Graphics cards as co-processor in PCI Express.

[ZapZilla]

Using the power of ones graphics card to assist in distributed computing has long been wanted...

Is its time coming with PCI Express?

"using graphics as a co-processor"

From third to last paragraph here.

If true, this looks to be a good thing for distributed projects.

Anyone have further info on this?

 

[Mardeth]

I was just about ask if this was possible. Using graphic card I mean. I could bring some nice performance boost like 10% at least? (Since their arent maked for that kind of stuff they arent probably really efficient.)

 

[Confused]

Graphics processors are now becoming more and more like "normal" processors every day, as they have to do so much more, with Microsoft bringing out all these versions of DirectX which do more and more stuff like a normal CPU does.

Of course, with graphics processors, ATI and nVidia do things differently, and it's up to the drivers to convert the DX API calls into things that the GPU will understand (unlike AMD and Intel CPU's which all recognise the same instruction sets (x86, MMX, SSE etc) plus some extras for each processor type (3D-Now!, SSE2 etc)) so writing "general" things to run on GPU's will be more difficult.

Of course I would love to be proved wrong!!!


Garry

 

[Overkiller]

Using the graphics processor as a *co-processor* could be a very neat idea. While the GPUs are not designed for this by any means it would still be nice to have an extra boost...

then again we could all wait for intel's Tanglewood...16 processors on one die :Q