Siggraph 2010 #2: GPU, CPU, HPU. Who cares?
Published 29 July 2010
Posted by Bob Cramblitt
At Siggraph 2010, a not-so-subtle battle is taking place. It’s the battle of the graphics computing future. Depending on whom you listen to, the path to graphics performance nirvana is paved by graphics processing units (GPUs), central processing units (CPUs) or a combination of the two called heterogeneous processing units (HPUs) by analyst Jon Peddie.
At Peddie’s annual luncheon on Wednesday, the graphics processing future was discussed by a panel of high-ranking technologists, some with vested interest in which acronym comes out on top:
Eric Demers, GPG CTO of AMD
Brian Harrison, CTO of SolidWorks Labs
Rolf Herken, CEO & CTO of mental images
Bill Mark, Senior Research Scientist for Intel
Paul Stallings, VP of Software Development for Kubotek
Cheaper and faster
The principal area of interest for designers and engineers, of course, is how high-end rendering can improve their work, now and in the future.
Prices for heterogeneous computing are dropping dramatically, according to Peddie, giving more designers and engineers access to capabilities such as real-time ray tracing on lower-cost workstations. More bandwidth, better compression and optimized software are making it more feasible to work with computer graphics via the cloud, whether over a company intranet or public internet.
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