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Impressive Benchmarks: Sorting with a GPU
An anonymous reader writes "The Graphics research group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has posted some interesting benchmarks for a sorting implementation which is done entirely on a GPU. There have been efforts on doing general purpose computation on GPUs before (previous Slashdot article). However, most of them had generally utilized the fragment processing pipeline of the GPUs which is slower then the default high speed rendering pipeline. Apparently, the above implementation is done using "simple texture mapping operations" and "cache efficient memory accesses" only. There also seems to an option to download the distribution for non-commercial use, though the requirements seem pretty hefty (a very decent nVidia graphics card and the latest nVidia drivers)."
Who the fuck has enough data to sort on a regular basis that they'd need hardware-assisted sorting?
Perhaps you've heard of, I dunno.. Google, or Oracle?
Well, to be fair GPUs are only "so much more powerful than CPUs" if your task is suitable for running on a GPU. If not, then you're better off using the CPU.
Kind of like how a bulldozer is much more powerful than a hammer, but totally unsuitable to banging a nail in a bit of wood. If you want something torn down or moved about, though...
It's official. Most of you are morons.