I was catching up on my reading and came across an interesting article in the September
2005 IEEE Computer Society "Computer" magazine.
The gist of the particular article was that the graphics processors on many high-end PC
video cards are overlooked for applications requiring heavy number-crunching. What caught
my eye was the chart that illustrated that the Nvidia G70 graphics processor now performs
at about 170 GFlops! (A dual-core Pentium 4 running at 3 GHz, by contrast, will do about
20 GFlops).
Granted, this is 32-bit vector floating point arithmetic, but the raw numbers are pretty
stunning.
It simply doesn't seem that long ago that Neil Lincoln was telling me how wonderful
his liquid nitrogen-cooled high-density CMOS vector supercomputer was going to be in that
it would be the first to break the 10 Gflop mark. (This was the ill-fated ETA Systems one
and only ETA-10 supercomputer).
Now we have 170 GFlops on the desktop to draw pictures!
Times certainly do change. Does anyone know what became of very few ETA-10's that
were built? Museum or landfill?
Cheers,
Chuck