While AMD’s financial troubles indicate that the adoption of Firestream has not been as strong as hoped, Over at Scientific Computing, IDC’s Steve Conway writes that GPUs are gaining momentum in HPC and have tripled their worldwide footprint in the past two years.
GPUs today are still far from being able to tell x86 processors they have 24 hours to get out of town, but GPUs are clearly proliferating in the HPC market at a decent clip. An important sign is the spread of GPU-related academic offerings. At the September 2010 HPC User Forum meeting in Seattle, Rob Farber of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reported that GPU computing is part of the curriculum at more than 200 universities around the world, including marquee names, such as MIT, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, the Indian Institutes of Technology, National Taiwan University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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I had a great conversation about this yesterday here… Its not about the GPU vs the CPU… Its about the USAGE of parallelism.
the GPU is a device designed to handle a specific class of parallelism. What the market is really seeing is the recognition that highly parallel applications matter and are an element of the path forward. The reason we are seeing such a strong pull for our MIC products is exactly this.
Is Highly Parallel a trend? Shoot yes… Is it all GPU… Heck no.