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In the last several years, the landscape for computing has become increasingly interesting and diverse. GPUs have gradually evolved to be less application specific and slightly more generalized than their fixed function ancestors. The changes started in the DirectX 9 time frame, with real floating point (FP) data types, but still fixed vertex, geometry and pixel processing. DX10 hardware was really the turning point with unified shaders, relatively complete data types (i.e. integers were added) and slightly more flexible control flow. Today the high-end is a four horse race between AMD nee ATI, Intel’s and AMD’s integrated graphics and Larrabee, and Nvidia. All four face different goals, constraints and hence have taken slightly different paths. It is in this context that Nvidia has announced a next generation architecture, Fermi, which aims for even greater performance, reliability and programmability; unlocking even more software capabilities.
