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)