Friday, November 17th 2006
Future GPUs to consist of several cores
The GPUs that we are used to today comprise of several parts that are all joined together by a high speed interconnect. Now, imagine separating the core out into several chips, again connecting all of them by an interconnect. The great advantage would be that to increase performance you would simply increase the number of cores, design of GPUs could also be simplified.
For example, low end cards could have 2 of these "cores", middle range cards would utilize 4, and high end cards would boast 8 processing units.
The Inquirer reports that this is exactly what we can expect from the AMD/ATI R700 chip, and perhaps NVIDIA's G90.
Source:
The Inq
For example, low end cards could have 2 of these "cores", middle range cards would utilize 4, and high end cards would boast 8 processing units.
The Inquirer reports that this is exactly what we can expect from the AMD/ATI R700 chip, and perhaps NVIDIA's G90.
16 Comments on Future GPUs to consist of several cores
In the future, hopefully not too far into the future, we will have only a single proccesing unit, that will consist of many many cores - CPU cores and GPU cores. There will be only one socket and under it will be over a dozen core. One core will perform math calculations, another will render one part of the image, etc. Its kind of a CPU/GPU combination, but in the future we will have so many cores, that each core will be set to do a certain task - one will subtract, one will add.
Thats what the future holds. I cant imagine anything being better than that, so that is how it will always remain. The only that will change is the speed of the cores, and at some point they will have become powerfull enough to render an image wich looks nothing less than a photo.. that will be the end of modern technological use.. and i dont know what will happen later.
Single cores got hot and fast (Pentium 4 EE). Then they went dual core with only a little more power, but much better performance in applications which supported them. Almost doubling processing power for less than a 25% increase in power. (A64 X2s)
Then die shrinks came into play and better architectures were developed, with renewed emphasis on performance/watt. (65W TDP conroes and 35W+65W AM2s)
What makes you think that this will just make things more power hungry? Especially when there's a VERY similar thing that happened VERY recently with just the opposite outcome.
We are at the end of Single core graphics cards (GX2s count as single). With SLi, Crossfire, and Unified shaders, programs are already equipped to do rendering in a massively parallel way; there won't even be the same multithreaded application thing CPUs went through. When they add another core, even at a slower speed, the performance gains will be above 50% right off the bat. Add some memory bandwidth and it goes higher, get into second generation multi core graphics cards and TDPs will drop, it's not like they really can go much higher anyways (like physical limits of the Silicon and the PCB.)
Yes I agree things are far too power hungry, but to be cynical and say it will just be worse soon, with evidence otherwise, that's just wrong.
wait omg they should do this.
Have a small board that you can upgrade your GPU and GRAM (Graphics Random Access Memory). The parts would be designed to fit on the card so that it dosnt get so heavy with a huge heatsink/fan for the GPU etc... but you wouldnt need to buy a whole new board just to get a GPU and GRAM. That would pretty much SAVE money because you dont need to buy a new board.
crap cdawall already said it :shadedshu