Unusual Question Please Advise

[Major_A]

Would it be terribly hard for a graphics card manufacturer to use a desktop chip for the GPU? Correct me if I am wrong (not the sharpest tool in the shed) but don’t CPU’s and GPU’s just calculate math equations to give the end result? Why couldn’t nVidia or ATi just take a mobile Barton or Pentium M and reprogram it with PS 3.0 instructions and everything else a GPU uses? Seems like this would be easy enough to reprogram the CPU to do GPU work. Is this a possibility and if so why hasn’t anyone tried it? It would also seem that these mobile processors would run considerably cooler than what ATi and nVidia are putting out these days.

Please explain to me like I’m a two year old why or why not this would work.

 

[RAutrey]

This will not work as GPU/VPUs are far more specialized in their operation and more complex than CPUs.

 

[draksia]

GPU's are far more dedicated and should be because there task are very well defined. This allows them to be as efficent as possible reducing power consumption and transitor count.


Here is a very good article on the architecture of a modern GPU

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/gffx/nv40-part1-a.html

And here is a article on the pentium-m

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pentium-m.ars

They give a good illustration why general purpose cpu's can't bee good at running graphics.