As i was reading this post:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...html#post42458
I had a thought go through my head..." wow a card that can handle audio, jeez stick embeded bluetooth and a power adapter
on that card an i wont even Need the rest of my computer..."
then i started thinking about a few other sites that i've read recently, and
a new concept came to mind. After a little bit of research I was quite
surprized at what I found.
Cpu vs Gpu...
Now quite obviously you cant compare the two exactly. They are two tooootally different pieces of hardware, specialized for
two different tasks.... but are they? Well the short answer would be yes, but for how long? Nvidia and ATI have both made
thier GPUs programable in the last generation, giving more than a few people the opertunity to question the future relevance
of the CPU. Now you might read that and immidiatly ask yourself who these "idiots" are, but before you pass judgment let me
show you some of the information that i've found.
When i first got my Q6600 I was mightily impressed! and why shouldn't I have been? For the first time ever, I had a procesor
that could do 4 processes at once, it has a great memory bandwith, a great clock speed, 582 million transistors and it
was affordably priced. These processors have so much processing power that there have been many heated debates
questioning the necessity of it all... little did i know that i had another, even more powerful processor in my computer that
i didnt even think twice about... other than about what all the great games i could play with it...
Que the GPU...
Nividia's 8800GT has 128 stream processors running at 1.35Ghz each, with a theoretical maximum of 580 gigaflops
of computing power, its got 680 million transistors and a memory bandwith of 86.4 GB/S to its onboard ram and can run
thousands of independantly executing threads at once... WOW. now remember that you can use SLI to put 2 or 3 of them
together on one board...
when i look at the specs between Nvidia's gpu and the Q6600 its pretty hard to stay impressed with the Q6600...
Yes I know
that there are some major fundamental differences between the two units, but what if there wern't? I mean, everything i was
excited about in the Q6600, the GPU has been doing for years, and trumps it in almost every way. It seems to me that the
CPU manufactures are adopting alot of techniques used by gpu manufactures, just to be able to continue to increase their
power. What if the GPU manufactures (who already have a far superior processor) started implimenting techniques used by
CPU manufactures? I mean how hard would it be to adopt the neccessary functions of a cpu into a gpu anyway... especially for
someone like AMD/ATI?????
Think using a gpu like a cpu is super far away?? Think again. Stanford Universitie's Folding@Home project has introduced a
client that uses ATI's X1800 and X1900 series' GPU to fold. Here is a testamonial quote...
"Over five days, our Radeon X1900 XTX crunched eight work units for a total of 2,640 points. During the same period, our single Opteron 180 core chewed its way through six smaller work units for a score of 899—just about one third the point production of the Radeon"
also another quote
"The processing power of just 5,000 ATI processors is also enough to rival that of the existing 200,000 computers currently involved in the Folding@home project; and it is estimated that if a mere 10,000 computers were to each use an ATI processor to conduct folding research, that the Folding@home program would effectively perform faster than the fastest supercomputer in existence today, surpassing the 1 petaFLOP
level."
And its no secret that Nvidia has been trying to break into the embedded market either...
Now i gotta ask... do we NEED all that power that the GPU is capable of?? Hell no, we barely use the power current cpus have, but hell, if its sitting there in my computer anyway... doin nothing half the time... crack that thing open an give me the POWER baby!!!
If this excites you as much as it does me, here are a few links that go much deeper in depth than i could ever explain it...
Coding Horror: CPU vs. GPU How to get 520 GigaFlops for $600 | Ed Burnette’s Dev Connection | ZDNet.com http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/files/...unch_Final.pdf