On Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:27:52 Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > I have a continuing fear that excessive reliance on GPUs > will be very bad for the world of free open source software. Free open > source software should be quite portable and not tied to specific > proprietary hardware. If the software is not portable or is tied to > specific proprietary hardware then innovation and competition > dwindles.
Well, I'm much more afraid of another issue: GPUs are being used much more and more by other processes they more belong to. E. g. the composite manager, etc. And one thing they're not good at at all is task switching. So if more *applications* on a general desktop are competing for the resource that could lead to a massive slowdown. In scientific computing that's not an issue (as I see here) as they are performed on dedicated boxes where one expects not to have a smooth user feeling. If it all were done in the domain of the display/composite manager (e. g. the X server, or whatever OS domain is helpful with colour management), then it's something else, but to develop another application competing for a resource that's not well off with sharing is something I'm not anticipating. Guy -- Guy K. Kloss Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences Te Kura Pūtaiao o Mōhiohio me Pāngarau Room 2.63, Quad Block A Building Massey University, Auckland, Albany Private Bag 102 904, North Shore Mail Centre voice: +64 9 414-0800 ext. 9585 fax: +64 9 441-8181 eMail: g.kl...@massey.ac.nz http://iims.massey.ac.nz ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: High Quality Requirements in a Collaborative Environment. Download a free trial of Rational Requirements Composer Now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/www-ibm-com _______________________________________________ Lcms-user mailing list Lcms-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lcms-user
