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Intel Reveals the Future of the CPU-GPU War

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the state-of-the-chip dept.

Arun Demeure writes "Beyond3D has once again obtained new information on Intel's plans to compete against NVIDIA and AMD's graphics processors, in what the Chief Architect of the project presents as a 'battle for control of the computing platform.' He describes a new computing architecture based on the many-core paradigm with super-wide execution units, and the reasoning behind some of the design choices. Looks like computer scientists and software programmers everywhere will have to adapt to these new concepts, as there will be no silver bullet to achieve high efficiency on new and exotic architectures."

4 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. Great! by Short+Circuit · · Score: 3, Informative

    As I recall, AMD's Athlon beat out the competing Intel processor in per-clock performance, partially as a result of having a more superscalar architecture. It's nice to see that, with the NetBurst architecture dead, Intel's finally taking an approach that's expandable and extensible.

    The CPU wars have finally gotten interesting again. I'm going to go grab some popcorn.

    --
    tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
    1. Re:Great! by strstrep · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's a good design, it just doesn't seem like a good design for a video game system. It's a general purpose CPU attached to several CPUs that essentially are DSPs. DSP programming is very weird, and you need to at least understand how the device works on the instruction level for optimal performance. A lot of DSP code is still written in assembly (or at the very least hand-optimized after compilation).

      It's very expensive to have DSP code written, when compared to normal CPU code, and video game manufacturers have been complaining that the cost of making a game is too high. Also, most of the complexity in a video game nowadays is handled by the GPU, not the CPU. Now the cell would be great for lots of parallel signal processing, or some other similar task, and I bet it could be used to create a great video game, it would just be prohibitively expensive.

      The cell is a great solution to a problem. However, that problem isn't video games. A fast traditional CPU, possibly with multiple cores, attached to a massively pipelined GPU would probably work better for video games.

  2. Re:Sure there is by Fnord · · Score: 3, Informative

    A perl6 *interpreter* was written in haskell, and it's considered a non-performance oriented reference implementation, purely for exploring the perl6 syntax. No one has ever doubted that interpreters and compilers are easier to do in functional languages. One of the things you learn first when you take a class in lisp is a recursive descent parser. But the version of perl6 that's expected to acutally perform? Parrot is written in C. The fact that its no where near done is a completely different matter...

  3. Ken Kutaragi thinks Sony is the devil? by *weasel · · Score: 3, Informative

    it was mostly the people who thought Sony was the devil himself who hyped it up


    No, mostly, it was Ken Kutaragi.

    Having an extensive history of reporting on Sony, I'm sure you remember he did the exact same thing when hyping the PS2's emotion engine.

    --
    // "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"