
For the tech-heads among you, the system should be around 563.1 TFLOPS on Linpack (60% from GPUs) and will have a peak performance of 1.2 PFLOPS (80% from GPUs). The cluster’s primary workload will consist of scientific applications such as oil and gas exploration.
I really think this in an interesting example of how “balanced systems” – by which I mean those which combine CPUs and GPUs – are becoming a mainstream solution. Moreover, additional power comes from adding more GPUs and not CPUs. Something gamers already have learned.
By the way, the name “Tianhe” literally means “galaxy” (actually translates to “river in sky”), which is pretty much where the limit is for this next generation of supercomputers.
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
Speaking Directly
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 11:01 PM
(14 votes, average: 4.14 out of 5)So the ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series is the first and only fully-compliant DirectX 11 graphics processor in the market. I get that. It is going to be ‘the thing’ that every game player worth their fragging-rights needs this holiday, if not before. I get that too. It is going to run the best and most exciting games ever with sexy stuff like tesselation. I even get that.
What I also get is – it’s about so much more than playing games.
The “more” is around something called DirectCompute. In many ways it’s the feature that my favorite applications are going to benefit from more than any other so I thought it would be worth spending a blog on.
DirectCompute is a component of the DirectX11 API to be released with Windows 7. It is fundamentally designed to enable GPU compute and enables applications to take advantage of the massively parallel computing power of the GPU.
What does DirectCompute mean for users? Simple: you have two great processors in your PC – one CPU and one GPU. And your system can use both to solve problems. For some workloads, like GPU-accelerated video transcoding and rendering, this combination can really speed up your throughput.
So as you begin compiling your holiday wish list, keep your eye out for systems with this astounding GPU compute capability. But here’s my caveat emptor. When you look at specifications of GPUs, it is important to note there are different levels of support provided for DirectCompute.
One level, which AMD terms DirectCompute 10, runs on the legacy path of the DirectX 11 API to support previous generation of DirectX 10/10.1 GPUs. If offered a system with this feature, just say no. You should demand what we at AMD call Direct Compute 11. This is the only version designed to unlock the full feature set of DirectX 11 and, as I mentioned previously, the only architecture that is fundamentally designed to enable GPU compute.
For developers, DirectCompute 11 represents a paradigm shift for GPU compute development. It will now be much more straightforward for developers to code using this architecture. No longer will they have to do contortions and jump through hoops to code what they want to. DirectCompute enables new algorithms that were not possible previously. Some examples of these advanced techniques are order independent transparency, ray tracing, better shadows, and depths of field. If you are interested in more details, you can read this white paper. DirectCompute is a de-facto industry standard for developers of GPU-compute applications and as such, it should not be confused with proprietary APIs (and by “proprietary” I mean supported by only one supplier’s hardware).
These are some of the reasons why at AMD, we are excited about the ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 Series graphics products. It’s not only the first and only GPUs in the market with full DirectX 11 support it is the only one to unlock the full feature set of Windows 7 and DirectCompute 11.We are proud of this technology leadership. We believe this industry standard will accelerate industry adoption of GPU compute applications running on Windows7 and add a new dimension to the end user’s computing experience.
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
AMD Fusion, or up to 8X More Performance for No Extra Cost
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 12:42 PM
It’s pretty good when you get asked to do as a business project something that’s also your hobby. That’s what I was doing last weekend ― and I know that you wanted the details!
I first learned to edit video at school, maybe 30 years ago, on reel-to-reel Sony black and white video machines. The process was not as disruptive as, say, editing sound tape with a razor blade (see my years at the BBC about 25 years ago) but one error could ruin many hours of great work with one wrong button press.
Since then we have come a long way, and now video editing is a real-time (nearly), computer-enabled marvel. What back then only a well-funded company could do with a Quantel Paintbox, now you and I can do on PCs that, even when you go crazy and over-configure, cost less than $1000.
Ironically, the software can now cost more than that, but that is where the power is.
For many years, off-line editing on PCs was a bust for me. It was expensive and the drivers for the video boards were terrible; I used to joke that the time it took to update the drivers was faster than the time it took me to do an editing job. I did love Adobe Premiere (first really good editing software I used) but I hated the PC experience.
Truth is I went Mac!
But now, happily, I’m at AMD and have a new AMD Phenom™ II 3Gz Quad-core with Dual ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 cards. That’s one heck of a lot of processing power. But the issue for me was that, from my Mac days, I know FCP keyboard shortcuts in my sleep: since I went Mac – could I go back?
That question may now be irrelevant thanks to two pieces of software and some nifty enablement courtesy of AMD Fusion.
I will write more on Sony Vegas 9 another day (but I LOVE the new interface and it’s much faster) but today I wanted to talk about Adobe Premiere as part of the latest CS4.
The Next Wave of Video Editing
AMD has just announced a beta plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 that dramatically improves the performance of a range of complex video editing tasks. The plug-in is the result of an ongoing collaboration between Adobe and AMD engineers designed to take advantage of ATI Stream technology in a way that allocates processing between available system CPU and GPU resources for maximum application performance.
The Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 plug-in draws on the computational power of both the CPU and GPU to improve the program’s performance. ATI Stream technology allows the powerful GPU to be used for more than just graphics processing, resulting in improved general computing power. This is the industry-changing power of accelerated computing ― the power of Fusion.
In the case of the Adobe Premiere plug-in, a lot of the processing is still being handled by the multi-core CPU, but what is nice here is that I finally get to unlock ATI Stream compute acceleration capabilities sitting on those ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards. Great graphics cards are not just for gamers.
It’s hard for me to give exact measures of the improvement at home ― I just don’t have the measurement tools, but our labs (who have those tools) tell me with the latest Catalyst driver you can see up to 8 times greater encoding performance. 1
More specifically, for those looking to build DVDs (or in need of MPEG2 streams) the AMD Fast MPEG2 encoder performs over 178% faster than Adobe default encoder.2 I still like H.264 for quality and compression and the AMD Fast H.264 encoder performs up to 668% faster than Adobe default encoder.
I also dipped into the latest version of Adobe Photoshop and there are lots of ATI Stream accelerated features there too – more on that another time.
Editing has been almost real-time for a few years, and now I’m waiting for rendering and compression to catch up. In a pre-Stream world it took 8 hours to render my China Olympics video which ended up being 50 GB ― now I need to compress that to fit onto a DVD and onto a Blu-ray. The beta plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 is really starting to take huge chunks out of that problem.
The future really does seem to be about Fusion.
Now if we could just get Blu-ray players to work faster…
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
1The Beta plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4 demonstrates significant increases in video encoding performance. When installed, the plug-in encoded an H.264, 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second, High Quality file in 47.3s; without the plug-in, Adobe Premiere Pro encoded the same file in 372.5s (Custom pre-set based on 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second High Quality where Video Bitrate = CBR 15 Mbps & Audio Bitrate = 128 kbps), demonstrating an almost 8x faster encode time. The input file size for each comparison was 367 MB.
System Specifications: AMD Phenom™ II X4 955 3.2GHz processor; 8GB Corsair Dominator CM3X2G1866C9D memory; Sapphire ATI Radeon™ HD4870 1024MB; Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1. Performance of the Adobe Premiere Plug-In will vary based on system configuration, ATI Radeon product, source file and output settings used.
2The Beta plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4 demonstrates significant increases in video encoding performance. When installed, the plug-in encoded an MPEG2, 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second, High Quality file in 38.8s; without the plug-in, Adobe Premiere Pro encoded the same file in 108s (Custom pre-set based on 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second High Quality where Video Bitrate = CBR 15 Mbps & Audio Bitrate = 192 kbps), demonstrating over 178% faster encode time.
At GDC09, Game On! with Open Standards and the Visual Experience
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 9:30 AM
We kept ourselves busy last week at the Game Developers Conference 2009 ― the show of the year for game developers. While there was talk about some attendance drop-off as the economy takes its toll on what some consider a “recession-proof” industry, in some ways GDC is more relevant than ever.
Openness
Openness was a big theme in our discussions at the show. When we engage with developers, open industry standards are always top of mind ―the industry wants standards that are open and interoperable – we understand this and want to help enable it.
We applaud our friends at Mozilla and Khronos who are working to create a standard for accelerated 3D graphics on the Web. While delivering web-based games with 3D graphics may be in a primitive state today, this could eventually provide the Web with a new visual dimension not only for online gaming but for applications yet to be created. The possibilities are endless and exciting.
We announced our own 3D graphics initiative last week with a beta release of AMD GPU PerfStudio 2.0, a platform-agnostic development tool for 3D graphics technology. With the tool, debugging is free to all developers, and ― as you should expect ― is based on open standards.
The Visual Experience
Another big theme at GDC this year was the visual experience ― something I predict is only going to continue to gain in importance, and not just for gamers. As CNET keenly pointed out, game play trumps beauty every time. When you’re at the cutting edge of a technology, it’s easy to focus on form over function.
At the same time, putting tools in the hands of developers to create cinema-quality games has delivered great innovation as well ― just look at Ruby.
I spoke last July about the advent of Eye-Definition computing when we launched our Cinema 2.0 initiative. How have we moved the needle since then?
- Game realism, scale and reach are becoming increasingly advanced. Until recently the technology to deliver cinema-quality video games was just not there. With our ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 series our goal is to help developers make the most realistic games possible. And with over 1 TeraFLOPS of computing power in a single card, we’ve come much closer to achieving that goal.
- As AMD’s Neal Robison and Jules Urbach discussed in their GDC session on game physics and realism, developers rely on the total computing resources available to deliver the best gaming experience possible. We’re working with Havok to use their real-time physical simulations on ATI Stream technology to serve up unparalleled user experience. What’s great about this is that developers can access both CPU and GPU compute resources with OpenCL – bringing Fusion to life!
- We also announced the availability of the ATI FirePro™ V7750 graphics accelerator for the high-end. For you graphics professionals, I urge you to give this a shot. Large models, shader-intense apps, the ATI FirePro V7750 has its cake and eats it too. No reason why you shouldn’t as well.
Happy gaming!
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.