{"id":657,"date":"2015-01-16T18:43:48","date_gmt":"2015-01-16T18:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/?p=657"},"modified":"2022-10-08T19:40:04","modified_gmt":"2022-10-08T19:40:04","slug":"gpu-overshadows-cpu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/gpu-overshadows-cpu\/","title":{"rendered":"The GPU Overshadows the CPU"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ask a teenager about GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit)<\/a> and you might get a surprisingly informed response.  As I watch my kids, nephews, and their friends build “gaming PCs” while I contentedly play bingo real money<\/a> games on my phone, they all seem quite current on the relative performance of AMD vs<\/em> Nvidia, the merits of GPU memory, power issues, etc.  (And one important side effect:  a fairly healthy family ecosystem of hand-me-down GPUs).<\/p>\n

While it’s great to run Battlefield 4 at 60fps on ultra detail across three HD monitors, what’s most<\/strong> interesting is how GPU capabilities are generalizing beyond graphics. This is one of my absolute favorite disruption patterns: “commodization+crossover”, where a technology is commoditized by demand for one application and then applied elsewhere.<\/p>\n

GPUs began as very specialized (and expensive) 2D & 3D hardware accelerators. Things began to change in the 1990s, driven by demand for 3D games<\/a>, first with arcade units and consoles, and then PCs. In 1999, Nvidia coined the term “GPU”, starting a consumer-driven 15yr+ price\/performance ramp with no end in sight.<\/p>\n

GPUs are also getting much more generalized.  The first, fairly rigid 3D-transform computation pipelines have gradually given way to more general stream processors.  So called graphics “shaders<\/a>” are now nearly fully programmable:  GPU developers write compute “kernels<\/a>” in C-like languages (such as Open GL GLSL<\/a> or DirectX HLSL<\/a>) that then run on hundreds or thousands of compute units on the GPU.  And more recent technologies, such as Nvidia’s CUDA<\/a> and the OpenCL<\/a> platforms, dispense with the graphics-centric worldview entirely,<\/p>\n

Because of their parallel architecture, GPUs have continued to scale while single CPU performance has effectively flattened.<\/a>  For certain “embarrasingly parallel<\/a>” problems where a repeated operation is applied to large amounts of data, they are hard to beat. For example, $350<\/a> gets you ~3.4 trillion floating point ops\/second, 42,000x faster than the original Cray supercomputer!  Amazon offers GPU instances<\/a>, and even Intel has conceded in a way:  on a modern x86 multi-core processor, almost 2\/3rds of the die area is GPU<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s not surprising to see GPU horsepower applied to more and more non-graphics applications, such as simulating physics<\/a>, aligning genome sequences<\/a>, and training deep neural networks.<\/a>  I think this pattern will continue, with the GPU firmly entrenched in computing systems as a highly scalable vector co-processor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ask a teenager about GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) and you might get a surprisingly informed response.  As I watch my kids, nephews, and their friends build “gaming PCs” while I contentedly play bingo real money games on my phone, they all … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":855,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions\/855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}