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NVIDIA To Push Into Supercomputing
RedEaredSlider writes "NVIDIA outlined a plan to become 'the computing company,' moving well beyond its traditional focus on graphics and into high-profile areas such as supercomputing. NVIDIA is making heavy investments in several fields. Its Tegra product will be featured in several mobile devices, including a number of tablets that have either hit the market already or are planned for release this year. Its GeForce lineup is gaming-focused while Quadro is all about computer-aided design workstations. The Tesla product line is at the center of NVIDIA's supercomputing push."
The latest GPUs already use more power than the hungriest Intel or AMD x86 ever did.
And when used for the types tasks designed, pump out 10x the performance for maybe twice or three times the power.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
5 of Top 10 most green supercomputers use GPUs:
Green 500 List
Each GPU is very high performance and so high power. Performance / watt is what counts and
here GPUs beat CPUs by 4 to 5 times. This is why so many of the new supercomputers are using
GPUs / heterogenous computing.
Actually, up to 40 times the performance. http://www.gp-you.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=46:art-gpumat&catid=40:cat-gpumat&Itemid=54
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Look, I apologize if I offended you in any way, ok? There's no need for such languages.
I can NOT fucking believe there was not already a troll account called moderators long, long, LONG before UID 2M.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
nVidia shuns linux users? They may 'shun' those that can not have any non-GPL code, but they do make a higher performing and far more feature rich driver for their cards for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris and keep it (for the most part) up to date. If you don't like it, there are alternatives.
Gotta love the rabid GPL fans. The GPL doesn't mean freedom for everyone to do things the way you think they should be done.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
If all you're measuring is pure FLOPS, then here are some numbers: Cray X1, 250MFLOPS. nVidia Fermi: 1GFLOPS. ARM Cortex A8: 10MFLOPS. Of course, that doesn't tell the whole story. Getting 250MFLOPS out of the Cray required writing everything using huge vectors. Getting 1GFLOPS from Fermi requires using vectors within independent concurrent processing tasks which access memory in a predictable pattern and rarely branch.
GPUs are not magic, they are just optimised for different workloads. CPUs are designed to work well with algorithms that branch frequently (every 7 instructions or so - so they devote a lot of die area to branch prediction), have good locality of reference (cache speeds up memory in these cases), and have an integer-heavy workload. GPUs generally lack branch prediction, so a branch causes a pipeline stall (and, on something like Fermi, if two kernels take different branches then you drop to 50% throughput immediately). Their memory architecture is designed to stream large blocks of data in a few different orders (e.g. a texture cube, pixels in order along any axis). So, depending on your workload, either one may be faster than the other.
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