GPU Supercomputer... Today.

[tzetsin]

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

[Mr. Cipher]

I was wondering about that myself, especially when I learned my old athlon 3700+ system wasn't useless for F@H since it has 2 ATI x1600XTs inside. I read a while back on the forum that people have used GPUs to speed up cracking, so I imagine it is only a matter of time before we're sticking in GPUs in our sockets instead of our CPUs.

Heh, wouldn't that be cool. "I can run 8 processes on my dual socket quad-core system." " Yeah? I have thousands." GPUs FTW!

[tom.mullie]

folding is perfect for GPUs because it requires millions of easy calculations, for thousands of small processors (relatively speaking of course). I imagine that the GPU based CPU would start to falter when hit with programs that use harder math (know nothing of programing, so can't give examples.

that said, using 4x xfire to get 1280 cores would be cool, if only for the stats page.

[edit] also makes me wonder how GPU makers profit when they sell such a more complicated product, with onborard RAM and the whole deal for around $250 (8800gt), the price of an e8400, give or take.

[3.0charlie]

You should see a pts explosion once FaH releases their new GPU client, for the 38xx series.

[tzetsin]

I imagine that the GPU based CPU would start to falter when hit with programs that use harder math

Your right, thats because GPUs anrt designed for the work, but just thinking about the concept really makes my change my opinion of AMD. Here i thought that they were going to go down the tubes, but after thinking about how they have ati now, with gpu super processors... they now have the 2nd best of both worlds, put them together and you'll have very affordable super computing... of course the "need" for the average user to have even a portion of what this "potential" has to offer is way way way in the future... But its exciting none the less. Imagine encoding video with a gpu instead of the cpu... something that a stream processor is really quite suited for... i mean i'm getting almost 400 fps encoding with divx with my quad, imagine what 128 stream processors could do :D i dont think they make fast enough hard drives... hehe

[vdf22]

Originally Posted by 3.0charlie

You should see a pts explosion once FaH releases their new GPU client, for the 38xx series.

No kidding.

Originally Posted by tom.mullie

folding is perfect for GPUs because it requires millions of easy calculations, for thousands of small processors (relatively speaking of course). I imagine that the GPU based CPU would start to falter when hit with programs that use harder math (know nothing of programing, so can't give examples.

that said, using 4x xfire to get 1280 cores would be cool, if only for the stats page.

[edit] also makes me wonder how GPU makers profit when they sell such a more complicated product, with onborard RAM and the whole deal for around $250 (8800gt), the price of an e8400, give or take.

Stuff like physics really works well on GPU's, with all the parallelism (is that a word??). A cheap GPU can easily beat a CPU in physics. And with Fusion coming up there will likely be a easy way to use the Fusion GPU for stuff other than graphics for things that can benefit from it.

Those are just my thoughts.

[Babrbarossa]

I suppose ideally there would be multiple purpose-specific processors on a motherboard and no CPU, but the programming is what hinders any major leaps forward like that- it's almost like there needs to be a whole new platform designed from the ground up that doesn't worry about running legacy programs, or windows- a whole new type of programming designed to stream data to a series of purpose specific processors.

[Scratch]

I have heard through a discreet source that Intel is in the works to purchase NVidea.

This source has also confirmed that there is work currently underway to eliminate the need for conventional television by transforming the current monitor into a standalone HTPC with the graphics chipset performing the functions normally assigned the cpu and without the bulk of a personal computer

The voice controlled wallmounted monitor without conventional wiring is quickly becoming a reality so what exactly is a computer going to look like?

[tzetsin]

I think we are in for some exciting times, and the best part is that most of the technology exsists already today. Its just a matter of putting them together.

also makes me wonder how GPU makers profit when they sell such a more complicated product, with onborard RAM and the whole deal for around $250 (8800gt), the price of an e8400, give or take.

LOL your right, the gpu is much more complex then a standard cpu, comes with its own fast ram, its own motherboard.... why is it that we have to pay so much for these damn cpus? Especially considering how slowly they are developing in comparison to the gpu.

but the programming is what hinders any major leaps forward like that

Yeah, the way programmers are complaining about the complexity of multiple threads with just 4 processors... i cant imagine what they would do if they were expected to use 128... Im pretty sure they would need to come up with an entirely new programming language just to accomadate it. I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but even i could see how it would get down right confusing trying to follow all those threads, But at the same time, they are somehow able to use the full capability of the gpu with games... perhaps we just need an OS that can dynamically define different threads of a processor to different functions of a piece of software, even without the software being muli threaded. Think of a raid array, the raid controller can split the data, store it and rebuild it with a good deal greater performance than a single hard drive, all without any "knowlage" of the rest of the computer or the software. what if there was some kind of embedded cpu/gpu controller that could split the incoming processes and rebuild them on the other side, then we wouldnt have any need to change the way we write software at all because all the multi threading would be done on the hardware.

just a thought.

[tzetsin]

I have heard through a discreet source that Intel is in the works to purchase NVidea.

Lol, they must have read my post ;D hehe jk, but i'm not at all surprised. i'm sure the boys at Intel figured out what AMD is capable of with ati.

[vdf22]

Originally Posted by Scratch

I have heard through a discreet source that Intel is in the works to purchase NVidea.

There've been rumours circulating about that since AMD bought out ATI. I personally don't know what that would do to AMD.

Originally Posted by tzetsin

Yeah, the way programmers are complaining about the complexity of multiple threads with just 4 processors... i cant imagine what they would do if they were expected to use 128... Im pretty sure they would need to come up with an entirely new programming language just to accomadate it. I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but even i could see how it would get down right confusing trying to follow all those threads, But at the same time, they are somehow able to use the full capability of the gpu with games... perhaps we just need an OS that can dynamically define different threads of a processor to different functions of a piece of software, even without the software being muli threaded. Think of a raid array, the raid controller can split the data, store it and rebuild it with a good deal greater performance than a single hard drive, all without any "knowlage" of the rest of the computer or the software. what if there was some kind of embedded cpu/gpu controller that could split the incoming processes and rebuild them on the other side, then we wouldnt have any need to change the way we write software at all because all the multi threading would be done on the hardware.

Most programs don't even work well with dual core CPU's, so something would have to be done to be able to use all the cores. Programmers wouldn't want to have to make 100-threaded programs. CAD programs support a lot of threads, but it's would be different making, say, a game with that many threads.

[vertex112]

Writing a multi-threaded program to run on 128 or more stream processors would be any programmers worst nightmare...

I like the idea of running audio or video encoding with the 128, or even 320 stream processors is my dream :)

As for the 3870 running FaH.......damn. (having 2 3870X2s running FaH!!!???)

[tzetsin]

does anyone know how it is that a game can utilize all the processes on a gpu, but we all think software has a hard time running just a few threads on a cpu? what is the difference here? Do game developers have a secret ninja way of doing it that other software developers cant fathom? I'm actually assuming that its handled by the vid card somehow, am i wrong?

[supernode]

From what i understand its all in the software for instance take the playstation 3 its closer to a gpu than cpu but it will run like a cpu cause the operating system is made to work with that type of chip.
Now if they built a operating system that would run with the gpu than basicaly that would turn your gpu into a cpu! i belive that the gpu is more like a risc chip that you would find in ps3 or gameing console.

Ive also heard rumors of software being made for windows that will allow the gpu to run some programs for the computer to take more load off the cpu. From what i read its not far away. we should start seeing the gpu run more software even off the desk top like maybe your web browsers or mp3 software in the next year or so!