Feasibility of GPU as a CPU? [closed]

2020-02-10 03:46发布

What do you think the future of GPU as a CPU initiatives like CUDA are? Do you think they are going to become mainstream and be the next adopted fad in the industry? Apple is building a new framework for using the GPU to do CPU tasks and there has been alot of success in the Nvidias CUDA project in the sciences. Would you suggest that a student commit time into this field?

标签: cuda cpu gpu gpgpu
8条回答
混吃等死
2楼-- · 2020-02-10 04:20

With so much untapped power I cannot see how it would go unused for too long. The question is, though, how the GPU will be used for this. CUDA seems to be a good guess for now but other techologies are emerging on the horizon which might make it more approachable by the average developer.

Apple have recently announced OpenCL which they claim is much more than CUDA, yet quite simple. I'm not sure what exactly to make of that but the khronos group (The guys working on the OpenGL standard) are working on the OpenCL standard, and is trying to make it highly interoperable with OpenGL. This might lead to a technology which is better suited for normal software development.

It's an interesting subject and, incidentally, I'm about to start my master thesis on the subject of how best to make the GPU power available to the average developers (if possible) with CUDA as the main focus.

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我命由我不由天
3楼-- · 2020-02-10 04:33

A long time ago, it was really hard to do floating point calculations (thousands/millions of cycles of emulation per instruction on terribly performing (by today's standards) CPUs like the 80386). People that needed floating point performance could get an FPU (for example, the 80387. The old FPU were fairly tightly integrated into the CPU's operation, but they were external. Later on they became integrated, with the 80486 having an FPU built-in.

The old-time FPU is analagous to GPU computation. We can already get it with AMD's APUs. An APU is a CPU with a GPU built into it.

So, I think the actual answer to your question is, GPU's won't become CPUs, instead CPU's will have a GPU built in.

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