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Re:Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Asc... by zsrxx on Monday August 26, 2019 @04:59PM (#20803704)
Why can't a GPU power a computer?
Re:Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Asc... by tenebrisalietum on Monday August 26, 2019 @06:49PM (#20804515)
I'm not an expert and might be horribly wrong and welcome edification, but I believe you don't want your GPU powering your computer because

- GPUs don't handle I/O other than writing to video RAM.

- GPUs don't handle interrupts.

- GPUs don't handle branching well.

For the first two, a lot of infrastructure that is part of the chipset and platform would have to be extended to each compute unit of the GPU.

Imagine a database on a GPU. It's not like 1.5K-2k+ cores that are super good at math can read and write your disk or disk array at once.

Re:Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Asc... by ArnoVW on Monday August 26, 2019 @05:25PM (#20803949)
Same reason we have OLAP and OLTP systems. Same reason it makes sense for some use cases to set up a Hadoop cluster, and for others to have a single but fast CPU: some tasks can be run in parallel, others can't.

See Amdahl's law : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

Re:Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Asc... by joking on Monday August 26, 2019 @06:25PM (#20804374)
You can calculate the value of each screen pixel without knowing the value of the others. To calculate the n value of a fibonnaci sequence you have to calculate the n-1 and n-2 values first, so it doesn't matter how many cores do you have. Gpus are for the former and CPUs for the latest.
Re:Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Asc... by chillee on Monday August 26, 2019 @07:29PM (#20804767)
Nitpick: I understand your point in general, but it's not actually true that you need to calculate the n-1 and n-2 values first for Fibonacci.

You can use Binet's formula or matrix exponentiation to calculate it without such a dependency.

Re:Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Asc... by Faark on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @06:15AM (#20807949)
GPUs are made to execute a limited set of the same operations operation on on a huge amount of data in parallel. This is a totally different workload than your usual computer programs, that commonly have a long and complicated series of commands. Thus just translating your program 1:1 to your GPU computer would make it way slower. Your GPU runs probably around ~1.5GHz, a third of your CPUs. The GPU does have a few thousand cores that run in parallel while our consumer CPUs does have at best a dozen (that are more capable than any single GPU core), but most of those are often already idle, since it's a lot of work to make your software take advantage of them. For some tasks it's worth it, and those take advantage of e.g. you GPU.
Re:Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Asc... by Retric on Monday August 26, 2019 @05:02PM (#20803741)
The biggest issue is lack of huge caches, and the extreme latency to main memory due to the speed of light.

GPU’s are fine or even better for a wide range of compute tasks see CUDA etc, they just end up being very slow at a subset of common tasks.

Re:Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Asc... by hermitdev on Monday August 26, 2019 @11:54PM (#20806210)
Circuits don't operate at speed of light, though. People like to say this over and over again, but electron mobility through a circuit is only around 2/3s the speed of light, IIRC. They may have very tiny mass, but they still have mass.
Re:Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Asc... by jabl on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @03:16AM (#20807005)
No, it's the electromagnetic field which propagates at around 2/3c in the conductor. The electron drift velocity is on the order of a fraction of a mm/s.
Re:Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Asc... by mycall on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @01:17AM (#20806541)
It is the mass in the electrons that creates the heat.