> There are two major functions that graphic cards need to do these days. > The first is to actually get a display out to a monitor. (DUH) > The second has become this GPU processing of 3D elements.
The third being video decoding. > are any of these GPU's really that much faster than a single Intel > or AMD core at these math functions? Appariently yes. People are starting to use GPUs for things that are (as far as I know) completely non-graphics related. For example they are doing protein folding (cancer research) on GPUs because it is faster. > From what I'm reading, we don't even have an effective way to program > for these multi-cores. Unless you're doing enterprise level spreadsheets > or 3D animation, the bulk of this processing power is going to be > waisted right now on virtualization anyway. Some applications are inheriently single threaded. Others are easy to split between CPUs. A decent multitasking OS (e.g. Unix) has no trouble running multiple programs in parallel. If you have more than one CPU they run in parallel. If the idea of an idle CPU bothers you, run protein folding in the background, niced down. > If you design a custom board to do this kid of 3D, it's always going to > be a generation behind the top of the line, A custom chip designed for 3D will be faster than a generic CPU, other things being equal. > and it's going to be more > expensive to produce because of the niche popularity. That's probably true. > We also get the support of the big processor manufactures as part of > this deal. Ok... not so much AMD since they purchased ATI, but Intel > would LOVE this idea since it would sell more of their products. You will get ZERO support from Intel. Intel will not walk across the street for companies much larger than itself (*), they will not care one bit for a small group like OGP. (*) Been there done that, didn't like the workaround. I have read that AMD does listen to the FLOSS crowd, so there is a ray of hope there. On the other hand I have also read that new ATI designs may not allow access to the framebuffer, so be realistic in what you hope for. > Imagine a graphic card that relied on a Core Duo > as it's processor and had it's own high speed RAM. Is anything better > documented than that? It is well known that Intel doesn't completely document their chips. > Since graphic cards are climbing into the $500-$1000 range anyway... The $500-$1000 cards get a lot of press, but they don't sell that many of them. Exotic sports cars get a lot of press, but you don't see many of them on the street. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
