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In reply to those pointing out non-graphics use of GPUs, ah, yeah. I don't follow that, so I didn't know if AMD/ATI was still/ever? a player, nVidia gets what
by hga 12y ago
In reply to those pointing out non-graphics use of GPUs, ah, yeah. I don't follow that, so I didn't know if AMD/ATI was still/ever? a player, nVidia gets what little press I see of that.
Aren't the economics of this are based on gamers buying large quantities of the chips, thereby spreading out the non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs of making the chips? Is AMD/ATI doing well in this separate from CPUs market? All I can remember is people still complaining about poor device drivers.
- greggyb 12y agoAMD is still quite competitive in the GPU market, but their major progress lately is in their HSA[0]. A big problem with GPU computing is that you have two distinct memory spaces, so whatever is being done on the GPU needs to be loaded into VRAM, worked upon, and then returned to system RAM. The goal of HSA is to break this down. If you have GPU and CPU on one chip with a single pool of RAM that both can access a lot of communications complexity and overhead goes away. All of this is still very new tech, so what I am saying is conjecture and possibility, but there is a lot of potential in this area. I am not able to say whether the magnitude of this is similar, but you might think of it analogously to AMD64 architecture. AMD was first to the table with 64 bit processors. They are also first to the table with this. Intel may catch up and blow them away, as has now happened with 64 bit processors, but right now AMDs integrated graphics far beyond Intel's offerings. [0]http://developer.amd.com/resources/heterogeneous-computing/what-is-heterogeneous-system-architecture-hsa/ http://developer.amd.com/resources/heterogeneous-computing/w...