Over at Hot Hardware, the reviewers of this Alienware dream machine are pretty clear about it.

It’s easy to see from the graphs that the parts used in this system are high-performance in every way. If money is no object, you can’t buy a faster platform than the Intel Core i7 975 with an X58 chipset motherboard.

And here’s one of those graphs.

Basically, we’re talking about the meanest gaming rig on the market. Or at least, that’s how Hot Hardware sees it, and there’s not much room for debating their findings. But it’ll cost you plenty. $US4074.

[Hot Hardware] via [Egadget]

The MSI R4890 Cyclone SOC, which shares as much aesthetically with a motorcycle engine as it does a PC component, is a perfect example of everything that is confusing, irritating and unnecessarily obfuscated with graphics cards today.

There’s a lot of impressive tech here—an overclocked 1GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 GPU and 1GB of GDDR5 RAM— but instead of putting that into meaningful terms, MSI is content to just throw the numbers out there and brag about the card’s “200-year lifespan” and “largest ever” fan. I’m sure this is fun for the hardest of the hardcore enthusiasts, but for the rest of us it’s just a headache. The card should ship any day now, priced somewhere in the ballpark of $US250. [Slashgear]

No, I didn’t stutter: GPGPU—general-purpose computing on graphics processor units—is what’s going to bring hot screaming gaming GPUs to the mainstream, with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. Finally, everbody’s face melts! Here’s how.

What a Difference a Letter Makes
GPU sounds—and looks—a lot like CPU, but they’re pretty different, and not just ’cause dedicated GPUs like the Radeon HD 4870 here can be massive. GPU stands for graphics processing unit, while CPU stands for central processing unit. Spelled out, you can already see the big differences between the two, but it takes some experts from Nvidia and AMD/ATI to get to the heart of what makes them so distinct.

Traditionally, a GPU does basically one thing, speed up the processing of image data that you end up seeing on your screen. As AMD Stream Computing Director Patricia Harrell told me, they’re essentially chains of special purpose hardware designed to accelerate each stage of the geometry pipeline, the process of matching image data or a computer model to the pixels on your screen.

GPUs have a pretty long history—you could go all the way back to the Commodore Amiga, if you wanted to—but we’re going to stick to the fairly present. That is, the last 10 years, when Nvidia’s Sanford Russell says GPUs starting adding cores to distribute the workload across multiple cores. See, graphics calculations—the calculations needed to figure out what pixels to display your screen as you snipe someone’s head off in Team Fortress 2—are particularly suited to being handled in parallel.

An example Nvidia’s Russell gave to think about the difference between a traditional CPU and a GPU is this: If you were looking for a word in a book, and handed the task to a CPU, it would start at page 1 and read it all the way to the end, because it’s a “serial” processor. It would be fast, but would take time because it has to go in order. A GPU, which is a “parallel” processor, “would tear [the book] into a thousand pieces” and read it all at the same time. Even if each individual word is read more slowly, the book may be read in its entirety quicker, because words are read simultaneously.

All those cores in a GPU—800 stream processors in ATI’s Radeon 4870—make it really good at performing the same calculation over and over on a whole bunch of data. (Hence a common GPU spec is flops, or floating point operations per second, measured in current hardware in terms of gigaflops and teraflops.) The general-purpose CPU is better at some stuff though, as AMD’s Harrell said: general programming, accessing memory randomly, executing steps in order, everyday stuff. It’s true, though, that CPUs are sprouting cores, looking more and more like GPUs in some respects, as retiring Intel Chairman Craig Barrett told me.

Explosions Are Cool, But Where’s the General Part?
Okay, so the thing about parallel processing—using tons of cores to break stuff up and crunch it all at once—is that applications have to be programmed to take advantage of it. It’s not easy, which is why Intel at this point hires more software engineers than hardware ones. So even if the hardware’s there, you still need the software to get there, and it’s a whole different kind of programming.

Which brings us to OpenCL (Open Computing Language) and, to a lesser extent, CUDA. They’re frameworks that make it way easier to use graphics cards for kinds of computing that aren’t related to making zombie guts fly in Left 4 Dead. OpenCL is the “open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems” standardised by the Khronos Group—AMD, Apple, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, Samsung and a bunch of others are involved, so it’s pretty much an industry-wide thing. In semi-English, it’s a cross-platform standard for parallel programming across different kinds of hardware—using both CPU and GPU—that anyone can use for free. CUDA is Nvidia’s own architecture for parallel programming on its graphics cards.

OpenCL is a big part of Snow Leopard. Windows 7 will use some graphics card acceleration too (though we’re really looking forward to DirectX 11). So graphics card acceleration is going to be a big part of future OSes.

So Uh, What’s It Going to Do for Me?
Parallel processing is pretty great for scientists. But what about those regular people? Does it make their stuff go faster. Not everything, and to start, it’s not going too far from graphics, since that’s still the easiest to parallelize. But converting, decoding and creating videos—stuff you’re probably using now more than you did a couple years ago—will improve dramatically soon. Say bye-bye 20-minute renders. Ditto for image editing; there’ll be less waiting for effects to propagate with giant images (Photoshop CS4 already uses GPU acceleration). In gaming, beyond straight-up graphical improvements, physics engines can get more complicated and realistic.

If you’re just Twittering or checking email, no, GPGPU computing is not going to melt your stone-cold face. But anyone with anything cool on their computer is going to feel the melt eventually.

At 1GHz, the ATI Radeon HD 4890 is the fastest-clocked graphics card in the planet—a world’s first. It’s not a new chip, however, just a “factory-overclocked” air-cooled 4890 that looks like a Ferrari.

So that’s a bit of a cheat: In theory, you can buy the 850MHz version and overclock it yourself without paying the premium for the 1GHz version. Or maybe you can buy the factory-overclocked 1GHz version and overclock it again so your PC melts and reaches the Earth’s core. [Hot Hardware]

The Amilo GraphicBooster connects to the laptop using PCI-E, and has its own power supply. It houses a 512MB ATI Radeon HD3870 capable of driving three displays simultaneously, with two USB ports added so you can have a mouse and a keyboard always connected for minimun fuss.

And on top of that, it looks nice.

We will have to wait and see if we can say the same about its price. [Ubergizmo]

[Maximum PC]

SAN JOSE, Calf. August 12, 2008 – Asetek’s industry-leading, LCLC liquid cooling solution is now available for AMD’s much anticipated multi-GPU cards, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 family of graphics cards (codenamed R700). The unique, liquid cooling approach is exactly what OEMs need to extract the highest performance from the graphics card and produce top-of-the-line gaming and entertainment products.

“We are Heat is an ‘age-old’ problem for computers. However, what once used to be a concern primarily for cutting-edge systems has now become an issue for everyone,” says Gary Baum, Asetek’s Senior VP of Marketing. “OEMs developing high-performance, low-noise systems require a safe thermal management solution that not only keeps their systems cool, but is easy to install, maintenance free, and most important, is virtually noise free,”

Baum continues: “The days of computers that sound like jet aircraft taking off are over. Our award-winning, LCLC provides worry-free, aggressive thermal management for advanced gaming and graphics-intensive applications–especially those using multiple GPUs like AMD’s latest R700-based graphics cards.”

When used as part of a Radeon HD 4870 X2 Crossfire configuration, the LCLC product consumes only two of the four slots normally used, freeing up two slots for other configuration upgrades. End users now have additional configuration flexibility.

Tests indicate that Asetek’s highly integrated, liquid cooling solution lowers the GPU temperatures found on the 4870 X2 by as much as 28 degrees. This enables the cards to have optimum overclocking potential for the extreme applications, but to also run completely silent. Only the system heat exchanger fan that typically runs at a very quiet 30 dB(A)–equivalent to a loud whisper–can be heard.

Asetek is the only liquid cooling company whose rigorous shock, vibration, and thermal stress testing assures a 50,000-hour operational lifetime with absolutely no end-user maintenance required

One of the most fundamental changes in the R700 cards–which are two RV770s with a PCI Express switch connecting the the two and double the memory–is that the GPUs actually communicate with each other, whereas past CrossFire configs had both cards basically rendering their own sections independently, then combining them. AnandTech says it’s not entirely clear how much communication there will be, but there will definitely be more than there was. Also, the drivers still need to come up to spec to let the card truly shine, but the hardware is totally in the right place. [AnandTech]