os that rather uses the gpu?

[mike cloaked]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 5:27 AM, john wendel <jwendel10 at comcast.net> wrote:

> Agreed that an OS kernel hasn't much use for a GPU. But it should be
> easy to add a small general purpose CPU (ARM or Intel Atom) and a couple
> of usb ports to the card and move X completely to the video card. Just
> like a remote X server only in the same box.
>
> I really think the OP was referring to having user mode code take
> advantage of the high processing power of modern GPUs. It works now, but
> could be improved if the OS contained specialized scheduling support for
> these kinds of jobs.

I understand that the GPU has no page faults, and is missing many of
what we regard as the essential functions of a normal processor?  Also
getting large amounts of data in or out of the GPU is slow - it is
fast partly because there is a lot less overhead compared to a single
processor and partly from the advantage of multiple cores. I was
speaking to someone who has been working with GPU processing for
several years and was skeptical about getting code to run reliably
across different GPUs...  and of course CUDA is vendor specific as fa
as I know? So speed gain is dependent on the kind of processing needed
but if anything goes wrong then it can easily crash the system.

Anyone had any experience with using the GPU could perhaps comment?

-- 
mike c