Time to ditch CPUs and concentrate on GPUs?

Time to ditch CPUs and concentrate on GPUs?

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Taking apart an Asus Revo, I couldn't help notice that the CPU chip is half the size of the graphics controller!

It was always destined to happen.

So now we have a situation where the CPU is graphically slowed down because it has to make huge number of connections the graphics chip to make that work. The same amount of silicon is repeated on the graphics chip. In the process, a large amount of electrical power and silicon is wasted trying to get the two devices to talk.

AMD and ARM are doing the right things by building the graphics controller into the CPU chip.

But it still 'feels' all wrong because the emphasis is on the CPU and treating the graphics controller as a peripheral.

The 'correct' way to do this is to treat the graphics controller as the 'central processing unit', and then put three or more CPUs around it as 'peripherals' to do the menial work.

Starting with lowest spec CPU, the low spec CPU will control all the peripherals such as UART, SPI, DMA and the like.

The next one up in power is the traditional CPU that runs your user programs.

The next one up in power is the graphics CPU that is dedicated to wrestling with the graphics engine with enormous programmable bandwidth into the graphics engine. This is the thing that will drink power if power is available and critically, scale back speed and the number of connections into the graphics engine if power is low.

So if power is available, it could use say a 128 bit bus from the graphics CPU into the graphics engine, but if power is low, then software could power down the big bus and possibly the graphics CPU and use a 1 bit serial bus to squirt the data into the graphics engine. Any of the lesser CPUs could do that as well shutting down higher spec CPUs and transferring execution of the main programs between the three computers.

Such an architecture does rely on ditching the idea of CPU as the most important things in a computer, and focusing all efforts to get graphics as the number one function inside a consumer computer chip, and littering CPUs around the GPU as peripherals that service the GPU functions.

Currently all the GPUs are encumbered. This creates documentation access problems for anyone trying to build an ecosystem around a CPU as rasberry pi have found out the hard way.

So it would be good to start with an

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project to create the custom GPUs. At least one graphics processing project is getting started there.

The development of a graphics supercomputer is made easy if one notes some critical advances have been made at opencores.

Their OpenRISC CPU which is similar to an ARM CPU is now operational on an FPGA and it has gcc and runs Linux so its entirely feasible to add the graphics CPU through 'arm chair' design effort into the FPGA and get it operational in next to no time.

The Linux and gcc compiler takes care of converting existing graphics libraries and generating executable OpenRISC assembler code and whatever else needed to feed a custom graphics engine. The custom graphics engine can be designed and modified to heart's content until it works because its just FPGA real estate. So the graphics centric GPU architecture could be developed in accelerated time and then rolled out to customers.

Who benefits? Mobile makers, desktop computer makers, gadget makers that have color graphics displays. In short, the beneficiaries are the vast majority of consumers that buy products with a display on it.

Reply to
7
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Your cluelessness is legendary. Graphics chips have been used for years in various simulation SW where their powers can be put to good use where

3d geometry, scaling and colour interpolation, anti aliasing (Hi Peter!) etc are suitable. but they do not replace the traditional cpu in the general usage case. The graphics chips are designed specifically around number crunching and large data volume throughputs in multiple texel rendering pipelines.

In addition, generally nothing is "graphically slowed down" since the cpu offlads a lot of the loading and instruction sequences to the GPU via well defined APIs and can get on with its work. Also using those incredibly useless things called cores, threads and interprocess communications that Jed thinks are unnecessary.

Tell you what little Fraud, why dont you use your nano bot arms to create a whole new paradigm in processing?

Reply to
Hadro

Meet Hadron quack - Burson-Marstelar Employee trolling Linux newsgroups.

Just because appil and micoshaft are loosing business to Linux, thats not a good reason for Burson-Marstelar employees to be trolling Linux newsgroups on their behalf.

Reply to
7

Burson-Marsteller, seems a good company to me, I like it! "We have a clear vision: To provide gold standard performance - for our clients, our people and our *shareowners* - as one seamless, global business with a single culture." I like them a lot:

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Thanks for the hint.

Reply to
Clogwog

I forgot to mention, this low spec CPU could also be programmed up to run as an intelligent caching unit similar in functions as an MMU but much more intelligent because it is programmable with separate software that targets specifics of a custom motherboard environment.

In the absence of a real MMU, this unit can take over the functions of paging and intelligent caching altogether.

Another function of the unit is to take care of disk format data structures. So while the main programs open and close files, this smaller CPU which handles DMA sweeps up behind it adjusting the disk data structures relieving the main CPU from having to do the house keeping.

Reply to
7

You are sniffing way too much glue.

Reply to
OldGoat

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