Hello AMD and IBM/Sony think a bit different with their Fusion and Cell processors+gpu integrated, no?
slds. On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 4:38 PM, Josh Marshall < joshua.r.marshall.1...@gmail.com> wrote: > A system running more hardware will, for all practical purposes, use more > energy. What this would do is increase the efficiency of that power use. > Say you're using a single threaded indexing program, and its indexing a very > slow medium. Why use a CPU processor when you can idle them, and idle most > of the other GPU processors and just use the one? This is mainly for max > hardware utilization though. > > In the VERY long run, I'm seeing thing trending towards very distributed > models. As system resources grow, I believe it will become practical to > "network" within a system. This can manifest itself in two ways. First, is > that due to multi-core systems slowly changing to many-core systems, a > networking model is very scalable and with so many things to break, the > fault tolerance will become a must. This could allow then for computer > systems to continue their march towards a more biological like organization, > like a multi-cellular organism. This will likely be abstracted to > programmers and users, but on a hardware level, it allows for variable > redundancy, extreme fault tolerance, internal and external networking > models, and any few components which break will have no or minimal impact on > the stability and usability of the system. This is WAY WAY in the future, > but that's where I imagine it going and this could be a step in that > direction. Was that as coherent as it should be? I'm still playing with > this in the back of my head, so its by no means well planned :P I'd be more > than happy to talk to someone about this, because no one at my university > knows this area--our math and CS/CIS departments are feeble. > > > On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 9:19 PM, erik quanstrom <quans...@quanstro.net>wrote: > >> > 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. >> >> i'd sure like a reference to a case where a system with a gpu draws less >> power than the same system without. it's not like you can turn the cpu >> off. >> >> > 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. >> >> please explain. how is a machine more of any of these things than >> a regular multi-core machine? >> >> - erik >> >> >
