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At this point real compute happens on the GPU. I think we'll see a shift to major apps being driven by GPGPU. The CPU's performance has started matter less and
by slededit 9y ago
At this point real compute happens on the GPU. I think we'll see a shift to major apps being driven by GPGPU.
The CPU's performance has started matter less and less.
- jacquesm 9y agoThat's just simply not true. The 'real computation' happening on GPUs is either very heavy floating point work or graphics related work, almost everything else is running on the CPU.
- davemp 9y agoWhat do you mean by major apps? Do you have some reason to believe that apps will suddenly become embarrassingly parallel? Major apps often don't even take full advantage of SIMD instructions on the CPU. As soon as you need a context switch, branching, or fast memory access your GPU is crap. GPUs are only good at _very_ specific workloads.
- slededit 9y agoI used to believe that, until I started to get into cryptocoin mining. There were algorithms that were specifically designed to be GPU resistant and they all were ported and saw significant gains. It was that experience that pushed me to learn how to program these devices. The tooling isn't good enough yet, but there is no question in my mind practically everything will run on a GPU like processor in the future. The speedups are just too tremendous. Intel knows this, which is why they purposely limit PCIe bandwidth.
- IntelMiner 9y ago"GPUs are only good at _very_ specific workloads." Let me detail you a completely specific workload citing my own personal experience over objective facts with citations Oh and let me also take a swipe at Intel again without any verifiable evidence
- slededit 9y agoPrimecoin is a good example. If you look at the implementation it requires generating a tightly packed bitfield for the sieve and then randomly accessing it after. Lots of synchronization required so you don't overwrite previously set bits are required and the memory accesses are random so its suboptimal for the GPU's memory subsystem. It took under a year for a GPU miner to come out. Having optimized it for Intel in assembly I was convinced it wasn't possible for a GPU to beat it - and yet it happened. It turns out even when used inefficiently a thousand cores can brute force its way through anything.
- purpleidea 9y ago> a thousand cores can brute force its way through anything Cool! Please factor this very large prime for me <insert some RSA prime>
- slededit 9y agoI can't tell what you are mocking... That primecoin exists? That it's POW is finding prime numbers? That it has a GPU miner? http://cryptomining-blog.com/2192-gpu-mining-for-primecoin-xpm-available-but-is-it-worth-it/ http://cryptomining-blog.com/2192-gpu-mining-for-primecoin-x...
- hvidgaard 9y ago> a thousand cores can brute force its way through anything This is so fundamentally wrong that your complete lack of understanding the underlying math is obvious. Let us use 1024bit RSA as the key to bruteforce. If we use the entire universe as a computer, i.e. every single atom in the observable universe enumerate 1 possibility every millisecond, it would take ~6 * 10^211 years to go through them all. In comparison, the universe is less than ~14 * 10^9 years old. And this is for 1024bit, today we use 2048bit or larger.
- slededit 9y agoXPM has nothing to do with finding primes used in RSA, I'm not sure where that came from. It's POW is finding cunningham chains of smaller sized primes. That said I wouldn't be surprised if it could be adapted to find larger primes on a GPU significantly faster than a CPU.
- coldtea 9y ago>I used to believe that, until I started to get into cryptocoin mining. 99% of the apps we use are totally unlike cryptocoin mining. And the style they are written (and more importantly, their function) is even more GPU resistant. >The tooling isn't good enough yet, but there is no question in my mind practically everything will run on a GPU like processor in the future. The speedups are just too tremendous. Don't hold your breath. For one, nobody's porting the thousands of apps we already have and depend on everyday to GPU.
- slededit 9y agoWhile true in the short term, it should be noted Intel is moving more towards the GPU model with its many slower core CPUs and very wide vector units. There is value in a large core capable of fast out of order execution for control purposes. But data processing can be done much faster with a GPU model. You can even implement explicit speculative execution - simply use a warp for each path and choose at the end. It is very wasteful but can often come out ahead.
- dom0 9y agoNo, Intel's approach is very different from GPUs, because Intel has a strong negative interest in making porting to GPUs easy (also, wide vectors are far easier to do in a CPU than a "GPU like model").
- TorKlingberg 9y agoCryptocoin mining is embarrassingly parallel by its nature. You are trying lots of different inputs to a hash function, so you can always run an arbitrary number of them in parallel. There are various ways to reduce the GPU/FPGA/ASIC advantage, like requiring lots of RAM, but the task is still parallel if you have enough RAM. Something like a JavaScript JIT on the other hand is fundamentally hard to parallelize.
- jostmey 9y agoRight on. Core speeds are not getting any faster. Chips with thousands of cores are the future. Intel is way behind in this area
- mrep 9y agoA quick look at AWS shows probably 5 out of 100 services that use GPU as their main resources whereas all of the others use CPU's. Machine learning may be all the hype right now, but it is still suboptimal for most software demands.
- frozenport 9y agoIntel chips have a giant iGPU, that on certain models occupies near half the space. It can currently decode 4k Netflix. The technology is equally applicable to GPUs.
- TorKlingberg 9y agoThe video decoding is done by a hard block called Quick Sync. It's part of the iGPU, but is not using the regular GPU cores.
- frozenport 9y agoYes, but its made with the same lithography - if not the same mask (or equivalent). The lithography is GPU/CPU debate agnostic.
- ant6n 9y agoI've never run a piece of software that used a GPU for anything other than rendering. I believe I'm part of a very large majority.
- oceanswave 9y agoIf you'd like to, these links will let you do so from the comfort of your (desktop) browser. https://tenso.rs https://tenso.rs http://gpu.rocks/ http://gpu.rocks/
- zanny 9y agoLibreoffice has OpenCL acceleration for some spreadsheet operations. With the advent of NVME storage, and the potential bandwidth it yields, I would expect to see database systems emerging that can GPGPU accelerate operations on tables to be way, way faster than what a CPU can handle.
- iainmerrick 9y agoWhat on earth are people doing on spreadsheets that needs GPU acceleration??
- a012 9y agoYou never worked with accounting I guess. They easily get a single spreadsheet that's over 1GB, and that's normal.
- iainmerrick 9y agoI'm aware of big spreadsheets, but from what I've seen, it tends to be complex and very ad-hoc calculations that (I imagine) don't lend themselves very well to GPUs. Making very complex tasks run well on a GPU is hard, whereas CPUs are great for dealing with that stuff. If you have something like a 100,000 row spreadsheet where every row is doing exactly the same calculation on different input data, sure, that starts to make sense. If people are really doing that in Excel, I'm surprised! (but maybe I shouldn't be)
- deepnotderp 9y agoLet's try a compromise, how about multithreaded programs? Or how about programs utilizing less control flow so that static processors (yes, like the infamous VLIW) can extract ilp?
- imtringued 9y agoGPUs are only useful if your problem is data parallel. The majority of compute intensive problems that are also data parallel at the same time have been shifted to GPUs and SIMD instructions already. A GPU isn't some pixie dust that makes everything faster.