A Little Story About GPUs

The Wheel of Reincarnation

The Wheel Today
1.5 turns around the wheel?
the display processor on the display processor

More than one turn around the wheel?
stream processors → raster processor → display chip

The conclusion in 1968

The conclusion in 2008?
Asymmetric/heterogeneous multiprocessing is hard.
(multiple memory models, different CPU characteristics)
But…serial CPUs aren’t getting faster
But…most programs are serial and need a fast serial CPU
But…1000 Pentium M’s (Intel Core) aren’t coming to desktops
Natural tendency to few beefy CPUs + zillions of simple ones…
GPGPU (Nvidia Tesla/AMD Firestream)?
Cell processors?
Intel Larrabee?
Something else?