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Future of 3d Graphics
zymano writes "Extremetech
has this nice article on the future of 3d graphics. The article also mentions that graphic card gpus can be used for non-traditional powerful processing like physics. A quote from the article, "GPU can be from 10 to 100 times faster than a Pentium 4 and Scientific computations such as linear algebra, Fast Fourier Transforms, and partial differential equations can benefit". My question - If these cards are getting so powerful at computations then why do we need a Intel/AMD processor at all? Just make a graphics card with more transistors and drop the traditional processor..."
The head of Nvidia was written about in wired a while ago and he essentially said the same thing.
He was like, our cards ARE the computer, and are becoming far more important then the CPU for the hard core stuff.
It was interesting, but I totally foo fooed it.
obviously he was smarter then me.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Why buy a big processor when the only intensive computational tasks are video en/decoding and games, tasks that can easily be farmed off to other, cheaper units?
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Using the power of the graphic subsystem to handle other kinds of calculations has been done for years, if not decade(s) by Silicon Graphics.
At least for the demos...
You keep hearing this logic every once in awhile.
Look, for the same price of a $400 graphics engine you can get yourself a dual CPU machine, a cheap graphic card with AGP, and do it in "software" with about the same efficiency, if you know what you're doing.
Because the extra CPU isn't inheritly multi-core like most modern GPUs, you need to compensate with a higher clock speed, and use whatever multimedia instructions it has to the fullest extent (ie altivec, mmx2, etc.)
But of course, the GPU is better suited to the actual drudge work of getting your screen to light up. If there's stuff to be computed and forgotten by it (i.e. particle physics), its probably better left decoupled to exploit parallism in that abstraction.
As you get to a limit in computational efficiency, you start adding on DSPs, and this is where FPGAs and grid computing start looking interesting.
So it shouldn't be considered suprising that these companies will say that; they can see that trend and they want a piece of that aux. processor/FPGA action. The nForce is a step in the right direction. They don't want to be relegated to just making graphic accelerators when they have the unique position to make pluggable accelerators for anything.
But to plan on packaging an FPGA designed for game augmentation and calling it a uber-cool GPU is just a marketing trick. This technology is becoming commercial viable, it seems.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
There's a lot of work being done on reconfigurable computing, which imagines replacing the CPU, GPU, DSP, soundcard, etc., with a single reconfigurable gate array (like an RAM-FPGA). You'd probably have a small control processor that manages the main array. On this array one could build a CPU (or several) of whatever ISA you needed, and GPU, DSP, whatever functionality was called for by the program(s) you're running at the current moment. Shutdown UnrealTournament 2009 and open Mathlab, and DynamicLinux will wipe out its shader code and vector pipelines, and grow a bunch of FP units instead. Run MAME and it will install appropriate CPUs and other hardware.
In the initial case, this would be controlled statically, a bit like the way a current OS's VM manages physical and virtual memory. Later, specialist "hardware" could be created, compiled, and optimised, based on an examination of how the program actually runs (a bit like a java dynamic compiler). So rather than running SETI-at-home your system would have built a specialist seti-ASIC on its main array. There will be lots of applications where most of the work is done in such a soft ASIC, and only a small proportion is done on a (commensuately puny) soft-CPU.
This all sounds too cool to be true, and at the moment it is. Existing programmable gate hardware is very expensive, of limited size (maybe enough to hold a 386?), runs crazy hot, and doesn't run nearly quickly enough.
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