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Re: On the importance of standards

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rickman wrote:

> On 6/15/2013 8:30 AM, Bernd Paysan wrote:
>> Most PCs don't have a dedicated GPU anymore.  And those who have usually
>> have a significantly smaller one.  And the PC market is dwindling. 
>> That's why GPU makers are looking for new markets.
> 
> I think you are confused, or maybe it is just terminology.

I don't think I'm confused.  Maybe I wasn't clear.

> All PCs have
> a GPU, it us just integrated with the other support chips or in the case
> of AMD, they may be adding it to the CPU, I'm not sure.  The point is
> that the GPU is still there regardless of how they combine the packaging.

But the lead GPGPU vendor is NVidia, which at least doesn't have a CPU to 
merge it with the GPU (they do have for mobile devices, but those are small 
and not that expensive devices).  Those big Kepler K20x chips are made for 
the supercomputer market, and even though you say it's small, this GPGPU is 
dedicated at that particular market.

> What is significant is that there typically is no dedicated graphic
> memory.  That puts the load on the main memory bus reducing the
> bandwidth available to the CPU.

Note that this is changing, too.  The PS4 will be the first one, where it is 
the other way round: graphics memory instead of "normal" memory.  Still 
shared, but the bandwidth of GDDR5-RAM is much higher than that of DDR3-RAM.  
And AMD will offer that sort of fused CPU+GPU to others, as well, not just 
for gaming.

>> Sure, GPUs are not MISCs, though compared to normal CPUs, their
>> instruction set is pretty small.
> 
> I guess that depends on how you define MISC.  Since it has no formal
> definition, I guess you can call a GPU MISC if you want.

I wouldn't say so.  Even though MISC might not have a "formal definition", 
the systems that have been called MISC have a very small number of 
instructions, an extremely simple instrution encoding (usually zero-
addressed, i.e. stacks), and only integer operations.  From a design point 
of view, the ISAs of GCN or NVidia's Kepler is just some sort of RISC, with 
SIMD operations; the predecessor of GCN had VLIW, too.  The instruction sets 
and surrounding infrastructure is expanding, e.g. AMD starts to use page 
address translation in their unified memory GPGPUs (see PS4).

-- 
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://bernd-paysan.de/

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Re: On the importance of standards Joshua Litt <jalitt@gmail.com> - 2013-06-06 17:15 -0700
  Re: On the importance of standards "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2013-06-06 14:45 -1000
    Re: On the importance of standards Joshua Litt <jalitt@gmail.com> - 2013-06-06 19:24 -0700
      Re: On the importance of standards Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2013-06-06 21:38 -0500
        Re: On the importance of standards Joshua Litt <jalitt@gmail.com> - 2013-06-07 14:39 -0700
          Re: On the importance of standards Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-06-09 00:57 +1000
            Re: On the importance of standards Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2013-06-08 10:44 -0700
              Re: On the importance of standards Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-06-09 06:11 +1000
                Re: On the importance of standards Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2013-06-08 14:47 -0700
                Re: On the importance of standards Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-06-10 00:03 +1000
                Re: On the importance of standards rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-06-09 15:00 -0400
                Re: On the importance of standards Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2013-06-09 12:26 -0700
                Re: On the importance of standards rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-06-09 15:41 -0400
                Re: On the importance of standards Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2013-06-09 13:11 -0700
                Re: On the importance of standards Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2013-06-09 13:14 -0700
                Re: On the importance of standards Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-06-10 18:41 +1000
                Re: On the importance of standards rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-06-09 17:09 -0400
                Re: On the importance of standards Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-06-10 18:35 +1000
                Re: On the importance of standards Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2013-06-10 16:04 +0200
                Re: On the importance of standards Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2013-06-15 01:08 -0700
                Re: On the importance of standards Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-06-10 20:13 +1000
                Re: On the importance of standards rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-06-10 11:35 -0400
                Re: On the importance of standards Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2013-06-10 17:37 -0500
                Re: On the importance of standards rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-06-10 18:46 -0400
                Re: On the importance of standards Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2013-06-10 16:36 -0700
                Re: On the importance of standards rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-06-10 20:09 -0400
                Re: On the importance of standards Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-06-13 21:55 +1000
                Re: On the importance of standards Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2013-06-11 09:56 -0500
                Re: On the importance of standards Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2013-06-11 18:40 +0200
                Re: On the importance of standards rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-06-11 22:36 -0400
                Re: On the importance of standards Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2013-06-15 14:30 +0200
                Re: On the importance of standards rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-06-15 19:20 -0400
                Re: On the importance of standards Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2013-06-16 22:37 +0200
                Re: On the importance of standards Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-06-23 17:14 +1000
                Re: On the importance of standards Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-06-13 21:33 +1000
                Re: On the importance of standards rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-06-15 13:21 -0400
                Re: On the importance of standards Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-06-23 18:58 +1000
                Re: On the importance of standards rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-06-08 18:42 -0400
                Re: On the importance of standards Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-06-09 23:27 +1000
              Re: On the importance of standards "WJ" <w_a_x_man@yahoo.com> - 2013-06-10 16:11 +0000
  Re: On the importance of standards Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-06-08 05:11 +1000

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