Fudo and his gang discovered MCP7A-GL motherboard over at Chinese Iworkstation.com.cn. This motherboard is “body of evidence” that Nvidia finally found the guts to go after the workstation market with embedded Quadro chipset. Over the course of years, I’ve seen couple of Quadro motherboards, but Nvidia never dedicated themselves to creating a market. Personally, I saw that as a big mistake, and often questioned chipset guys about professional solutions. Nvidia was afraid that the move would cannibalize their cash cow, Quadro series of cards, but that fear just didn’t made any sense – at the end of the day, a company has to increase the
Nvidia’s $50 card destroys ATI’s $500 one or “Why ATI sucks in Folding?”
As you might already know, I am a bit enthusiastic when it comes to distributed computing. I’ve been looking for aliens through SETI@home, later with BOINC… but then, Folding@Home showed up and I became an enthusiast for this valuable project from Stanford University. My family had some share of dealings with Alzheimer’s (aka AD) and Parkinson’s diseases (aka PD) and I won’t go here into what psychological and ultimately financial stress that families around the world, including my own – have to endure. Folding@Home is also a project that pioneered the use of GPUs for distributed computing (if I am wrong on this one, feel
AMD releasing professional cards to partners – Sapphire first
Ever since AMD/ATI took over FireGL, the company was the only manufacturer of professional graphics cards. FireGL, FireStream, and now FirePro – they were all coming out with ATI logo on the box. But not anymore – AMD is going the Nvidia route and starting to introduce partners who will manufacture and sell the cards in a higher-standard program than is the case with consumer cards. As logic dictates, Sapphire Technologies was the first company to release a non-AMD manufactured professional card – FireStream 9250. We expect that more companies follow suit – I remember that Diamond introduced their FireGL cards in the Radeon 2900
Folding@Home team update, new stats page ;)
I’ve been a fan of distributed computing since late 1990s, with SETI@Home running on every computer that I ever had. However, the real attractive proposition to me was running distributed computing applications on graphics cards. GPUs are much more efficient in stream computing than any CPU you could find, and I’ve tried DC apps on computers with DEC Alpha, Intel Pentium onwards, AMD K6-II onwards etc etc., but biggest jump in performance was Folding@Home on ATI Radeon X1800XTX graphics card. With the launch of this blog and the new website, I’ve decided to launch a new group, number 69864. Current name is the name of
