Boost UltraSPARC T1 Floating Point w/ a Graphics Card?

alxtoth asks: "All over the web, Sun's UltraSPARC T1 is described as 'not fit for floating point calculations'. Somebody has benchmarked it for HPC applications, and got results that weren't that bad. What if one of the threads could do the floating point in the GPU, as suggested here? Even if the factory setup does not expect an video card, could you insert a low profile PCI-E video card, boot Ubuntu and expect decent performance?"

Comments

Yes you can.. maybe not on SPARC though..

[NekoXP]

We produce an Open Firmware solution which includes an x86 emulator to bootstrap x86 hardware, specifically graphics cards and the like.

PowerPC boards, PC graphics chips with x86 BIOS, no driver edits required on the OS side.. it is there like it would be on a PC.

http://metadistribution.org/blog/Blog/78A3C88E-1CE 7-45B8-9C79-420134DD9B8E.html
http://www.genesippc.com/

Thanks for making me feel old...

[pedantic bore]

I remember when it was common practice to buy extra hardware to add to your system to implement fast floating point ops. First it was a box (FPS), then a few cards (Sky), then a card (Mercury), then a daughterboard (everyone), then a chip (Weitek)... and then it was on the CPU and everyone expected it to be there.

But Sun realized that the more things change, the more they stay the same; the reason why vendors got away with making floating point an expensive option was that there are lots of workloads where floating point performance is unimportant. So they applied the RISC principle and chose to not waste a lot of silicon on the T1 implementing instructions that are not needed in their target workload, but instead figure out how to get lots of concurrent threads.

Trying to improve floating point perf on a T1 by adding another card is like trying to figure out how to put wheels on a fish. It might be a cool hack and it might solve some particular problem but it doesn't generalize.

If you want floating point perf and tons of threads, wait for the rock chip from Sun (and hope that Sun stays afloat long enough to ship it). It's like a T1 only moreso, with floating point for each thread.