GPU - The Next FPU?

What was the difference between a 468/SX and a 486/DX2? The additional floating point processor. Hellz yeah.

In the budding days of personal computers and 486 goodness, CPU's were strictly integer machines. Floating point math was simply too much for the little chicklets that didn't even need active cooling. I recall that back in the olden days of ISA cards and SIMS you could purchase separate FPU's that you could hammer into your brute-force socket... this granted you massive power that your Excel spreadsheets never previously dreamed of.

I recall how up-in-arms everyone was that Quake actually demanded a freakin' FPU. Who'd id think we were, Rockafeller?

Now that graphics cards have become cheap, plentiful and pretty freakin' powerful vector processing has become all the rage. Projects like BrookGPU and GPGPU have made it (relatively) easy to create userspace apps run on a GPU just as it would a CPU. This means your GeForce 7800 could work on certain serialized tasks, crunching numbers while it remained idle between SecondLife sessions.

Of course, GPU's are just good for vector processing, which means only a certain type of algorithms are really suited for it. You don't need to look much farther than critiques of IBM's Cell architecture to see how people feel about a rash of vector processing units versus a CPU that can span and branch effectively.

It was interesting to see that Nvidia and Havok have teamed up to offload physics to the GPU. Bear in mind this doesn't work with an actor's physics since it branches and can't be effectively streamlined or predicted, but does extremely well with cloth and particle physics.

Nvidia could be realizing that Ageia's physics accelerator is a more than vaporware, and is stepping up their offering to get into that product space. However, from the specs it appears that only Ageia's PhysX (*groan*) will be able to handle physics asynchronously. Although, I guess if you run physics calculations like shaders you could send multiple calculations down each pipe on the graphics card itself.

Should be interesting to see how the space pans out. The GPU is quite a hoss nowadays, and needs extremely fast access to memory, so it may not be incorporated as a side-by-side processor or on-die any time soon. But still... one has to wonder if multiple fast vector units are the next big thing to go on a proc.