Archive for April 2012

I won't elaborate on what a supercomputer is - the term used for these devices says enough by itself. But how powerful is a supercomputer, exactly?

To make a comparison between your computer's processor and a supercomputer, multiply your computer's power by 1000... Then imagine a room completely filled with such computers, all stacked one atop another, linked through an incredibly fast network. A software that would take years to process certain data on a home computer would take mere seconds to perform the same task on a supercomputer.

If you weren't familiar with them until  now, this should create a fairly vivid picture of how fast a supercomputer actually is.

Even though somehow running Crysis 2 on such a machine would be every gamers dream, these devices are used for serious business - they perform climate analysis, energy analysis, run nuclear explosion simulations, are used for human genome research; basically, everything that requires handling enormous amounts of data in a very short amount of time.

At this moment, the fastest of the fastest - a giant among giants, is Roadrunner, developed and operated by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It operates at one petaflop per second - that's tens of thousands of trillions calculations done in a single second.

IBM designed the system for this machine - let's just hope that they don't plan to give it an AI.

AMD has really done it this time; their new AMD Radeon HD 6990 has surpassed all expectations and is, without question, the best and fastest graphics card currently on the market.

Even though the runner-up, the currently best Nvidia has to offer - Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 - stays far behind AMD in performance.

- This beasts main advantage are it's dual GPUs, which give it unparalleled speed.

- Even though it's two CPI slots wide, the card easily fits into a single CPI slot.

- 4GB of GDDR5 memory.

- Includes a microswitch that allows you to automatically overclock the device.

- It's core clock speed of 830 MHz (880 MHz in it's overclocked setting) sweeps the floor with Nvidias 607 MHz.

- It has a memory speed of 2.5 GHz - also outshining Nvidia, whose very best (at the moment) has a memory of 1.7 GHz.

- The card is rated up to 375 W (415 W if overclocked) - but don't let this worry you - this card has a much more improved cooling system than it's predecessors - handling up to 450 W.

So far, the only cons I can find for this piece of hardware are the price and the noise; although worth the $700 if put to good use, it stands out as the most expensive graphics card currently on the market. As for the noise, it's definitely loud, especially while under heavy use, although this is not that big of an issue, since the noise is under bearable limits.

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