Japanese Company Puts Together 800 TFLOP GPU for Real-Time Ray Tracing

Paul Lilly — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:30:59 -0500

Think your dual-GPU GTX 295 videocard is anything to write home about? It's still the king of desktop videocards, but it does't come anywhere close to offering 800 teraflops of processing power. That's the amount a Japanese company has to work with, which has mashed together nine 73-core chips into a single system. And as daunting as that may sound, it fits inside a typical ATX desktop setup.

Before anyone asks, the answer is 'no,' it won't run Crysis. Not because it can't, but because it's not aimed at gaming. Those 800 TFLOPs of number crunching provide real-time ray traced rendering and is being aimed at automotive design.

As for how the 45nm super GPU works, Arstechnia has put together a fantastic article describing all the gritty details, includng the complex bus directing all that traffic. Give it a glance here, then tell us what you'd like to use this kind of GPU computing power for (Folding, anyone?).

Image Credit: davidlarkin.files.wordpress.com

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Japanese Company Puts Together 800 TFLOP GPU for Real-Time Ray Tracing