I confess that I am dumbfounded by the decision to build a Dual Coprocessor board rather than a single coprocessor board. As for the price!! Perhaps the reporter got it wrong. Maybe I should go on paging through Google looking for an estimated price? Nahh... I will wait until there is a street price. Somebody will comment on it when it is finally released.

Lawrence

It looks like Folding@Home is all over this:

http://www.clearspeed.com/news/pr.php?pr=23

Time for WCG to step up or "fold"

Based on the dates, the PCI card referred to must be the CS301 (< $1,000 per chip), not the CSX600 (estimated to run about $25,000 when it first becomes available, 2 chips per board). I suspect that not many members want to put out $50,000 for an add-in coprocessor board. I really find the estimate unconvincing, and want to see the real street price.

'Physics' processor is a code word meaning 32-bit floating point. This is what the CELL processor uses in its 8 special processor units. Back in 2002-2003 Nvidia switched to 32-bit floating point in its new DX9.0 GPU, while ATI stayed with 24-bit floating point. I seem to recall that ATI's latest has just switched to 32-bit floating point, but may be wrong about this. The various streaming commands (SSE, etc.) use 32-bit floating point, except that some of these commands use fast table lookups that are only accurate to 12 bits in the mantissa.

All sorts of prospects are opening up for programs that are validated for single-precision floating point. Back in the 1970s this was an important area in practical (computational) numerical analysis, but when the Intel 8087 coprocessor was announced, everybody dropped single-precision floating point like a dead fish. Still, the Delorean is a really cool car!

Back to the future,
mycrofth

Here is the Folding@Home page about ClearSpeed and GPUs: http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-highperformance.html

It is very interesting, but we still have to wait.