ATI’s high-end Radeon cards offer up to 800 shader processors, which makes them ideal for high-end GPGPU work. Rumors have it that NVidia aims to take a bite of that market back with their new GT300 chip which will allegedly have 512 shader processors, and switch from a SIMD architecture to a MIMD architecture.
- SIMD – Single Instruction Multiple Data, long-time winner of raw instructions-per-second
- MIMD – Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data.
Why NVidia would change isn’t entirely clear, but MIMD does make the chips better-suited for GPGPU & CUDA applications, as it turns the card into more of a parallel-processor than a stream-processor.
