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NVIDIA Working on GPGPUs for Macs?

Thursday January 24, 2008 3:04 pm PST by Arnold Kim
Appleinsider claims that NVIDIA is working on bringing "general-purpose computing on graphics processing units" (GPGPUs) to the Mac.

GPGPUs are described as a new type of graphics processors that can perform complex computations typically reserved for the system's primary CPU.

The technology -- in Nvidia's case -- leverages a proprietary architecture called CUDA, which is short for Compute Unified Device Architecture. It's currently compatible with the company's new GeForce 8 Series of graphics cards, allowing developers to use the C programming language to write algorithms for execution on the GPU.


According to Appleinsider, the GPGPUs can be beneficial in a number of applications with complex mathematical requirements, such as raytracing, scientific applications, cryptography, and audio and image processing.

NVIDIA's $1500 Telsa card is the first example of this class of graphics card. When launched for Mac, these GPGPUs will likely be a high-end build-to-order option for Mac Pros.
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herr_neumann
53 months ago
Maybe we will finally get SLI now....
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diamond.g
53 months ago

Maybe we will finally get SLI now....

Sadly the only card that can fit in the Mac Pro is the 1 GPU card. The other GPU configurations are separate boxes.
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Umbongo
53 months ago
Don't get too excited about new cards, the Quadro FX 5600 and 8800GT already support CUDA.
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exabytes18
53 months ago
The CUDA SDK for windows is awesome. It includes some small demos of CUDA implementations such as a real-time mandelbrot generator, particle simulation, stable fluids model, and a bunch of other command-line based tests and such. I ran the demos on an 8800GTS which was sustaining several hundred GLOPS during the demos and tested to about 60 GB/s of internal bandwidth.

There is some extreme power in GPUs that's just waiting to be unlocked.

Edit: While it's not SLI, CUDA does support multiple GPUs per configuration.
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twoodcc
53 months ago
sounds good to me. we'll see if they really get into the mac pro anytime soon
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ricosuave
53 months ago
I knew this day would come! I have no idea of what you guys are talking about. :eek:
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haunebu
53 months ago
In the olden days, we greybeards called this AltiVec. ;)
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Abstract
53 months ago
This GP GPU sounds like another CPU. I mean, mathematical tasks such as image and sound processing? If they're really interested in another CPU, just add another CPU. It doesn't have to be from NVIDIA. It can be from Intel, no?

I don't really get it. Or is this just like what AltiVec used to be?
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exabytes18
53 months ago
GPGPU is more-or-less for highly parallel operations. It can achieve an order of magnitude higher performance than a normal CPU.

I suppose it's like altivec in the sense that it's not x86... GPGPU is more like a single processor with hundreds of more specialized cores.
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MrCrowbar
53 months ago
Well GPU's are good in dumb parrallel processing, which is what rendering 3d images is all about. Your CPU can't do it that fast because it has to be able to do all kinds of differnet stuff.
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