Anyone have an opinion on ClearSpeed?

[geekcomputing]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060315-6392.html

looks interesting .

[mhouston]

Very interesting for performance/watt, especially since the chip is 64-bit floating point. However, it's not fully general, so it's unclear how well applications other than those similar to dense algebra are going to perform. The neat thing is that they can interface with matlab really well for most BLAS like operations and easily accelerate user code without jumping through hoops like you do with other accelerators (like GPUs). But, you get 50GFlops of double precision (DGEMM) on the PCIX board at 25 Watts!

[Berek]

This is what I would call the equivalent of Ageia's PhysX add-on card for graphics, for multimedia parallel intensive applications.

MPEG-4 video processing will get a huge benefit out of something like this, but take a look at the cost for a moment. At over $1,000 per card non-quantity based its a bit expensive.

For businesses considering this or developers you've got switching costs and other elements to consider on top of that.

[Skrying]

This would have very specific applications in the server market, and in no way Clearspeed is alone in AMD wanting to push Hypertransport very hard in the server market. With HT AMD wants to push their platform, which in some ways is a good idea (because as a whole, the AMD platform is much better than Intel's) and it also helps them get over their current hurdle of not having Intel level performance. I am sure that with enough of these you'd have a very power conscious and very powerful system for a specific app.

[Techno+]

Ageia's PhysX add-on card for graphics, for multimedia parallel intensive applications.

graphics on AGEIA physx?