os that rather uses the gpu?

JD jd1008 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 15 18:38:32 UTC 2010


  On 07/15/2010 11:23 AM, Michael Miles wrote:
> On 07/15/2010 12:18 AM, JD wrote:
>>     On 07/14/2010 11:41 PM, mike cloaked wrote:
>>
>>> 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?
>>>
>> Sorry to barge in this late into this thread....
>> Was the originator of the thread interested in the kernel
>> to use the gpu for floating point operations or integer
>> operations?
>> If floating point, the x86 (among others) already has an
>> integrated fpu, and the integer logic is already in the cpu (or alu).
>> So I do not understand what sort of computations the originator
>> of the thread would like to see done on the gpu.
>>
>> jd
>>
> The other OS's Mac and Windows are using the GPU in its  video
> conversion programs.
> The newer programs will have selections to activate the GPU for computation.
>
> I have been using the GPU for scientific computation for quite a while now.
> Seti at home is very much a hobby and it takes samples from the areciebo
> telescope and analyse data looking for "You guessed it, ET"
> It will crunch numbers very fast compared to a normal CPU.
>
> I bench my Phenom 2 965 at 3 gflops/cpu   while the GPU will be doing 54
> Gflops .
>
> I have a slow video card Nvidia 9400GT. The bigger ones will go right up
> to  a full teraflop.
> That kind of speed would be well accepted if an OS would use it
> generally or software that is written for Video conversion to use it
> greatly reducing time.
>
>
> That's what I would like to see, more focus on speeding up video
> conversion especially with HD video and it seems that the GPU is a very
> inexpensive way to add a lot of power to your machines
A teraflop?? WHoa! Can the PCI  bus really feed the  gpu with
an instruction stream that will yield that performance?
I mean most pc's out there are in people's homes still pci (33 or 66 MHz 
bus).
Relatively, fewer are on pci x16 which is a much faster bus.

Thanks for your feedback.




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