GPU's hellalot useful for other tasks besides graphics

[Mr Bean]

Kinda Sort

Graphics processors supercharge everyday apps

By Scott Fulton

June 30, 2005 - 16:13 EST

Chapel Hill (NC) - Originally developed to remove a massive processing workload from the CPU, some scientists examine how the graphics processors can accelerate non-graphic applications as well. The Geometric Algorithms for Modeling, Motion, and Animation (GAMMA) Research Group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reported this week that Nvidia's 7800 GTX reference card increased the speed of test applications by up to 35x.

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The trick to exploiting the latent power of the graphics processor while it isn't producing scenery for 3D games, UNC Professor Dinesh Manocha told us, is to rephrase everyday operations as though they were specific two-dimensional graphics functions, like texture mapping. While everyday CPUs work with threads, Prof. Minocha pointed out, graphics processors deal with streams capable of performing single instructions on multiple data elements simultaneously, through pipelines. By comparison, CPU-based parallelism divides instruction threads among multiple cores, for what Prof. Minocha calls a "von Neumann bottleneck." The NVIDIA 7800 GTX utilizes 24 pixel pipelines and eight vertex units for its implementation of Single Instruction / Multiple Data (SIMD) architecture.

Intresting little trick, mostly it seems to apply to compling code.

Seems they were able to knock about fifteen seconds off a seventeen second compile time using C# compared to a standard Xeon 2.8Ghtz CPU

But what Prof. Manocha also pointed out is that the performance increase in GPUs is exceeding the rate of CPUs. "If you look at [both] computation power and rasterization power," stated Prof. Manocha, "in the last six years, [performance for] PC graphics cards has grown at a [factor] of 2 or 2.25 per year, whereas CPUs are barely doubling every 18 months." He added that he expects this trend to continue as both ATI and NVIDIA produce their next generations of graphics cards in 2006.

Intresting stuff. Speaking of which, we have a definate(Semi-definate) limit of 8Gthz being tossed around as when current CPU speeds will hit the wall, is there anything similar for video GPU?