[Fr0styMatt8]

I really wish AMD would promote this type of thing more heavily in general (having advanced features that Nvidia restricts to their high-cost cards). I seem to remember a similar thing with AMD being fantastic for Bitcoin mining and from memory it's because Nvidia gimped certain features that were on the cards, while AMD did not.

(on that note, I'm constantly annoyed that despite it being Nvidia specific, everyone supports CUDA for everything cool).

I understand companies have to do this to segregate their products and that it's impractical to have separate fab lines for a chip family for this kind of difference. It's still something I think AMD has a competitive advantage on though and they really need to push that alone (unless they just don't really want to - to sell their own high-end professional cards).

A worse example of this is Nvidia cards not running in systems that have AMD graphics cards in them. Which means, for example, you can't buy a low/mid-range Nvidia card to sit in your system as a dedicated PhysX/CUDA card. I'd consider such a setup for my system and I imagine there's probably others like me out there.

[noipv4]

Cryptocurrency mining demand for Radeon GPUs between 2010 - 2012 had improved AMD's revenue stream quite a bit back then. http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/02/14/why-the-par...

AMD GPU mining rigs and some other hardware pics. http://www.buttcoinfoundation.org/mining-rig-megapost#more-3...

[woadwarrior01]

The bitcoin mining edge that AMD cards had over Nvidia cards was came down to the AMD ISA having a single cycle hardware rotate instruction, which the NVIDIA cards lacked. Also the AMD philosophy of many dumb cores vs the Nvidia's philosophy of fewer smarter cores made a significant difference.

[optimiz3]

Not true - AMD GCN also has bitselect, which does

dst = (A & B) | (~A & C).

This is equivalent to the SHA-256 Ch "Choose" function.

It also can be used to compose the SHA-256 Maj "Majority" function with an additional XOR.

Additionally, the AMD ISA doesn't have a "rotate" instruction per-se, BFI_INT is "bitfield insert", which can be used to compose arbitrary length rotates, but is not strictly a rotate in and of itself.

AMD ISA also has instructions for computing integer add with carry, which is great for crushing elliptic curves.

NVidia really, really, sucks for integer compute. Friends don't let friends buy NVidia!

[leoc]

AMD similarly tends to avoid playing bullshit games with things like ECC memory and IOMMUs for consumer-level systems, unlike Intel.

[steckerbrett]

AMD didn't expose the necessary features for good SHA256 performance on their GPUs either, for a while you had to hack their SDK to get them.

[noipv4]

IIRC, it was the BFI_INT instruction.

[stephengillie]

VGI (VDI for gaming) is the future. We shouldn't have to run on bare metal; we should be able to have a single-VM Host (which theoretically gives full hardware performance) with full hardware pass thru.

This gives all the flexibility of VHDs and virtualization without losing the bare metal advantages. Installing a new OS shouldn't mean the current OS knows about it.

[dogma1138]

I some how doubt that VDI of any kind is the future in pure home use.

Game streaming is gathering steam now, don't let the OnLive failure fool you, services like Play-Cast have been running in Korea and other Asian companies for some time now.

They've opted to service their streaming through the carrier (cable companies) instead of over the internet which allowed them to pretty much bypass the latency and bandwidth limitations of open internet routing.

EA is now setting up a similar service with Comcast, and many will follow.

NVIDIA has setup it's "gaming cloud" service for it's Tegra based consoles which also seem to work pretty damn well, and localized streaming on NVIDIA cards has been working very well for several years now.

So sorry while VDI/VGI might be a future like any commercial product if it ever materializes it will be abstracted to a point in which you might not call it VDI/VGI, and no you won't get to tinker with it at that point.

[PascLeRasc]

You can get Nvidia and AMD cards to live together in the same machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqkI7bOfRkA