WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME TEA?

Saturday, June 20

Cool

MLP:FIM:EG:RR

For a sequel to a spinoff of the fourth iteration of a cartoon designed to sell toys to six-year-old girls, that was surprisingly good.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:50 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, June 17

Geek

Nano Nano

So AMD paper-launched their new video card lineup at E3 yesterday.  We already knew that most of the 300-series were just 200-series cards with new stencils and (in some cases) more memory.

The extra memory is welcome, though; with 2GB with 285 came up a bit short; with 4GB the 380 is a much better card, though it's the exact same chip.

The real excitement was around the new Fury cards - the top end cards now get a name and not just a number.  We knew that the Fury and Fury X were coming, because AMD announced their use of HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) months ago, but they still kept a surprise up their corporate sleeves.

HBM is a new answer to video cards' ever-growing demand for memory bandwidth.  If you look at Nvidia's current high-end cards, they use a 384-bit memory bus running at an effective 7GHz.  With HBM, AMD have flipped that around and only run at 1GHz - which demands far less power - but on a bus that's 4096 bits wide.

And they achieve that by attaching the memory not to a circuit board, but to a silicon interposer.  4096 traces on a circuit board would be hugely expensive - and just plain huge - but on silicon it's easy.  The interposer is far larger than a normal chip, but since it only carries wires and not transistors, it can be built easily on old, reliable equipment, and doesn't have the size restrictions of actual logic chips.

Anyway, AMD showed the water-cooled Fury X, which offers 50% more performance than their previous high-end card at the same power consumption - 8.6 TFLOPS vs. 5.6 TFLOPS - the air-cooled Fury, about 15% slower and 15% cheaper, the forthcoming Fury X2, which is two Fury Xs on a single card, and the R9 Nano, which came as a complete surprise.

Essentially, the Fury X is the fastest single-GPU card AMD can currently make; the Fury is the best price/performance they can achieve; the Fury X2 is the fastest card they can make that can actually fit in a normal computer.

The Nano is designed to deliver the best possible performance per watt.  The Fury X delivers 50% better performance per watt than the previous generation (using the same 28nm silicon process at TSMC), but the Nano is designed to run not at the optimum settings for performance, but at the optimum settings for power consumption, and the result is that it's faster than AMD's previous high-end card at about half the power.

And half the size.  By high-end video card standards, it's tiny, about 6" long.

AMD haven't yet release final specs and pricing for the Nano, but I'll be watching for it eagerly.  I don't need the absolute fastest video card I can get, but the card I have barely fits in the case, and makes upgrades incredibly awkward.  The Nano should be about twice as fast as the card I have, use less power, and take up half the room.  And give me more DisplayPort outputs so I can run a full 4K triple-monitor setup.

The real breakthroughs in performance will come in the next couple of years, as AMD and Nvidia combine HBM and HBM2 (twice as fast) with the next-generation 14nm silicon processes that are finally coming on line for them.  But AMD with its Fury range and Nvidia with their Maxwell linup (960, 970, 980, and Titan) have given us a tantalising taste of the near future.  Moore's law isn't dead quite yet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:12 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tuesday, June 16

Geek

Apparently Some Classic JRPG Fan Found A Magic Lamp...

They could have wished for world peace, a cure for cancer, and a really big pie.  But no...

At E3, Sony announced an actual release of the much delayed The Last Guardian, a PS4 remake of Final Fantasy VII, and (here much of the audience lost their minds), Shenmue III.

One commenter on Reddit described it as a fanfic version of an E3 event.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:12 PM | Comments (360) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, June 03

Cool

Oh No Tokyo!


Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:10 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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