complete os running on gpu?

jhu

Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
11,918
9
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after perusing gpgpu.org, i'm left wondering whether or not it's possible to run a complete os on the video card? do current gpus have enough general purpose instructions to do this?
 

Matthias99

Diamond Member
Oct 7, 2003
8,808
0
0
A SM3.0 GPU *might*, but it would be using the hardware in horribly inefficient ways at best. It would be sort of like trying to write an OS to run using only the MMX/SSE instruction sets.
 

eLiu

Diamond Member
Jun 4, 2001
6,407
1
0
unrelated...

wow that LU factorization is really nifty. Incredible how well the problem scales on a GPU vs a fairly fast P4.

Any idea as to what machine zero/epsilon is on a new GPU? Are these guys still using IEEE double precision or is there something else going on?