On 8/19/06, Jared Putnam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The weaknesses of GPUs are: There is no support for integers or fixed point. There is only fixed-function graph reduction. Output must be a two-dimensional array. There is no hardware support for doubles, although there are SIGGRAPH presentations this year about emulating them. If those can be beaten in a product costing less than the Cell, there will be markets. Scientific computing wants cheaper supercomputers, financial and statistical computing wants faster APLs,[1] game programmers[2] want to run "essentially functional" programs which transform "a small input data set to a small output data set, making use of large constant data structures." AGEIA is testing the market for a product that solves a sliver of that last problem.
My opinion is this: If the goal is to do supercomputing, then design something that's good at supercomputing. I can see why they currently use GPUs to do stream computing. There are lessons to be learned from that. But the graphics nature of GPUs, I think, will soon start to hold things back, because you're shoehorning problems into an environment not designed to compute them. People say "it's good to design something that is versatile" and "there is money in supercomputing". But if there's money in supercomputing, why not spend that money more wisely than trying to use GPUs? Design something that throws away all of the cruft and limitations that usually come along with the GPU. So... we can do this (within the limits of various FTC and Dept. of Commerce regulations, which are very scary), but we shouldn't limit our thinking to the way people think about graphics. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
