Patrick Elliott wrote:
> All of which become irrelevant, if AMD's idea takes wing and the GPU
> becomes part of the CPU, making the difference between the "internal"
> floats, and the "external" GPU floats completely bloody meaningless. We
> may see GPUs become a sort of "enhanced process" loaded with stuff the
> inbuilt doesn't handle, instead of the main focus of this whole thing.
> The end result is likely that the difference between an AMD compliant
> POVRay and one for GPU will be zip, zilch, and nada.
> 

This is one thing that will drastically change everything. If that idea
takes flight, and any compiler offers a nice API and syntax for writing
the equivalent of CUDA kernels, then the data bus problems vanish (to
the coder, they are still there in reality), the bit accuracy problem
goes away, and very little needs to be rewritten. Recursion may be a
problem for the GPU on chip, but that will be a problem for any current
GPU implementation.

But, chances are, we would still be stuck with AMD/ATI implementing
their Stream SDK instead of OpenCL. But, we can hold out hope.

Post a reply to this message