G80 Is Actually a CPU

[lay-z-boy]

Well Almost..

It looks like Nvidia’s GPGPU (general purpose GPU) can be programmed to do almost everything a normal CPU can do and it has the horsepower to do it a lot faster. (…) Unofficially, some engineers from AMD took a closer look at Nvidia’s monster and came up with the conclusion that it works almost similar to an x86 CPU. Need I say more? I think Nvidia succeeded in creating a possible Fusion architecture maybe 2 years earlier than expected. I wonder what will happen if they get an x86 license.

Original Link

 

[Darkwave]

I thought this was the case for most GPUs, especially the X1900 Series (which is why Folding@Home love them.)

 

[lay-z-boy]

I thought this was the case for most GPUs, especially the X1900 Series (which is why Folding@Home love them.)

Folding loves the x1900 due to the 48 odd shaders that can be programmed to act as huge parrallel taskers.

G80 expands on this.

 

[Dureth]

F@H is an odd program however as it lends itself to the mass parrallelism of a GPU scarily well.

Try running any program that relies on higher single thread performance and you'd find very different results. Not saying that the GPU would be dead slow, just not as amazing as you might think given the F@H results.

 

[Defcon5]

why would they need a license?

 

[Dureth]

I believe that x86 instructions are still patented (are they?) and thus require a license in order to use them. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

"AMD produced clone 386 and 486 chips under license from Intel. Every x86 processor produced since then has taken Intel's instruction set and "reverse engineered" a processor from that set. The K6 line of processors was the result of such engineering, and much of the legal wrangling between AMD and Intel was rooted in the original license between AMD and Intel over the 386 and 486 chips."