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Intel Reveals the Future of the CPU-GPU War
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."
Abandon C and Fortran. Functional programing makes multithreading easy and programs can be written for parallel execution with ease. And as an added benefit, goodbye buffer overflows and double frees!
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Arun Demeure writes "Beyond3D has once again obtained new information...
If you are going to submit your own articles to Slashdot, at least have the decency to admit this instead of talking about yourself in the third-person.
I don't know what it is, or how it will be different from x86, but progress can't keep continuing if we don't look for better methods of doing things.
It cannot be argued that x86 is best architecture ever made, we all know it's not... but it is the one with the most research. We need the top companies in the industry, Intel, AMD, MS, etc. to sit down and design an entirely new specification going forward.
New processor architecture, a new form factor, a new power supply, etc...
Google has demonstrated that a single voltage PSU is more efficient, and completely do able. There is little reason that we still use internal cards to add functionality to our systems, couldn't these be more like cartridges so you don't need to open the case?
Why not do away with most of the legacy technology in one swoop and update the entire industry to a new standard.
PS, I know why, money, too much investment in the old to be worth creating the new. But I can dream can't I?
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
So when Intel decides that it's time to implement new architectures and force new methods of coding it's an awesome thing, but when Sony does it people tell them to stop trying to be different... I know people will cry about the console market being different, but the principals of the decisions are the same. If people cried about the Cell I expect them to cry about Intel's new direction. And this had to be said... I have Karma to burn.
FanFictionRecs.net
Funny, I wouldn't consider a mobo without because Intel are working towards an open source driver. I'm sick of binary drivers and unfathomable nvidia error messages. At least Nvidia expend some effort, ATI are a complete joke. Even on windows ATI palm you off with some sub-standard media player and some ridiculous .NET application that runs in the taskbar (What fucking planet are those morons on?)
So you can bash intel graphics all you like but for F/OSS users they could end up as the only game in town. We're not usually playing the latest first person shooters, performance only need be "good enough".
Speaking as someone who wrote reports on the Cell as early as 2004, it was mostly the people who thought Sony was the devil himself who hyped it up.
Easiest way to make sure a product doesn't meet expectations is to raise expectations.
FanFictionRecs.net
If intel keeps supporting its equipment with excellent OSS support, I'll happily switch to an all-intel platform, even at a significant premium.
NVIDIA's Linux drivers are pretty good, but ATI/AMD's are god awful, and both NVIDIA's & AMD/ATI's are much more difficult to use than Intels.
I'd love to see an Intel GPU/CPU platform that was performance competitive with ATI/AMD or NVIDIA's offerings.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
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.