NVIDIA responds to Intel's Larrabee GPU

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CISC and RISC.

I have wondered how Intel proposed to scale their CISC x86 instruction set up to more than a few cores. They can only do this by reducing the complexity of each core, and use less transistors. That means dropping all the clever stuff they came up with to make their CISC processors fast.

On the other hand, a RISC based approach can go back to small fast corea, and scale up far better. Many modern RISC chips have large instructions sets, needing many transistors too, so they are also stuck.

But for a GPU, how much legacy support do we need. Why do we need x86 in the GPU?

I suspect Intel are a bit worried that a return to small-core RISC designs will scale out massively better than they can do with x86, and via technology like CUDA, we'll end up with a several core CPU and thousand-CPU co-processors, and ultimately plenty of code that isn't written for x86.

Posted by: TheTruthisOutThere@...   Posted on: 08/13/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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