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leejsmith · 05-18-2004, 02:22 AM

this is a little off topic but interesting.

from overclockers.au

A few weeks ago I went to an ATI technology briefing for their X800 product. I asked Daniel Taranovsky, who was presenting the technical info, about the X800's power requirements - it only has a single molex 12V connector. Apparently the card will run fine without the extra power connected, unlike the R9700/R9800 which will refuse to boot. Only when you really stress the card does it need the connector. Obviously you're going to leave it plugged in all the time, but it's an indicator of the efficiency of the new GPU.

One other thing I mentioned to Daniel was the possibility of using the GPU's power to supplement the CPU. I remember a couple of years ago there was some talk of a Linux driver for this - I don't know what stage of development it's up to now - but I explained how it seems silly to have a powerful GPU sitting idle on the graphics card while, for example, the CPU is working to the limit in an excel spreadsheet or similar. Having worked in financial IT for a few years, I've seen certain financial models that took literally hours to calculate. Imagine if you could hand some of the work over to your video card processor. You could see the benefits for Folding@HOME or even shorter-timeframe tasks like compression or encryption. Daniel was very interested in this idea and didn't think it would be particularly hard to implement. Should we be keeping an eye out for this feature in a future Windows driver?

the top end gpu's are just as powerful as some cpu's and we pay a lot of money for them to only work hard when we play games. So i think this would be a good feature.

05-18-2004, 02:22 AM	#21
leejsmith Cooling Savant Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: notts uk Posts: 408	this is a little off topic but interesting. from overclockers.au A few weeks ago I went to an ATI technology briefing for their X800 product. I asked Daniel Taranovsky, who was presenting the technical info, about the X800's power requirements - it only has a single molex 12V connector. Apparently the card will run fine without the extra power connected, unlike the R9700/R9800 which will refuse to boot. Only when you really stress the card does it need the connector. Obviously you're going to leave it plugged in all the time, but it's an indicator of the efficiency of the new GPU. One other thing I mentioned to Daniel was the possibility of using the GPU's power to supplement the CPU. I remember a couple of years ago there was some talk of a Linux driver for this - I don't know what stage of development it's up to now - but I explained how it seems silly to have a powerful GPU sitting idle on the graphics card while, for example, the CPU is working to the limit in an excel spreadsheet or similar. Having worked in financial IT for a few years, I've seen certain financial models that took literally hours to calculate. Imagine if you could hand some of the work over to your video card processor. You could see the benefits for Folding@HOME or even shorter-timeframe tasks like compression or encryption. Daniel was very interested in this idea and didn't think it would be particularly hard to implement. Should we be keeping an eye out for this feature in a future Windows driver? the top end gpu's are just as powerful as some cpu's and we pay a lot of money for them to only work hard when we play games. So i think this would be a good feature. __________________ Folding , Folding , Folding !