Comments on: Hot Chips wrap up http://insidehpc.com/2009/08/31/hot-chips-wrap-up/ HPC News Without the Noise for Supercomputing Professionals | insideHPC Sun, 09 Jun 2013 01:54:13 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.1 By: John Leidel http://insidehpc.com/2009/08/31/hot-chips-wrap-up/#comment-180551 John Leidel Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:57:41 +0000 http://insidehpc.com/?p=6895#comment-180551 As an addition to John West's comments on the future adoption of GPUs, we are ignoring a critical piece of the proverbial pie. How does one feed a processor that is 570X faster than today's processors? Current bus technologies are already limiting the amount of data one can pump to and from a GPU. If you examine the speed at which our bus technologies evolve [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_bus], its far slower than the core processor technologies. Personally, I believe GPUs are very applicable for certain applications. However, I also believe they are simply a stepping stone to the next generation of computational platforms. I believe we're beginning to witness the initial convergence of traditional scalar and massively multi-threaded [vector] core processor techniques. Alongside this, I also believe we'll bear witness to a similar shift in the parallelization methodologies. As an addition to John West’s comments on the future adoption of GPUs, we are ignoring a critical piece of the proverbial pie. How does one feed a processor that is 570X faster than today’s processors? Current bus technologies are already limiting the amount of data one can pump to and from a GPU. If you examine the speed at which our bus technologies evolve [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_bus], its far slower than the core processor technologies.

Personally, I believe GPUs are very applicable for certain applications. However, I also believe they are simply a stepping stone to the next generation of computational platforms. I believe we’re beginning to witness the initial convergence of traditional scalar and massively multi-threaded [vector] core processor techniques. Alongside this, I also believe we’ll bear witness to a similar shift in the parallelization methodologies.

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