Do you believe massively parallel CPUs will do graphics, with assisted cores?

[Techno+]

hi,

The tecently announced Intel Terascale project has really interested me, and i want to know what you think. Intel said that dedicated hardware engines will be added to the chips to increase performance in specific tasks, and wat i wanna talk about is gfx. The slides showed three texture units replacing three cores, so in other words, these units are obviously more powerful thatn the units in current GPUs. So does this mean that the gfx hardware to be integrated will consist of a specific no. of cores, each that does one job, for e.g 10 shader cores?

What fo u think?

 

[Rys]

The current TS implementation runs slower than I do up the north face of the Eiger. So it doesn't replace any texture unit in any current hardware by any stretch (if that's what you meant, unless we're playing the 'let's imagine it's 2010' game). However, the general concept of a multiplicity of general units combining to provide the computation for a certain task is a simple one to grasp, and indeed it's part of the foundation of current graphics hardware.

So what remains is to see just what said units are capable of first, and what's added to them to assist specific tasks, to see if it's useful for a graphics application. The idea is sound enough (IMO), and is proven to work.