Conclusions and Awards

This has to have been one of the most outrageous  demonstrations of complete raw power from all parts of the system I/O.  Everyone from all hardware suppliers today has to be extremely proud of what they have presented and has been witnessed from within.   This is without doubt the marketers dream come true in every aspect of todays products shown.    It takes a very
special kind of magic to put all this together.

So lets start with the New ATI FirePro V8800.   Factually and on paper this new offering from ATI  is one of the most significant technological advancements within the professional graphic card industry for quite some time.    Support from Tier 1 and 2 has been huge and notwithstanding the support from the S.I.'S and VARS.   Therefore this 147.2GB/s bandwidth, 2GB onboard memory which delivers an enormous  2.6 Teraflops of computational power walks through the  door with an MSRP of only $1499 USD.   Hello, have we your attention utterly and completely now and prevented you turning off the page.  Many of you will have thought that the  V8800 which has such huge technological leaps forward would come at a premium.   No, the clever bean counters and marketers at ATI have sat down and done their homework precisely.  Which brings us next to our crystal ball readings.   Paper figures, are just that, actually reality of product out the door is fact, within 18 months ATI has gained a substantial part of market share in certain areas on its own merits and from NVIDIA.  

Whilst supporting a raw beta driver the V8800 has leap up through the scales and we have successfully demonstrated the
scalability of the card over its predecessor the ATI FirePro V8750 on page 11.   In some areas we see a 40% increase.    Now much of this performance improvement is down to the architecture of the new product, some down to the driver team, the unsung heroes that so many forget about.   The results shown within have been extra-ordinary to say the least.     This card most certainly has overtaken its predecessor in many ways, faster memory, the aid of 1600 unified shaders - this will help many in complex drawings.  Life in the professional graphics card market has just shifted up directly to overdrive.  Today's article has only been the tip of the iceberg.   As we have so much more to present to you.

Intel's new earth shattering Westmere chips, these have shown what a superb upgrade path these items really are.  Today
we demonstrated on just how easy it is to upgrade - flash the bios and pop in the new CPU's - in this order.   Where to start
here, firstly our Supermicro X8DA3 is an original and the backbone of the outing, not one of the newer mainboard which has all those wonderful new instructions and a little bit more.  Bios flash was easy and the performance increase has been utterly astonishing, 215.12GFLOPS throughput, a POVRAY Render of just 20 seconds and we still have to get into place the new mainboard version.   Six months ago these were only numbers that everyone dreamed of, until everything was finally bolted together and ultimately up and running.    Once more the engineering skills of both Intel and Supermicro spring to the fore.   A year ago Supermicro's listing was away down at $6.00 USD a share, today we see in excess of $17.00 USD a share - we have said it before a company to be watched as they have some marvelous products sitting in the sidelines.

Once again, we must wait for more complete and final figures and this should not be long - we hope.  In the interim, those who cannot wait and cannot wait "the need for speed" is here without a doubt.   "Fast is good and Fast is what we want", therefore in this scenario, fast is what you have got.   

Which bring us to the AES security upgrades in place within the chip.   The facts shown within are without a doubt undisputable.  AES encryption and decryption algorithms have dramatically improved 4 to 5 times faster than previously witnessed.   Therefore many will be scrambling quickly to embrace this new technology making safer your online transactions and within the corporate environment making internal encryption of files etc so much easier.  We should see no excuses now of poor encryption as the power to make it faster and more secure has been readily presented.

Onwards and to our next exclusive offering, the new WD SiliconEdge SSD.  WD have waited very patiently in the wings
working vigorously on their new consumer based SSD and today it has stood them proud amongst all the other products
shown within.  The predicted Read / Write speeds met the expectations and some.  We also found was after many
arduous hours of task the SiliconEdge maintained its dignity maintaining blistering Write / Read speeds.    The synthetic benchmarks did show the SiliconEdge SSD to perform, but what of real-time applications and the professional arena.  
No workstation should be seen without it, professional applications have a knack of pulling down SSD's to a grinding halt
with freespace issues, not so here, the algorithms in place are most certainly doing their job correctly.  Therefore if you are
thinking on that expensive upgrade of an SSD for a boot disc, then look no further.

Ultimately we have taken 3 sets of systems encompassed the new FirePro V8800 that soon will be readily found
within all studio's and workplaces.   The FirePro V8800 performance shown within is without a doubt on all the platforms
superb, no more can the cry of we need more speed.  It's here.   We have more to show in the very near future covering much
more of this awesome card and some important features not covered today like the new ATI Eyefinity multi-display
technology.   This is a much needed advantage to the professional utilising multi monitor displays.   1 Card that drives four displays, a significant leap forward in technology.   Not to digress support for Stereo, Stream Computing  and importantly
ATI CrossFire™ Pro Support.

Availably of the card.  On going to print we have been advised to get your orders in quick as there is expected to be a huge rush on these cards - especially at the snippet of a price they are on offer for.   We would advise you touch base quickly with your supplier for up to date pricing and approximate eta's of when the beasties come into stock.   Though as it currently stands they should be within EMEA within the next 10 days.

What will the next 6 months bring, only time will tell.  For now, ATI continues to make acres of hay whilst the sun shines.   Nevertheless, a dark cloud and a bitter chill has been recently seen and felt over in Santa Clara and analysts the like;  project from that you may. 

Oh so very fast is what we most certainly have here today.  Roll over the FirePro V8750 the FirePro V8800 is the Principle Chess Piece in this bitterly fought arena.

Page 1 - Introduction The ATI FirePro™ V8800 3D Workstation Graphics Accelerator
Page 2 - The new X5680 3.33GHz Intel® Xeon® Processor
Page 3 - The New Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD
Page 4 - System's Set-Up and Software Used
Page 5 - Sandra 2010 and POVRAY on Westmere
Page 6 - WD 256GB SiliconEdge Blue SSD
Page 7 - Westmere - HyperThreading Switched Off
Page 8 - ATI FirePro™ V8800 and Gulftown
Page 9 - ATI FirePro™ V8800 and a Single 3.33GHz Intel® Xeon® W5590 Nehalem EP® System
Page 10 - ATI FirePro™ V8800 and a Dual 3.33GHz Intel® Xeon® X5680 Nehalem EP® (aka Westmere) System
Page 11 - SPECviewperf® 10.0 64-bit The ATI FirePro™ V8750 v The ATI FirePro™ V8800
Page 12 - Conclusions and Awards