It looks like ATI plans to take a similar path with GPUs as with CPUs. Rather than keep making GPUs bigger and bigger with resulting increases in cost, power consumption and heat, it looks like they plan to make smaller GPUs and use more than one together to build high end products. The little I've read indicates that they will be using multiple dies.
This approach has some manufacturing advantages. If you can build a range of product with a single type of die, it would cost less to manufacture. Only one mask to have made. Larger quantities of a single chip. With smaller dies, a defect would spoil a smaller percentage of the wafer. Yield would increase. I know a bit about SMP, but close to nothing about the Crossfire/SLI style multiple GPU systems. How well does it scale? How much extra work is it to create a multiple GPU system? Would it be feasible for OGP to go this route? If we can, this could allow us to be *far* more competitive while keeping chip fab costs down. We could build a single board with, say, 8 sockets. A user could buy a 1 GPU board, and if their needs increased they could add additional GPUs later, rather than having to buy an entire new board and throwing the old one away. More cost effective and greener. ---------- It looks like ray tracing and radiosity are going to become more and more important. Does OGP need to do anything to be ready for this? (e.g. architecture to support it) _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
