Posted on Friday, November 21 2008 @ 21:33 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
GPU maker NVIDIA has plans to bring its CUDA technology to mobile devices, although the first generation of Tegra, which arrives in 2009, won't support this feature yet.
According to Huang, a new computer architecture can be spotted, one that combines the power of traditional CPUs and that of GPUs and other types of parallel processors. “The CPU is excellent for sequential processing, but there are many types of problems that you can operate on in parallel,” he added.
Huang also stated that GPUs are able to offer higher performance levels than CPUs, mainly due to the integration of hundreds of processors. He shared that the Tesla Personal Supercomputer is an example of 240 processors running in parallel. Moreover, Huang said that gamers were the first to realize how important a heterogeneous architecture could be, as they could observe improvements in their video games and 3-D graphics while running both powerful CPU and GPU.
NVIDIA does not believe that GPUs could replace CPUs. “We are not trying to replace the CPU, as we believe it is necessary,” said Huang. He added that the company is currently working with application developers to port their software to the CUDA architecture. According to him, programming using the C language allows sophisticated users like researchers to write themselves the programs for the new supercomputer.
Source: Softpedia
