[Herefordshire] Bigger and bigger graphics cards?

[Noel McG.]

Hello all,

The article below is from today's paper.    I had always thought that
today's 'big memory' graphics cards were mainly for gamers and video editing
enthusiasts.

However, this would seem to suggest that a GPU with lots of memory can/will
be of real benefit to ordinary computer users. I am not a gamer but I do use
my PC for digital 'photos and the occasional video.

What do you think?

Noel.

-- 
Herefordshire Linux Users Group
www.herefordshire.lug.org.uk


The Times December 05, 2004

PCs will soon be as cheap as chips
Report by Paul Durman
An American firm predicts a bonanza as graphics processors make the £100
computer a reality


IF you are using your computer to display digital-camera pictures this
Christmas, or play electronic games, or stream video from the internet,
spare a thought - if only a brief one - for the machine's graphics
processor. Without this unseen and largely unknown component, the visual
performance of your computer would be impossibly clunky.

The ever-improving ability of personal computers to display high-quality
pictures is largely due to the increasing power of graphics cards, sometimes
known as GPUs, or graphics processing units. But this development is only
one sign of a more fundamental shift taking place in modern computing.

That's the argument put forward by Nvidia, an American company that, with
ATI of Canada, is one of only two remaining specialist producers of graphics
chips.

Dave Kirk, Nvidia's chief scientist, said the increasing power of GPUs means
they are taking on a larger share of the "heavy lifting", partly usurping
the role of the microprocessor, the computer's "brain" and the key to Intel'
s fortune.

This is more than just an esoteric argument about which electronic component
does what. GPUs are typically much cheaper than microprocessors (also known
as central processing units, or CPUs). A PC built around a GPU can be much,
much cheaper than we are used to - perhaps less than $200 (£104).

Kirk said: "If you can build a PC for $200, there are a billion more people
who can use a PC. Almost all of the growth is in the developing world,
particularly in the 'Bric' countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China. It
means a bonanza of epic proportions. It will cause the PC market to
positively explode."

Kirk was quick to insist that this prospect does not threaten Intel's
long-standing dominance of the PC business. He expects Intel, with which
Nvidia works closely, to benefit by selling many more cheaper and lower
specified microprocessors. "They ought to be excited about that," he said.

Traditionally, GPUs and their predecessors played a junior role, converting
electronic signals into text or images. But advances in technology have
meant the raw calculating power of specialist GPUs has now overtaken that of
CPUs.

For decades, the processing power of computer chips has doubled roughly
every 18 months, as predicted by the Intel founder Gordon Moore. However, as
miniaturisation continues, further progress is running into the problem of
dissipating the heat generated by the chips.

GPUs don't face this problem, and typically double in power every six
months. Kirk said: "GPUs get faster much more quickly. A CPU gets 10 times
faster over five years. A GPU gets 1,000 times faster."

The significance of this, Nvidia said, is that GPUs are much better suited
for advanced computing. The promise starts with high definition video, which
represents an impossible struggle for the current generation of PCs.

And Kirk said GPUs will open the door to better, and useable, handwriting
and speech-recognitition technology. "Speech recognition takes an enormous
amount of processing power," he said. "If you don't have it, you get a lot
of errors. And if one out of 10, or one out of 20, words is incorrect, it's
pretty useless."

More generally, GPUs will allow researchers to tackle other problems that
are "unspeakably difficult". One example is in the pharmaceutical industry,
where scientists need to crunch vast amounts of genetic information in their
attempts to develop new medicines.

Another important opportunity is in finance. Option- pricing calculations,
based on the Black-Scholes equation, involves a lot of mathematics and
little data - an almost ideal problem for GPUs.

"You would not believe how excited the financial community is about this,"
said Kirk. "People are willing to spend lots of millions of dollars to make
more millions of dollars. If you tell them, 'I can give you a PC 60 times
more efficient at making money', this is not lost on them."

Nvidia, which has annual sales of about $2 billion, currently sells about
100m GPUs a year. "We see that accelerating pretty heavily," said Kirk.

Sandeep Deshpande, semiconductor analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein,
remains sceptical. "I'm not convinced," said Deshpande, who used to work for
a graphics company. "This is not a paradigm shift."

Nvidia remains confident that the world has changed. "The best days of the
over-priced Rolls-Royce PC are probably over," said Kirk. "That market is
not growing so much. The Austin Mini personal computer is going to take over
worldwide."



---
This outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.805 / Virus Database: 547 - Release Date: 03/12/2004