AMD breaks Teraflop limit (with Firestream 9250 GPU PCIe express card).

On a sunny day (Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:22:20 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Yevgen
Barsukov wrote in
:

Do you think it would be fundamentally possible to Re-use graphic
cards GPU
for floating-point math done on non-graphic programs that run on the
PC, _without_
creating a special card based on same hardware such as FireStream?

Yes this is possible.


E.g. while I am not running Crisis on my expensive graphic card,
could I use my graphic-card resources running Mathcad 10 times faster?

If mathcad would support the card.... some speedup could perhaps be
obtained.


Also graphic cards being much more
mainstream compared to floating point accelerators, it looks like such
dual-purpose solution
would be much cheaper...

Graphics or video cards have been used for multiple purposes since the
beginning of computing, I once used to keep a copy of CP/M CCP in the
video memory for fast reboot.

At the moment these cards are for example used for accelerating high definition
TV H264 encoding, to very high speed:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/suche...594/;words=GPU

It is up to the software vendors to support those cards...