HostRail Posted February 14, 2009 Share Posted February 14, 2009 Ive read and heard a little about the massive amount of computational power built into GPU's and how there are now api's out to process data with them. My question is what makes the GPU faster then the CPU. And can an OS or VM be loaded entirely into a GPU and effectively bypass the CPU? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stingwray Posted February 14, 2009 Share Posted February 14, 2009 None. GPUs are highly parallel, something that is operating systems and the applications that they run are not. Because of having lots of core, each core is actually quite slow, but its the fact that you have lots of them that makes the card very fast. Also the cores are heavily specialized to certain mathematical calculations and memory access, generally OS and most applications don't make of this because they do lots of other things. Because of the complete different architecture, your only option if you were desperate to do this would be linux or bsd as you would need to make some serious changes to the kernel, then you would have to change any application so it could run on it as well. It'd also be really slow, so stick to your normal CPU, and keep your GPU rendering video or your games, this it is fast at. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HostRail Posted February 14, 2009 Author Share Posted February 14, 2009 I see. Thats about what I had guessed. Maybe this could be harnessed as a folding at home project. ??? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stingwray Posted February 14, 2009 Share Posted February 14, 2009 I believe that is done, folding@home has some support for GPGPU. Don't know what GPUs though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
misfitsman805 Posted February 15, 2009 Share Posted February 15, 2009 I believe that is done, folding@home has some support for GPGPU. Don't know what GPUs though. Any GPU that supports CUDA,which is 8 Series and above. Now I'm not sure about ATI cards though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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