Being among the first to get a hold of the new GPU - and multiples of them at that, in this case AMD Radeon HD7970 'Tahiti' has its advantages, one of them running a lot of tests for the first time for the public to see. In our case, benchmonkey Lennard ran quite a few such benchmark tests on one, two, three and, of course, four cards in parallel. You'd have noticed that the results from the compute tests scaled just as well, if not even better, than the 3-D graphics ones, which on their own did a wonderful scaling job as well - notice even the 3Dmark and Heaven test scaling gains between one and four cards!
Putting aside the numbers, which you can see on our site and widely across the Net now as well, the impact is interesting. The AMD GCN new GPU architecture, which basically looks a lot like a vector FP processor surrounded by graphics acceleration hardware, did provide for much higher usable vs peak FP rate, especially for double precision FP critical for mainstream PC and HPC applications. On top of it, the OpenCL programming model has now matured well to handle single and multiple tasks with many threads being well balanced and spread across multiple GPUs, which the benchmark performance gains when running on up to four GPUs have shown.
One important thing here is that the GPU compute is not limited by CrossFire - or SLI, on Nvidia - four-GPU barrier. If your application, or multiple tasks, can handle it, and the underlying board has enough PCIe slots to support it, there's nothing to stop you from having, say, eight or more GPUs in a single system, all running GPU compute and/or graphics at the same time. For instance, the upcoming Xeon E5 4600 quad-socket LGA 2011 platform, slated for release mid year, will have a whopping 160 PCIe v3 lanes available direct from the CPUs, enabling 8 or more GPU cards in the system. If each of these is a, say, 1.1 GHz pre overclocked 6 GB RAM HD7970, it would mean a 9 TFLOPs DP FP capability in a single box, yet with 48 GB dedicated RAM on these GPUs for large local dataset processing without having to go to the over an order of magnitude slower PCIe link - keep this in mind, as having to often go to PCIe for slow data movement was one of key limitations in wider GPGPU spread.
In those apps where you can tolerate even higher PCIe latency induced by PCIe bridges present on dual-GPU cards, in return for higher total performance, that same Quad Xeon E5 box could take eight dual-GPU, say 975 MHz pre overclocked AMD HD7990, cards, and have 16 TFLOPs peak DP FP performance in a single box. Whether one can fit 2 x 6 GB RAM on a single dual-GPU card right now, remains to be seen, but it would help keep all those data away from having to shuffle over comparatively slower bridged PCIe.
Why do I mention pre-overclocked here? Well, it seems AMD was really conservative with clocking the new parts, as so many of them run comfortably even at 1.1 GHz without any voltage changes or such. The yields seem to be good, and there's nothing wrong in producing higher-end binned parts, combined with more memory, to breach the 1 TFLOP peak DP FP limit, which for these cards would be at 980 MHz GPU, or let's just round it up to 1 GHz, frequency. The extra performance helps get a few more FPS in gaming, but it means real, monetizable, compute performance in supercomputing, workstation and multimedia use.
Let's see what Nvidia answers in with the GK100 chips in the next few months, then followed by Intel's 'Knights Corner' compute version of the Larrabee project. Either way, with the new 'Tahiti' chips, GPU accelerated computing seems to be more efficient and meaningful.
2011年9月4日星期日
Original artwork doesn't have to cost your a fortune
Original art, in addition to family photographs and heirlooms, makes a home personal and individual.
But making the leap into collecting art can be intimidating, even to the bright and the bold. Perhaps that fear factor forms early, after you’ve visited art museums and spotted security guards standing on alert. Or maybe it comes from the notion that you have to be an art insider to even step inside a gallery. And, of course, there’s the price-tag issue.
“You don’t have to have a lot of money to buy art,” said Cortney Novogratz, who along with her decorator husband, Robert, has an HGTV show, “Home by Novogratz.” Original art is a major part of their design projects, and they typically spotlight an artist in each episode.
“Original art reflects who you are as a person, as a family, much more than buying something from a chain store,” she said.
For those who haven’t purchased art before, Novogratz advises going to art fairs to get an overview of what’s out there. She has attended Art Basel Miami Beach, where more than 2,000 international artists exhibit their work.
“You discover what your tastes are,” she said. “You quickly learn there’s more out there than paintings, which is what people think of as art. There’s photography, ceramics, charcoal and pencil drawings, glass and furniture. Some designer chairs we purchased have really held their value.”
The next step is visiting galleries, intimidating at first for the uninitiated art seeker.
“They have the power, not the gallery owner,” said John O’Brien, owner of Dolphin, a gallery and custom framer in the West Bottoms area of Kansas City. “I always tell people to take their time. Get a feel for what you like and don’t like.”
Galleries are Novogratz’s preferred method for buying art.
“Yes, online is the world we live in, but I like to see where my money’s going and to meet the artist,” she said. “It makes art a richer experience.”
For 32-year-old Erica Wren of Leawood, Kan., though, the Web is a great research tool. A gallery site led last year to her first major art purchase.
“I was hopping around websites, as usual, being a design junkie,” said Wren, vice president of communications at Barkley, a Kansas City-based advertising and marketing agency. “I came across pieces by artist Eric Zener, and I was struck by them.”
So Wren made an appointment with Blue Gallery in the Crossroads Arts District to see some of the California artist’s works. Gallery owner Kelly Kuhn let Wren take home several on approval, a common try-before-you-buy practice among gallery owners and customers. Wren loved the piece “Bursting Through,” a photograph of a woman submerged in water that was painted with silver leaf on a light box. She discussed it with her family before buying.
“Usually I’m a muller-over when it comes to purchases for the home,” she said. “But the piece and its title resonated with me. Art shows a commitment to something unique. I think it’s important to support the arts, which is more underfunded than ever with the cuts nationwide.”
Wren now has a book of Zener’s art that he inscribed to her. She hopes to meet him one day.
Novogratz asks artists questions beyond what inspired their work. She’ll ask how many prints were made of a photograph. She also discusses decorative elements with the artist, such as framing: Lucite box or chipped wooden molding?
Artist Lonnie Powell of Lee’s Summit enjoys meeting patrons and discussing his work, much of which is portraiture of black men and women in oil, acrylic, charcoal, pencil, pastel and watercolors. Like most artists, he prefers people purchase what he has created from his own mind’s eye and hands. But for a 60 percent retainer, he accepts commissions for custom work, a common practice.
“It helps prevent art by committee,” said Powell, whose work hangs in the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and the H&R Block and Sprint headquarters. “That committee could be a family. It’s best when an individual makes decisions. Art is personal.”
Still, Novogratz has found it works best when couples act as a unified front on purchasing art.
“It shouldn’t be stressful,” she says. “It should be fun. Remind each other we found each other, so we can definitely decide on pieces of art together.”
But making the leap into collecting art can be intimidating, even to the bright and the bold. Perhaps that fear factor forms early, after you’ve visited art museums and spotted security guards standing on alert. Or maybe it comes from the notion that you have to be an art insider to even step inside a gallery. And, of course, there’s the price-tag issue.
“You don’t have to have a lot of money to buy art,” said Cortney Novogratz, who along with her decorator husband, Robert, has an HGTV show, “Home by Novogratz.” Original art is a major part of their design projects, and they typically spotlight an artist in each episode.
“Original art reflects who you are as a person, as a family, much more than buying something from a chain store,” she said.
For those who haven’t purchased art before, Novogratz advises going to art fairs to get an overview of what’s out there. She has attended Art Basel Miami Beach, where more than 2,000 international artists exhibit their work.
“You discover what your tastes are,” she said. “You quickly learn there’s more out there than paintings, which is what people think of as art. There’s photography, ceramics, charcoal and pencil drawings, glass and furniture. Some designer chairs we purchased have really held their value.”
The next step is visiting galleries, intimidating at first for the uninitiated art seeker.
“They have the power, not the gallery owner,” said John O’Brien, owner of Dolphin, a gallery and custom framer in the West Bottoms area of Kansas City. “I always tell people to take their time. Get a feel for what you like and don’t like.”
Galleries are Novogratz’s preferred method for buying art.
“Yes, online is the world we live in, but I like to see where my money’s going and to meet the artist,” she said. “It makes art a richer experience.”
For 32-year-old Erica Wren of Leawood, Kan., though, the Web is a great research tool. A gallery site led last year to her first major art purchase.
“I was hopping around websites, as usual, being a design junkie,” said Wren, vice president of communications at Barkley, a Kansas City-based advertising and marketing agency. “I came across pieces by artist Eric Zener, and I was struck by them.”
So Wren made an appointment with Blue Gallery in the Crossroads Arts District to see some of the California artist’s works. Gallery owner Kelly Kuhn let Wren take home several on approval, a common try-before-you-buy practice among gallery owners and customers. Wren loved the piece “Bursting Through,” a photograph of a woman submerged in water that was painted with silver leaf on a light box. She discussed it with her family before buying.
“Usually I’m a muller-over when it comes to purchases for the home,” she said. “But the piece and its title resonated with me. Art shows a commitment to something unique. I think it’s important to support the arts, which is more underfunded than ever with the cuts nationwide.”
Wren now has a book of Zener’s art that he inscribed to her. She hopes to meet him one day.
Novogratz asks artists questions beyond what inspired their work. She’ll ask how many prints were made of a photograph. She also discusses decorative elements with the artist, such as framing: Lucite box or chipped wooden molding?
Artist Lonnie Powell of Lee’s Summit enjoys meeting patrons and discussing his work, much of which is portraiture of black men and women in oil, acrylic, charcoal, pencil, pastel and watercolors. Like most artists, he prefers people purchase what he has created from his own mind’s eye and hands. But for a 60 percent retainer, he accepts commissions for custom work, a common practice.
“It helps prevent art by committee,” said Powell, whose work hangs in the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and the H&R Block and Sprint headquarters. “That committee could be a family. It’s best when an individual makes decisions. Art is personal.”
Still, Novogratz has found it works best when couples act as a unified front on purchasing art.
“It shouldn’t be stressful,” she says. “It should be fun. Remind each other we found each other, so we can definitely decide on pieces of art together.”
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