4 ms·

The speed Of the interconnect is absolutely critical. It depends on the problem somewhat, but if you are moving data back and forth cpu to gpu the interconnect

The speed Of the interconnect is absolutely critical. It depends on the problem somewhat, but if you are moving data back and forth cpu to gpu the interconnect becomes the limiting factor very quickly. So much of a limitation that for some problems you might be better of with a cpu or a puny gpu that is on the same die as the cpu. If you can do everything on the gpu then it isn't a problem but at that point why isn't the gpu your main processor?

JimmyAustin 10y ago
ATI is taking an interesting approach with this by mounting M2 drives onto the video card [0]. http://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd-announces-radeon-pro-ssg-fiji-with-m2-ssds-onboard http://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd-announces-radeon-pro...
gumby 10y ago
> If you can do everything on the gpu then it isn't a problem but at that point why isn't the gpu your main processor? The GPU is a highly optimized block of SIMD machines with a more limited set of ALU ops and addressing modes. The CPU has a more general architecture. It's totally reasonable to have a truck, a car and a bicycle.
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  Modern CPUs have multiple cores so they are really four cars bolted together. Why not bolt a car and a truck together and let them share memory (he says completely ruining the metaphor). Graphics cards are becoming full fledged computers, a sibling poster mentioned AMD adding an interface for SSds to their cards. So why have the big x86 multi core system if all it does is feed data to the symbiotic computer that is the gpu and give us a shell prompt? I guess I just answered my question. Gpus are symbiots because they don't run Linux. But I would like to see one that does, whatever that would look like.
  - detaro 10y ago
    That would probably look (roughly) like Intel Xeon Phi, which according to some was started as a GPU project. (they are also co-processors, but you can connect to one and log into a Linux running on it) I'm not sure why you'd totally want to get rid of a general-purpose CPU to run Linux, set up data etc and keep the GPU part simpler (and fast) once you've given them equal memory access.

JimmyAustin 10y ago

ATI is taking an interesting approach with this by mounting M2 drives onto the video card [0]. http://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd-announces-radeon-pro-ssg-fiji-with-m2-ssds-onboard http://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd-announces-radeon-pro...

gumby 10y ago

> If you can do everything on the gpu then it isn't a problem but at that point why isn't the gpu your main processor? The GPU is a highly optimized block of SIMD machines with a more limited set of ALU ops and addressing modes. The CPU has a more general architecture. It's totally reasonable to have a truck, a car and a bicycle.

quantumhobbit 10y ago
Modern CPUs have multiple cores so they are really four cars bolted together. Why not bolt a car and a truck together and let them share memory (he says completely ruining the metaphor). Graphics cards are becoming full fledged computers, a sibling poster mentioned AMD adding an interface for SSds to their cards. So why have the big x86 multi core system if all it does is feed data to the symbiotic computer that is the gpu and give us a shell prompt? I guess I just answered my question. Gpus are symbiots because they don't run Linux. But I would like to see one that does, whatever that would look like.
- detaro 10y ago
  That would probably look (roughly) like Intel Xeon Phi, which according to some was started as a GPU project. (they are also co-processors, but you can connect to one and log into a Linux running on it) I'm not sure why you'd totally want to get rid of a general-purpose CPU to run Linux, set up data etc and keep the GPU part simpler (and fast) once you've given them equal memory access.