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ATI's Stream Computing on the Way
SQLGuru writes to tell us that ATI has announced plans to release a new graphics product that could provide a shake-up for high performance computing. From the article: "ATI has invited reporters to a Sept. 29 event in San Francisco at which it will reveal 'a new class of processing known as Stream Computing.' The company has refused to divulge much more about the event other than the vague 'stream computing' reference. The Register, however, has learned that a product called FireStream will likely be the star of the show. FireStream product marks ATI's most concerted effort to date in the world of GPGPUs or general purpose graphics processor units. Ignore the acronym hell for a moment because this gear is simple to understand. GPGPU backers just want to take graphics chips from the likes of ATI and Nvidia and tweak them to handle software that normally runs on mainstream server and desktop processors."
Not "Steam Computing"...
Perhaps they're following Valve's lead and are introducing 'episodic' computing.
Except that GPGPUs are not a competitor for x86. Tell me how fast your C compiler will work on that nvidia or ATI card.
... oh wait. IBM did that.
If you're gonna beef up and make more general a GPU you might as well all it a Cell
NEXT!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
For most uses you don't need fast 3d graphics anyway. You just need the features. Or want them. Intel graphics will be enough to give Linux users their cutesy Xgl desktop with shadows and warping and blah blah blah and that will be enough to sell a bunch of intel cards solely because they have open source drivers. In fact my goal in future servers will be to get intel integrated graphics so that I can have the open source drivers.
On a desktop I don't care so much about whether drivers are open source or not. On a server, I care very much. I can use another desktop or desktop OS and get the same functionality, but I might not be able to conveniently jump over to another server.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The point of a thing like this is to ship data in bulk to the VRAM attached to the GPU. Then have the GPU grind away on that data using the large memory bandwidth available on the adapter. Then once finished pull the data back off the adapter. Also note that PCIe is much much better then any prior PCI/AGP bus for feeding this type of thing.
(Full disclosure: I work for a major manufacturer of 3-D accelerators.)
There's lots of good sites that talk about GPGPU. Wikipedia has an okay article on the subject as well, and NVIDIA has a primer (PDF) on the subject. But the summary of this article is a bit overly broad.
GPGPU isn't about moving arbitrary processing to the GPU, rather it's about moving specific, computationally expensive computing to the massively parallel GPU.
Effectively, the core idea of GPGPU solutions is that you compute 256x256 (or another granularity) of solutions entirely in one pass.
NVIDIA has several examples on their website, specifically the GPGPU Disease and GPGPU Fluid samples. The Mandelbrot computation they have there could also be considered an example. (More samples here).
GPGPU has already been utilized to perform very fast (comparable to the CPU) FFTs. In an article in GPU Gems 2 (a very good book if you're interested in doing GPGPU work), they indicate that a 1.8x speedup can be had over performing FFTs on the CPU. I've heard that there are now significantly faster implementations as well.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
In the original PC, the VGA interface gave the CPU a direct window into the video memory. Your CPU was your GPU as well - the only thing the graphics card did was convert the raster of bytes in a certain location to a signal recognizable by the monitor. As such, the hardware wasn't optimized for the kinds of operations that would become typical in the games that followed. So video card manufacturers began a mitigation strategy which involved moving the computationally complex parts of rendering off to the video card, where the onboard processor could render much more quickly and more efficiently than the CPU itself. The drawback of this approach was that to take full advantage of your video hardware you had to run a certain buggy, unstable, and rather insecure operating system. Typically, the drivers were written only for Windows. Reinstalling Windows became a semi-annual ritual for serious gamers.
But, if ATI is successful in standardizing the GPGPU architecture, we may be able to take advantages of the video hardware on platforms other than Windows. While Linux has typical suffered a dearth of FPS games because of the lack of good hardware rendering support in the past, this has the potential for Linux to become the next serious gamer's platform.
Which is a good thing, IMHO.
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NVidia's current market cap: US$ 10.83B
And that's assuming Intel won't have to write down a ton of their current inventory (all their old Netburst crap). They'd have to issue a ton of new stock to pay for the purchase - I don't think their shareholders would go for it.
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