Over the past few years, there have been persistent rumours that NVIDIA, the graphics chip maker, was working on an x86 chip to compete with Intel and AMD. Recently, these rumours gained some traction, but NVIDIA's CEO just shot them down, and denied the company will enter the x86 processor market.
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Member since:2009-08-18
@Phocean
"GPU are not so interesting in computing, only on very specific tasks, and even there nothing so great that would give it a solid advantage."
Maybe on Windows PCs.
For OS X and some instances of Linux, the OS takes full advantage of the GPU leaving the processor to be dedicated to do more demanding tasks. in the end, it can and DOES make a system faster when properly integrated into the OS.
Edited 2009-11-09 22:03 UTC
Member since:2009-08-18
Windows has damn good GUI acceleration. Desktop Windows Manager which is responsible for accelerating the Windows 7 GUI is taking up 26Meg of ram according to task manager, Skype is using 28Meg.
Windows 7 has pretty good GUI acceleration which doesn't eat up my memory and is damn responsive on this Integrated graphics card.
Anyhow where does this myth come from that you need a graphics card accelerating the GUI otherwise it degrades performance horribly? ... unless your app is using software 3d acceleration or heavily relying on the graphics card to help it with additional processing (Adobe CS4) any CPU in the last 6 years can do at least 1280x1024 any application degradation that you are likely to notice.
Member since:2006-01-03
"... only on very specific tasks, and even there nothing so great that would give it a solid advantage"
Next time, please check the Nvidia Cuda website or gpgpu.org before make such comment
From my experience, for many problems a cuda program running with a simple gtx 260 gives you a factor between 80-100x faster than a 2 x quadcore 5020 (using openMP), and that even before doing substantial tunning for the coalesced memory access that makes huge differences in the performance. If giving two orders of magnitude in performance does not give a solid advantage, please tell Intel they can throw Larrabee to the garbage bin, that they don't need to compete with Nvidia in the GPGPUs arena.
In more than 20 years doing scientific computing I haven't witnessed such jump in performance by just plugging a card and do some recoding. Even if the learning curve is important, very quickly you get programs running much faster than before. We have ported around 20 programs in the last 3 months and the impact has been dramatic. Many programs that required 4 to 8 2xquad-core nodes (MPI+OpenMP) in a cluster to get results in a promptly manner are being replaced by their gpgpu counterparts and this let the cluster for the very long simulations.
Then, Nvidia is effectively having a substantial advantage here until Larrabee can come to reshape the market.
The big missing feature in Nvidia's line is the support to ECC but that is going to be addressed in the next generation of GPGPUs coming next year.
Member since:2006-01-18
Member since:
2007-07-07
I bet they will be dead soon.
GPU are not so interesting in computing, only on very specific tasks, and even there nothing so great that would give it a solid advantage.