ATI Video Card CPU running at 2 GHz?

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ATI has licensed Intrinsity's Fast 14 'dynamic logic' chip design technology to help it create "future consumer products" - possibly even the graphics accelerator it is designed for the Xbox 2 - aka Xbox Next.

We first wrote about Intrinsity back in 2001, after it had demonstrated a 2.2GHz chip - back than, way faster than anything Intel, AMD, IBM or Motorola had come up with. This year it began sampling a 130nm DSP chip, FastMath, that runs at 2GHz, operating at 1V. Aimed at the wireless infrastructure market, FastMath is being fabbed by TSMC, ATI's own foundry partner.

Intrinsity's technology is based on Dynamic Logic, an old-style design methodology now relegated to a few, highly performance-sensitive circuits thanks to the arrival in the 1980s of automated design software and the CMOS manufacturing process that helped make it possible.

Today's Static Logic methodology - essentially chip-building by numbers - makes for slower, less efficient processors (by between 50 and 80 per cent, Intrinsity says) but ones that could be designed, tested and put into manufacturing for more quickly and cheaply than DL-designed parts.

To do DL properly has always required very highly skilled staff - and plenty of them. No wonder, then, it quickly became uneconomic to use the technique for all but a few on-chip units.

Intrinsity claims Fast 14 puts DL design on a par with SL. The company admits DL remains harder to do, but the cost of the extra work is much lower than it once was and the premium is justified by the extra performance it yields. Fast 14 comprises enhancements to the basic building blocks of a DL processor that not only make automated DL design tools effective but have the knock-on effect of reducing circuit noise - a major barrier to higher clock speeds - and increasing gate speeds.

ATI, at any rate, is impressed. Company engineering VP Bob Feldstein believes Fast 14 can "deliver up to four times the performance per silicon dollar when compared with standard design approaches".

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If this realy happen, I'll one hell of a happy gamer!!

Source : http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/35387.html

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I belive that ATI makes chipsets that go on an actual motherboard to accompany the processor, as well as their Video Cards.

I don't belive its an actual Graphics Card Processor. lol

I'll correct you Cheyenne but Video card actually have Processor call VPU for Visual Processing Unit.

Here some info from Webopedia

Link : http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/v/video_adapter.html

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Modern video adapters contain memory, so that the computer's RAM is not used for storing displays. In addition, most adapters have their own graphics coprocessor for performing graphics calculations. These adapters are often called graphics accelerators.

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Graphics Coprocessor : A microprocessor specially designed for handling graphics computations. Most graphics accelerators include a graphics coprocessor.

Graphics Accelerator :

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A type of video adapter that contains its own processor to boost performance levels. These processors are specialized for computing graphical transformations, so they achieve better results than the general-purpose CPU used by the computer. In addition, they free up the computer's CPU to execute other commands while the graphics accelerator is handling graphics computations.
The popularity of graphical applications, and especially multimedia applications, has made graphics accelerators not only a common enhancement, but a necessity. Most computer manufacturers now bundle a graphics accelerator with their mid-range and high-end systems.

Aside from the graphics processor used, the other characteristics that differentiate graphics accelerators are:

memory : Graphics accelerators have their own memory, which is reserved for storing graphical representations. The amount of memory determines how much resolution and how many colors can be displayed. Some accelerators use conventional DRAM, but others use a special type of video RAM (VRAM), which enables both the video circuitry and the processor to simultaneously access the memory.
bus : Each graphics accelerator is designed for a particular type of video bus. As of 1995, most are designed for the PCI bus.
register width: The wider the register, the more data the processor can manipulate with each instruction. 64-bit accelerators are already becoming common, and we can expect 128-bit accelerators in the near future.

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I think that will help you understand deep inside how video card work.