could video card become a cpu?

TheBuzzer

TheBuzzer

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we all know video card can do some math extremely fast.

Do you think it is possible for video card to be able to handle cpu command?
 
GPUs are still far too specialized to perform regular CPU tasks adequately.
 
CPU/GPU hybrids are on their way however. Nonetheless, I don't see the discrete GPU vanishing any time soon.
 
Nvidia can think all they want but GPU's are still far too specialized and do not do the complex and varied arithmetic and other things the CPU can do. Not to mention that things are still built on the x86 and x64 platforms still which have license issues in itself
 
Mega666 said:
I see no one has looked at a cpu design and realize what is needed as compared to a gpu. This thread is idoicy.
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Exactly. A GPU is great at floating point math that is highly parallelized, a CPU is good at pretty much anything. A vast majority of what is run on a typical system uses no floating point math and the work is usually done in a single thread. Heck, even something "simple" like a web browser would run like shit on a GPU (if you could get it to run on the GPU at all).
 
kllrnohj said:
Exactly. A GPU is great at floating point math that is highly parallelized, a CPU is good at pretty much anything. A vast majority of what is run on a typical system uses no floating point math and the work is usually done in a single thread. Heck, even something "simple" like a web browser would run like shit on a GPU (if you could get it to run on the GPU at all).
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Thats soon going to change with larrabee, it has 32 x86 cores at 2GHz which would be able to handle office applications with ease. It has SIMD units for floating point calculations, it has dedicated texture units and so on. So say after 5-10 years we will see the fusion of CPU and GPU.
 
Forr35t said:
Thats soon going to change with larrabee, it has 32 x86 cores at 2GHz which would be able to handle office applications with ease. It has SIMD units for floating point calculations, it has dedicated texture units and so on. So say after 5-10 years we will see the fusion of CPU and GPU.
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Hate to burst your bubble, but Larrabee won't be changing anything. Its x86 cores are in-order units similar to that of the old Pentiums from the early 1990s. Think an Atom clocked to 2ghz but with half the L2 cache. Do not confuse x86 with CPU-like, as larrabee's x86 cores would still suck as a CPU.

EDIT: We are going to see a fusion of GPU and GPU much sooner than 5-10 years. AMD's Fusion should be out much sooner than that, but that is a mix of a CPU and a GPU (actually it will just be a CPU and a GPU sitting really really close), not a GPU taking the role of a CPU.
 
Do not confuse x86 with CPU-like, as larrabee's x86 cores would still suck as a CPU.
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Let's see what happens. And what I meant by fusion is that both will be on same die like larrabee.

From wikipedia:
On August 12, 2008, Intel will present a paper describing Larrabee at SIGGRAPH. [8] The paper is said to contain a comparison of performance between Larrabee and Core 2 Duo, which reveals that the single-threaded performance of one of Larrabee's cores is roughly half that of a "Core 2" core, while the overall performance per watt of a Larrabee chip is 20× better than a Core 2 Duo chip.[9]
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Theres no reason that some of a CPU's function cant be put on a GPU, but can this replace the CPU?
The placement (localisation) of the CPU in relation to other components in the system dictates that the CPU cannot be removed from the equation.
If it were, then all control would come from the graphics card making a second motherboard instead, estranging the CPU from other components which need it.

The CPU is used for much more than just providing data for the graphics card, it runs the drivers for all parts of the system, arbitrates between many internal communications etc.

To prevent new timing issues, bus bandwidth problems and excessively complex circuit design, the CPU needs to be placed physically close to the components that need it, not on the other side of a bus which runs at much slower speed than the CPU can communicate.
Where the CPU is placed, it is needed.

Could a CPU's functions on a graphics card be beneficial?
Yes, in relation to just video processing, it could speed up inter-component data transfers by utilising a faster bus and having shorter traces.
Faster comms result in tighter timing control, faster data throughput and better utilisation of components.

So there is a benefit but you cant do away with the core of the PC, its "Central Processing Unit".
 
I do see the CPU becoming less important as time goes on but I can't see how you could ever replace it, general purpose registrars are always going to be needed, you can do all kinds of neat things in the other registrars but it is far simpler just to use the general ones.
 
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