Richard Cownie (tich@pobox.com) on 8/5/10 wrote:
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>>So from purely the R&D perspective, the NRE is relatively >low on the <$100 card market.
>
>But that's a fiction. You had to spend a ton of money
>to develop the GPU architecture and the drivers. You can
>mess around with the accounting in various subjective ways,
>but if that money wasn't spent then you couldn't sell
>those low-end cards.

By NRE for low end, I meant NRE spent exclusively on low end, and is not used for any other product in any way.

>
>>I guess what I am trying to say is that GPUs are not going to vanish from the HPC
>>market even if nobody writes HPC codes for them. RISCs had nothing like that going for them.
>
>Oh, I agree. They're not going to vanish. They're very
>good at some apps. And even if the speedup is only 3x
>or 5x rather than 80x, if it makes the difference between
>needing a $50M machine vs a $15M machine then it's
>quite handy. But are they going to dominate HPC - say,
>in the way that Cray's vector machines did in the late
>1970s, early 1980s ? I think not. And are the GPUs
>that go in those HPC compute farms going to be discrete
>GPUs on separate (PCIe or whatever) cards ? Or are they
>going to be whatever GPU-like hardware gets integrated
>onto AMD and Intel cpu+gpu chips ?
>

Can you point me to some thing that describes architecture of these Cray vector machines in moderate detail? Is LRB a Cray-vector-on-steroids?I have heard a lot about them but never known what they were.