Bennett Ring15 May 2008, 8:33 PM
NVIDIA has comes out swinging yet again in a tirade against its soon-to-be multicore GPU competitor, Intel.
It seems that NVIDIA’s VP of Content Relations, Roy Taylor, is in a hurry to burn as many bridges as possible. Not content with his sweeping generalisation that “the UK is the only place in the world where anyone talks about AMD or ATI", Roy’s now taken a swing at an even bigger target. Intel strayed into his sights in a recent interview with TechRadar.com, where Roy announced that the imbalance between CPUs and GPUs within the PC is “obscene”.
His claims aren’t new, with the gist of his argument being that GPUs absolutely trounce CPUs. Build an application that is focused on a specific task and there’s a good chance a GPU can do it faster than a more expensive, complicated general purpose CPU. He then cited specific examples where GPUs are being utilised in brute force applications over general purpose CPUs, pointing to both medicine and climate modelling.
According to Roy, the cornerstone of unlocking the potential of NVIDIA’s GPUs is the CUDA programming language, which should help utilise the programmable architecture of today’s GPUs. However, none of this is news to us – we’ve known for many years that GPUs can wipe the floor with CPUs, and then some. There’s a catch though.
While GPUs excel at very specialised tasks, they’re not so great at doing tasks they’re not designed for. This is the reason CPUs are such complicated creations – they’ve got to be comfortable taking on a wide range of different duties, whereas GPUs need only concern themselves with a handful.
If Roy’s claims are to be believed, we need never upgrade our CPUs again, instead plugging ever increasing numbers of video cards into our octa-SLI systems. However, those of us in the real world who actually use computers realise that we’re still a long way from the CPU no longer being one of the main bottlenecks in PC performance. When that day arrives we’ll happily stop spending money on Intel or AMD silicon, but until then the CPU remains a crucial piece of hardware.