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Five Nvidia CUDA-Enabled Apps Tested
crazipper writes "Much fuss has been made about Nvidia's CUDA technology and its general-purpose computing potential. Now, in 2009, a steady stream of launches from third-party software developers sees CUDA gaining traction at the mainstream. Tom's Hardware takes five of the most interesting desktop apps with CUDA support and compares the speed-up yielded by a pair of mainstream GPUs versus a CPU-only. Not surprisingly, depending on the workload you throw at your GPU, you'll see results ranging from average to downright impressive."
What I don't understand is why people hype a technology that is tied to a specific manufacturer of card. If nvidia died tomorrow, we'd have a fair amount of code thats no longer relevant, unless there was some way to design cards that are CUDA-capable but not nvidia.
Also worth noting that I'd completely forgotten CUDA even ran on windows, as I've only heard it in the context of linux recently.
Does it matter? Linux is not anywhere close to the target market,
Linux support for CUDA matters hugely, Linux boxes are head and shoulders above any other market for CUDA-based software. That's because linux is the OS for supercomputing nowadays and CUDA's biggest niche is the exact same kind of number crunching that is typically associated with supercomputer workloads.
In fact, these GPUs are yet another example of how there is nothing new under the sun. A GPU is very much like the vector processor of Cray-style supercomputing (when Cray was still alive that is) aka SIMD (single instruction, multiple data).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
To be honest, it's all about advertising.
C'mon, 15 pages? You wonder why few of us ever RTFA...
Make Slashdot linked articles direct to a single page version, with maybe a handful of ads, and we may stick around and look at the rest of your site. Otherwise, it's potentially 1 million readers who may not bother clicking the URL, or just skip to the conclusion and miss the point of the article - perhaps hurting sales of advertised nvidia cards, the crux of the article's technology.
Definitely YES, if it's an article worth viewing. I mightn't think I'm interested in a topic, only to find I am. :) Clicking a link after a screen only disrupts one's concentration, while the next page loads, when most of us just use a scroll wheel. And as far as revenue goes, you can fill an entire sidebar with ads, if lost advertising is a concern...
And to whoever moderated his post a troll, get a life. He's trying to improve the experience for us readers and we should encourage dialog...
If anything, NVIDIA is likely far more interested in CUDA working on Linux then in openGL working on Linux(something that they obviously do have some interest in).
Gamers, certainly, most likely have Windows systems. Workstation applications are likely a good chunk of Windows, with a slice of Mac, and some Linux.
Bulk crunching, though, which is where CUDA might make NVIDIA some real money, is overwhelmingly Linux based. Linux is, by a substantial margin, the obvious choice for big commodity clusters.
Here's why you're proven to be a money-hatted site.
Advertising bandwidth versus actual article content bandwidth. Your advertising uses up about 2500% more bandwidth than the actual article content.
You care more about advertising than you do about content. That's why you split everything up into so many pages that I could have done in less than two, single-spaced, 20 point font.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
What's with only allowing registered users access to the print version? I pretty much gave up on being able to read the article after seeing that.