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Tuesday, September 19, 2006

September 19 - GPU Ownage!

If you thought you had to splash out £900 on the latest Kentsfield quad-core Core 2 CPU from Intel to get yourself a dream PC, think again! Engadget reports that, 'While building a supercomputer has been whittled down to a science, Peakstream has developed a suite of applications that look towards those speedy PCI Express slots -- not the CPU socket -- for an extra boost of power. The company boldly states that a supercomputer can be created by harnessing the power of "common CPUs combined with the resources of modern graphics cards" to increase performance by "20x." This extreme form of load balancing exploits the tremendous potential housed in today's GPUs in order to schedule workloads, offload tasks onto the optimal processor(s), and manage calculations to minimize the queue of tasks to be completed. Granted, the biggest boon of a graphics processor is the extraordinary floating-point performance; for instance, ATi's X1950 XTX pumps out 750 GFLOPS in dual-graphics mode, while it'd take 31 Intel Xeon 5100 CPUs to crank out those same figures -- thus Peakstream feels that mathematical and computational applications (sorry, Doom fans) are best suited for its software. While having your own personal supercomputer churning those Engadget Folding@home cycles would be mighty impressive, the average joe isn't apt to drop $2,000 (per node) for Peakstream's suite.'

So, as you can tell, you're GPU may be replacing your CPU. Could this be the end of Intel? Could AMD be staring into that black hole of doom? Is this the rise of ATI? Or will Nvidia steal the spotlight. We'll be watching this drama carefully as it unfolds. Stay tuned!

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  Digg | Permalink | Posted by Davidat 7:25 PM. 0 comments





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