Well, two reasons come to my mind immediately. First, I'd be cool. Second, the wattage you listed is the max wattage, not the idle or light load wattage which would likely be used. Per processing element, GPUs use less power, and you get more processing power per watt than a CPU under certain loads. Further more, this would greatly increase the available processing power to system, could spur a change in model for GPUs to a processor bank which does distributed work for the whole system, including graphics and the real video card could change to something extrmely abstract which only takes in an image and converts it to a signal for the display(s).
So, in short, more system power, and could have long term benifit to hardware development, abstraction, and model change. This concept could be taken as far as to bring all processing off specialized areas for general purpose use, allowing potentially for an internally distributed system with high regularity, fault tolerance, etc. That's on the far end, but not to be totally discounted. Also, I'd like to do something interesting with my free time. On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 6:36 PM, erik quanstrom <quans...@quanstro.net>wrote: > > Finally for this, what would it take to have the GPU treated as a > processor > > bank for idling and tasks not requiring a full CPU core? > > leaving trifling software problems tiny running general-purpose > code on a special-purpose bit of haradware and running multiple > cpu arches in the same machine aside, why wouldn't you prefer > to idle the gpu, since it usually less power-efficient than your cpu? > pci-sig is working on 300+w pcie power for gpus. > > - erik > >
