Sunday, July 13th 2008
R700 Supports 4-way Crossfire X?
Yes, you read that right. You can use upto four HD4870 X2 accelerators in tandem for an 8-GPU, 9.6 TFLOP, 8 GB graphics crunching monster. You need a 4-slot motherboard though. There are 4-slot solutions available on the AMD 790FX platform, for Intel though X48 did support 4 slots and images of prototype X48 boards with 4 slots did surface months back, there isn't such a board out yet. You do have the Skulltrail platform and upcoming X58 Bloomfield-supportive boards do promise to come in 4 slot flavours.
In a press-conference, Raja Koduri, worldwide CTO (Products Group), AMD talked to Indian website TechTree, among minor revelations such as "Fusion in 2009", here's a shocker:
"AMD has already built a computer that has four 4870X2s in it. So it has eight GPUs; drivers will not be supporting eight GPUs at this point of time."
-Implies that AMD is fully geared up to go head on against GT200b whenever it comes up. It's all a matter of them releasing a supportive driver. Again, unreliable sources point towards the possibility that also in the pipeline could be a R700+ which could be based on 'Super-RV770XT' processors. If you thought you're witnessing the peak of the GPU battle for supremacy, hold on, you're only getting appetised.
Source:
TechTree
In a press-conference, Raja Koduri, worldwide CTO (Products Group), AMD talked to Indian website TechTree, among minor revelations such as "Fusion in 2009", here's a shocker:
"AMD has already built a computer that has four 4870X2s in it. So it has eight GPUs; drivers will not be supporting eight GPUs at this point of time."
-Implies that AMD is fully geared up to go head on against GT200b whenever it comes up. It's all a matter of them releasing a supportive driver. Again, unreliable sources point towards the possibility that also in the pipeline could be a R700+ which could be based on 'Super-RV770XT' processors. If you thought you're witnessing the peak of the GPU battle for supremacy, hold on, you're only getting appetised.
89 Comments on R700 Supports 4-way Crossfire X?
well obviously for those who wish to invest in such hardware will have to run a 64bit O/S unless M$ & ATi have found a way to use the gpu ram as bog standard system ram.
which wouldnt be such a bad idea - being able to convert your 'idle' gpu ram into ram which is use by your pc
Would that be 4x 2GB, or 8x 1GB memory?
It ISNT 8GB of independent memory, because the "same assets" are being stored multiple times in each memory bank. The GPU doesnt actually have 8GB to play with, only 1GB (or is it 2GB?). The rest of the memory are just COPIES of the same memory space on each GPU's local address bus.
P.S. I'd love to see a FPS or flightsim using all 8 DVI ports independently! WOW.
So the application has to load the same stuff (= textures, mesh, shader data, wireframe data) into all eight memory arrays. Same applies when the GPUs are made to render a scene in tiling. All 'stuff' should be available to all GPUs.
Since we still don't have motherboards with four full x16 2.0 slots, with four slots populated it means x8 2.0 bandwidth / card.
In reality, you can't arrange four 9800 GX2s in SLI. I wonder how they did it with four R700s though, since PCB has only one CFX finger.
The cons are many....8 GPUs and say hello to heat, power, mobo, micro-stutters, etc. But end of the day the fastest available consumer graphics would be made by ATI. That adds brand-value all the way down to Radeon HD4450. "Hey these guys make the fastest graphics configurations in the industry".
1) Wasn't there a project which used four 9800GX2s to crunch numbers? (crunch numbers NOT to do video)
2) Was it a 4x 16x PCI-E mobo which they were using?
3) /ot what's the guy drinking in your picture?
An MSI K9A2 Platinum was used, x16(x8) x 4.
2. Maybe, I don't know. It's impossibile that they used Skulltrail since the last two PCI-E slots are adjescent and 9800GX2 is a dual-PCB card. They must've used some NForce Professional based WS board which had 4 slots spaced out.
3. not drinking, blowing air into a conch. (Ancient-Indian for war-cry).
BUT, let's see how the drivers hold the 8 cores together.