AMD Radeon 7970 Released

Reviews are flooding the tech sites, the AMD Radeon 7970 is now available! The significant change from previous cards is the transition from VLIW cores to SIMD cores. What does this mean to you and me? The new 7000 series GPUs are significantly more capable of generalized processing.

AMD always says, “The Future Is Fusion.” By enhancing the ability of their new GPUs to act as generalized processors, AMD sets the stage for Fusion to excel in any case where massively parallel workloads exist. This is Intel’s only real weakness, so it’s probably wise that AMD is acting aggressively in this regard.

UPDATE: Reviews indicate the Radeon 7970 is on average 25% faster than the Radeon 6970. It also dethrones the Nvidia GTX 580 as the fastest single GPU available. A premium card at a premium price, AMD plans to start selling the card at $550,  50% higher than the going price ($350) of the 6970 .

Snow?

It’s nearly Christmas in Boston, and beyond a light dusting several weeks ago, no snow graces our only recently chilly city. For one, it hasn’t been cold enough, we regularly have afternoons in the 40s (Fahrenheit, 5-10 Celsius) so snow wouldn’t last long anyway. If it had snowed earlier in the season it’s possible it would be cold enough for snow now. Why is that, you might wonder? Clean, white snow reflects sunlight back into the sky, preventing it from heating the ground. Snow can have a reflection coefficient near 0.9 if it is fresh. Either way, I’m crossing my fingers for a white Christmas.

Reflection Coefficient, aka Albedo, is the measure (between 0 and 1) of a substance's reflectivity.
Reflection Coefficient, aka Albedo, is the measure (between 0 and 1) of a substance’s reflectivity.