On Tuesday 03 October 2006 17:50, Jason Papadopoulos wrote: > Quoting John R Pierce <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > how many people have pentium/athlon CPUs? > > > > what percentage of those people have X1900's ? (noting that these are > > $400 video cards, bought almost exclusively by the 'extreme gamer' crowd > > who are willing to spend twice the money for tiny increments of game > > performance) > > How many of those graphics cards implement double-precision floating point? > > While it's possible to implement a LL test using only 32-bit integers, > unless those graphics cards can do wide integer multiplies that scheme > would also be impossible to port as well. > > Using graphics cards for finding primes is a long-standing FAQ, and the > answer is always no, but as time goes on there are fewer and fewer > reasons it's impossible.
Surely the overriding problem is that the manufacturers of graphics cards tend to keep the driver code confidential. e.g. the linux drivers - if provided - "work" but by no means implement the full capabilities of the graphics card. If you don't have access to the hardware - except through a proprietary driver which responds only to graphics-specific commands, and doesn't even have a published API unless you're using the crippled linux version - you're going to have great problems persuading the thing to do any useful computations - whatever the capabilities of the thing are. Regards Brian Beesley _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
