turn a radeon into a gpgpu

[Pelu]

Hey... I was wondering if there is a driver, bios, hack, or something that can turn a radeon 4870x2 into some sort of processor core, or at least one of the two gpus core into cpu and one in graphics...

 

[error8]

and the video memory into a hard drive?

 

[Munky]

Originally posted by: error8
and the video memory into a hard drive?

It IS a gpu that can be used for gpgpu work... but gpgpu is not a replacement for cpu. Windows apps will not work on it.

 

[Pelu]

Originally posted by: munky

Originally posted by: error8
and the video memory into a hard drive?

It IS a gpu that can be used for gpgpu work... but gpgpu is not a replacement for cpu. Windows apps will not work on it.

To tell you the true I was looking into this because I hear of some cards that work like a processor, windows kinda detect the gpu as a core, even the task manager shows it like a core and the video memory is ram... not harddisk!

Much like a Tesla or Stream, but just a video card doing some trick like that... lol I dont feel like buying a 1300 bucks card just to tinker...

 

[error8]

Originally posted by: munky

Originally posted by: error8
and the video memory into a hard drive?

It IS a gpu that can be used for gpgpu work... but gpgpu is not a replacement for cpu. Windows apps will not work on it.

Dam it, with all that video memory, Pelu could have installed XP on it. 😛

 

[Munky]

Originally posted by: Pelu

Originally posted by: munky

Originally posted by: error8
and the video memory into a hard drive?

It IS a gpu that can be used for gpgpu work... but gpgpu is not a replacement for cpu. Windows apps will not work on it.

To tell you the true I was looking into this because I hear of some cards that work like a processor, windows kinda detect the gpu as a core, even the task manager shows it like a core and the video memory is ram... not harddisk!

Much like a Tesla or Stream, but just a video card doing some trick like that... lol I dont feel like buying a 1300 bucks card just to tinker...

It doesn't work that way. If you know how to program the gpu, you can tinker all you want, but there's no way an app written only to run on the cpu will use the gpu for additional computation...

*edit - not even with $2000 Tesla cards.

 

[KIAman]

Originally posted by: Pelu

Originally posted by: munky

Originally posted by: error8
and the video memory into a hard drive?

It IS a gpu that can be used for gpgpu work... but gpgpu is not a replacement for cpu. Windows apps will not work on it.

To tell you the true I was looking into this because I hear of some cards that work like a processor, windows kinda detect the gpu as a core, even the task manager shows it like a core and the video memory is ram... not harddisk!

Much like a Tesla or Stream, but just a video card doing some trick like that... lol I dont feel like buying a 1300 bucks card just to tinker...

Source? I'm very curious. Better not be a friend of a friend of an uncle's previous dog owner's girlfriend former roommate's boss.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: Pelu

To tell you the true I was looking into this because I hear of some cards that work like a processor, windows kinda detect the gpu as a core, even the task manager shows it like a core and the video memory is ram... not harddisk! ..

Windows runs on x86 processors, programs compile to x86 assembly. nv and ATI do not use x86-compatible processor cores for their GPUs.

Your friend of a friend of a pizza delivery boy also believes that Bill Gates is paying $20 for each forwarded email and the PSP Go is worth two hundred forty-nine US dollars.

 

[DaveSimmons]

You probably misread something like nvidia's announcement of using a software written specially for their GPU to accelerate Flash, or people running x86 applications (on a regular CPU core) that use the GPU as a coprocessor to speed up video encoding.

In neither case does the GPU appear to Windows as an extra core. and the program running in Windows is still an x86 application running on a CPU core that uses the GPU as a secondary coprocessor.

 

[Cogman]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons

Originally posted by: Pelu

To tell you the true I was looking into this because I hear of some cards that work like a processor, windows kinda detect the gpu as a core, even the task manager shows it like a core and the video memory is ram... not harddisk! ..

Windows runs on x86 processors, programs compile to x86 assembly. nv and ATI can not use x86-compatible processor cores for their GPUs.

Your friend of a friend of a pizza delivery boy also believes that Bill Gates is paying $20 for each forwarded email and the PSP Go is worth two hundred forty-nine US dollars.

Fixed (Though, I guess technically ATI could use an x86 architecture, it being AMD now and all, however, before the purchase, it was not possible, patents and all)

Larrabee will be the first GPU to use the x86 architecture, its success will determine if x86 video cards are in our future.

However, even if the video card runs on an x86 instruction set, getting it to behave like just another core is pretty near impossible. The lag from transferring data across the PCI-E bus alone should dissuade anyone from trying to treat it just like another core.

Please note, that using the GPU is fine and dandy, so long as you use it for what it was built for, mainly massive parrallel floating point calculations. Trying to use it in a serial fashion will be very disappointing.

Heck, most programs don't take advantage of more then 2 cores. Parallel programming is hard (for operations that aren't inherently parallel)