Well I was just trolling the interweb and decided to check out the nvidia site, spotted their tesla computing setup, for when the program complexity outstrips the cpu's ability to solve them. Or something like that. So what do you guys think? 960 cores on the beast, It would be interesting if something like that made it to the personal computer market. http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_s1070.html Thats the site to check out for the info...........
The problem with that, and with other GPU based processing is that its only better than a CPU for a fairly constrained set of problems. What a GPU does really well is apply the same, fairly simple, operation to huge datasets. Where a GPU falls behind a CPU is trying to run different operations on the same data or just random operations on random data. As far as I understand it GPUs have very little cache and little or no capability to look ahead in the instruction stream and extract operations that can be completed together, whereas CPUs are constantly trying to find ways to break up the instructions and maximise the utilisation of the limited number of operational units they have. I dont think we will see a time when the GPU or its descendants replace the CPU or become useful for a PC as anything other than a graphics card. Moriquendi
