[Openmcl-devel] Speed, compilers and multi-core processors

[Jeremy Jones]

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 9:13 AM, Raffael Cavallaro
<raffaelcavallaro at mac.com> wrote:
> tomshardware.com ran this a couple of days ago:
>
> <http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-cuda-gpgpu,2299.html>
>
> It's a summary of real-world results from apps using Nvidia's CUDA.
> For certain things, like video encoding, they're seeing a 4x speedup
> using the GPU over using the CPU. In addition, when they use the GPU,
> it leaves the CPU free for other tasks.


Why don't we just throw out the main CPU and fill our computers with
graphics cards?  (Once CCL is ported to GPUs of course)

Seriously though, what does a CPU have that a GPU doesn't, besides a
different instruction set?  More memory?  Better i/o?  Is the GPU
instruction set too specialized?  I bet the answer is mainly software,
like OSes and device drivers.  I remember in the old days it was
common to have a separate processor to handle i/o.  Maybe that's what
the main CPU should be relegated to.  OTOH, if the software is good
enough, it should just be distributed to whatever computing resources
are appropriate and available.  Just thinking out loud.