Apr 242009
I built a new computer. It is a fairly decent computer, but what makes it special is its video card: it is a card that, in addition to producing graphics, can also be used for numerical computations.
The raw speed of the card is one TFLOP. That is, one trillion (single-precision) floating-point instructions per second.
It wasn’t that long ago that not even the world’s biggest supercomputer came even close to this kind of computing power.
I wonder how many such GPU cards are presently being used in places like Iran’s or North Korea’s weapons laboratories. And it’s not like it’s easy to ban their exports to such countries… the card, while bearing the ATI/AMD logo, was nonetheless manufactured in China.