Which was it? a GPU or CPU?

[metis]

I remember reading something about the CPU is infantly programmable. Is it me or is the grahpics industry wanting programmability!?!?!

So why can't we throw an old K6 on a skinny piece of silicon with some ram, support chips and make that become the new industry standard for grahpics?? I know there are the obvious issues to answered and so on but Ive never seen an article about even designing a card with a CPU at its heart...

 

[Mingon]

A cpu is capable of a lot of different tasks, whereas the GPU is still very focused on 2d/3d albeit with programmable effects. Ask in the highly technical forum or on beyond3d.com for a better answer

Read this thread for some related info.

 

[Alex]

it was a gpu. and yes the do want programability!!

 

[spanky]

mingon - link no work

 

[Goi]

Fixed Link

The CPU is a general purpose processor, consisting of basic hardware like buffers, ALU(algorithmic Logic Units) that do simple operations with input operands and operators, and producing an output result to store in an output buffer, and memory components. GPUs are specialized processors that have hardware oriented more towards graphics, so that it will be faster and not waste extra space implementing logic found in a general purpose CPU that will never be used in graphics operations. Hence, general purpose CPUs, even highly clocked ones, will be much slower than specialized GPUs. Remember the original Quake played in software mode and hardware(3dfx Voodoo) mode? The difference in graphics quality and speed was night and day.

 

[Mingon]

oops sorry my bad link.