”GPU IS THE NEW CPU”

The first time I heard this statement was at the launch of the HD1000 3 years ago in 2005. ATI had invited Mike Houston from Stanford University who explained how the GPU’s now would be able to do a lot more stuff than just the traditional rendering. This was all very new then and I ended the segment about this with these words:

“The conclusion – the X1800 really kicks the GeForce 7800GTX in most cases. Still, Mike did hope that ATI and NVIDIa would start thinking about this kind of application when they develop future chips since there still is much that can be better. But who knows – in the future maybe it will be a Radeon 3800 or a GeForce 9900GTX that assists in finding the cure for cancer. “

Ok, I didn’t get the timing completely right but you must admit I was not far off. The truth is that during the last year or so the whole field around using the GPU as a compliment to the CPU has heated up considerably. Both AMD and NVIDIA have now Folding@Home clients that allow them to use their GPU’s to fold proteins and help finding a cure for cancer and NVDIDA has bought up PhysX to allow them to use their GPU’s for physics-acceleration.

AMD of course does not want to be left out and thus today are announcing some cool new features in their upcoming Catalyst-drivers (v8.12) for HD3000 and HD4000 owners.

FINDING THE BALANCE

So why use the GPU at all for other stuff than the usual rendering jobs? It turns out that the GPU is good at some types of workloads (Data Parallel Workloads) while the CPU is good at other types of workloads (Serial and Task Parallel Workloads).

The key is to find a way to balance the workload so that the GPU can step in and take care of stuff that it is more suited to do while the CPU is left to work on what it is best on. This is where today’s announcement comes in.

AMD has built in ATI Stream support for HD3000 and HD4000 owners into Catalyst 8.12. This means that when the driver is released on the 10th of December all HD3000/HD4000 owners will directly be able to run and take advantage of any ATI-Stream enabled apps (more about those later).