Hasta La Gadget!

The Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been upgraded, tackling complex climate change calculations with 20 petaflops worth of new processors. Under the (considerable) hood its NVIDIA’s “Kepler” GPUs and AMD Opetron 6274 processors doing the heavy lifting, though NVIDIA can’t resist pointing out that its graphics chips are in fact carrying 90-percent of the overall load. The GPUs, more commonly found powering gaming rigs, help make Titan “the world’s fastest supercomputer for open scientific research.”

That research will include simulating physical systems, such as weather patterns, or progressions in energy, climate change, efficient engines, materials, and other fields. However, unlike most supercomputers, where access is jealously guarded, Titan takes a more open approach to access.

Researchers from schools and universities, government labs, and private industry can access Titan – by arrangement, of course – to crunch their own data. Final testing is still underway by the laboratory and Cray, and the supercomputer’s first year will be dominated by work on the Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.

“The improvements in simulation fidelity will accelerate progress in a wide range of research areas such as alternative energy and energy efficiency, the identification and development of novel and useful materials and the opportunity for more advanced climate projections” James Hack, director of ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences, said of the new machine.

In total, there are 299,008 CPU cores, sixteen to each of 18,688 nodes; each node also has an NVIDIA Tesla K20 graphics accelerator. The cores are used to guide the simulations, while the GPUs are relied upon to do the actual data crunching; altogether, it’s more than 10x faster and 5x more power efficient than the Jaguar supercomputer Titan replaces.

In fact, Titan can simulate 1-5 years per day of computing time, whereas Jaguar took a day to work through around three months worth of data. ORNL says it’s the equivalent of “the world’s 7 billion people being able to carry out 3 million calculations per second.”

Titan supercomputer goes live with potent CPU/GPU tag team is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Now that AMD’s fresh new FX processors based on the Piledriver architecture are out in the wild, the specialist hardware sites have seen fit to benchmark the top-lining FX-8350. Overall, the group feels that AMD has at least closed the gap a bit on Intel’s Core juggernaut with a much better FX offering this time around, but overall the desktop CPU landscape remains unchanged — with Intel still firmly at the top of the heap. Compared to its last-gen Bulldozer chips, “in every way, today’s FX-8350 is better,” according to Tom’s Hardware: cheaper, up to 15 percent faster and more energy efficient. Still, while the new CPUs represent AMD’s desktop high-end, they only stack up against Intel’s mid-range Core i5 family, and even against that line-up they only edge ahead in heavily threaded testing. But if you “look beyond those specific (multithreaded) applications, Intel can pull away with a significant lead” due to its superior design, says Anantech. As for power consumption, unfortunately “the FX-8350 isn’t even the same class of product as the Ivy Bridge Core i5 processors on this front,” claims The Tech Report.

Despite all that, Hot Hardware still sees several niches that AMD could fill with the new chips, as they’ll provide “an easy upgrade path for existing AMD owners and more flexibility for overclocking, due to its unlocked multipliers.” That means if you already have a Socket-AM3+ motherboard, you’ll be able to do a cheap upgrade by swapping in the new CPU, and punching up the clock cycles might close the performance gap enjoyed by the Core i5. Finally, AMD also saw fit to bring the new chip in at a “very attractive” $195 by Hexus‘ reckoning, a much lower price than an earlier leak suggested. Despite that, however, the site says that AMD’s flagship FX processor still “cannot tick as many desirable checkboxes as the competing Intel Core i5 chips.” Feel free to scope all the sources below to make your own conclusions.

Read – Tom’s Hardware
Read – Hot Hardware
Read – AnandTech
Read – Hexus
Read – The Tech Report

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, AMD

AMD FX-8350 review roundup: enthusiasts still won’t be totally enthused originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Oct 2012 17:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you get the impression that AMD is diverting its energy away from traditional CPUs and towards APUs and fresher PC form factors such as all-in-ones, then you’re certainly right — but you’re also slightly ahead of the game. The company promises there’s a still a good few years of life left in its CPU-only chips and the AM3+ socket, and it’s putting today’s announcement forward as evidence. As of now, last year’s eight-core FX-8150 has been superseded on retailers’ shelves by the FX-8350, which notches the stock clock speed up to 4GHz, or 4.2GHz on turbo (alas with no obvious sign of that resonant mesh we once heard about). The full stack (codenamed ‘Vishera’) includes eight-, six- and four-core options, all based on the new Piledriver architecture which — when combined with these higher clock speeds — promises an overall performance uplift of around 15 percent versus the old Bulldozer cores. To be fair though, those Bulldozers weren’t so snappy to begin with, and besides, the most significant performance claims with this upgrade relate to multi-threaded applications and a few gaming titles like Skyrim and Civ 5. Judging from the slide deck below, gains in other areas of performance may be lower — perhaps in the region of seven percent — so as usual we’re going to roundup a bunch of reviews later today before we jump to any conclusions.

If it turns out that stock performance alone isn’t enough to sell these chips, then potential buyers still ought to check out FX’s pricing relative to Intel — not least because, as is typical, AMD sells overclockable chips at no extra charge. The top-end FX-8350 will hit the market at $195, which is not only cheaper than some earlier leaks suggested, but also $40 cheaper than an unlocked Core i5-3570K that has a lower clock speed and a smaller L3 cache — although the relative performance of these two chips remains to be independently tested. Meanwhile, the entry-level quad-core FX-4300 will virtually match the price of a locked i3-2120 at $122, but can be readily overclocked to 5GHz with water-cooling. AMD is also making a few claims based on the cost of multiple components in a rig: for example, that you can spend $372 on an FX-8350 and Radeon HD 7850 combo that delivers a 25 to 70 percent gaming advantage over a similarly priced Core i5 3570K with a GeForce GTX 650 Ti. Again, stay tuned for our roundup and we’ll figure out just how compelling this really is.

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, AMD

AMD updates its FX processors: 8-core chip has 4GHz base clock, ’15 percent’ more oomph, $195 price tag originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just about anyone who has bought more than one aftermarket graphics card knows that bundled games rarely matter. They’re usually year-old titles or neutered editions built only to showcase the GPU’s performance for a few hours. AMD thinks its Never Settle bundle might finally get us to notice. Buy any modern Radeon HD video card from the 7770 GHz Edition on up and you’ll get a download code for at least one new game you’d genuinely want to try, ranging from Far Cry 3 on basic cards to a full three-game deal that supplies Far Cry 3, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs to high rollers buying the 7900 series. There’s likewise a discount for Medal of Honor: Warfighter and promises of bundles in 2013 for Bioshock Infinite and the reimagined Tomb Raider. As long as you’re not dead set on springing for a GeForce board in the next few months, one of the qualifying cards might be worth a look to jumpstart your game collection.

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Peripherals, AMD

AMD Never Settle bundle gives Radeon HD 7000 buyers free games they’d actually care to play originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Welcome to Thursday evening, everyone. This afternoon we had a bunch of quarterly reports hit, and some were better than others. Google posted its quarterly report a little prematurely, a blunder that had a hand in driving down the price of the company’s stock. Later on in the day, we heard from Microsoft, which managed to do pretty good in its first quarter. Sadly, AMD posted its results for quarter 3 just a little while ago, and things aren’t looking too good for the company – in fact, it says that it will have to layoff around 15% of its workforce in an attempt to save some money.

Moving away from that rather depressing news, we heard some more whispers about the different iPad Mini variants today, and Google announced a brand new Samsung-made Chromebook (that’s super cheap, too!). The controversial Copyright Alert System is said to be going live in the next few weeks, and today AT&T released a statement in which it objects to SoftBank’s planned buyout of Sprint. Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has started a new file sharing site, and we learned that Apple may just be looking to buy the talent behind the soon-to-be-shutdown Color app, rather than the whole thing.

comScore says that the Amazon Kindle Fire has the highest readership rates for digital content, and today was the day the Motorola RAZR HD and RAZR MAXX HD launched at Verizon. Twitter is ruffling some feathers with the way it censors content, and TweetBot landed on the Mac App Store with a pretty high price tag. Chevrolet announced today that it will be unveiling the 2014 Corvette on January 13, while Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said that his company is ready to compete if Microsoft launches a Surface-branded smartphone. Researchers are considering launching a probe to a recently-discovered exoplanet, and Caldexa said that it has plans to begin using 64-bit ARM chips in 2014.

New rumors are pegging AMD with an itch to drop prices on APU Llano chips, and beloved digital distribution site GOG added support for Mac today with the addition of 50 games. Battlefield 3: Aftermath will be available for PS3 Premium subscribers on November 27, so get ready to battle on a handful of new maps that have been decimated by an earthquake. Finally tonight, we have a number of original articles for you to take a look at, as Chris Burns compares the RAZR MAXX HD and RAZR HD side-by-side in a new hands-on article. Chris also gave us his review of the MAINGEAR Potenza, and we ask if picking up the new $249 Chromebook is a good idea for students. One last thing to note before we go – we’ve released version 2.0 of our iOS app, making it compatible with the iPhone 5′s larger screen. You can get it right this minute from the iTunes Store by clicking this [download link]! Enjoy the rest of your night folks!

SlashGear Evening Wrap-Up: October 18, 2012 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.