Duranix

hey, i was just wondering...

a gpu is like a cpu, except its dedicated to floating point calculations, so would it be possible to get a cpu and surface mod it onto ur gpu? or something around those lines? id like to be able to have a 3ghz gpu since the two are basically the same (cpu + gpu) would it be possible? because i know it wouldnt have much ram on it, but thats what Agp Appeture size is for... so you could have a crazy card...

germanjulian

lol

no cause the cpu and gpu dont do just simple instructions there are special instructions inside the cpu/gpu, for example SSE in the cpu handels mulimedia and other things really well and a GPU is supposed to handle dx9 instructions now etc.

there is a lot more to CPU and GPU nowadays then simple additions!

you gotta lot to learn... enjoy

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Duranix

hmm...

so you mean theres no way?

i just wanna try it out, even if it doesnt really work that well.

germanjulian

no its totally impossible. you can also not mount a CPU onto a graphics card... no way lol...

that would be like ..... cant think of an example lol.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit

google read learn read read read :0

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Duranix

im sure it can be done...

you should be able to get a cpu to work as a gpu (damn im persistent)

i mean... i dont have onboard gfx, but when i dont have any drivers installed and no gfx card, my pc still boots to desktop. its rather slow, but it works.

md5

There is no single kind of CPU, as there is no single type of computer. E.g. PCs, Macs, Amigas, PowerPCs etc etc all have different types of CPUs. Each one of them (e.g. i386, MIPS, DEC Alpha etc etc) has a different architecture, therefore a different instruction set. So the answer, once again, is NO, you can't mount a CPU onto a GPU. The CPU would just not understand what the other parts of the card are trying to tell it

And yes, you're persistent

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IvanV

Even if it were possible, it would be highly inefficient. GPUs are optimised for 3D graphics, CPUs aren't. Try to find an old game that can run with software rendering and see for yourself how a mighty 3GHz CPU can't get even close to any not-to-obsolete graphic card. On the other hand, I read that there were very successful attempts to make a GPU do the CPU's work such as large database serches where high parallelism helped GPU achieve very high performance.

Duranix

See? if you can make the gpu do the cpu's work, and acheive very good results at searching large databases etc, you should be able to get 2 cpus and get one to work as a gpu. come on.. it has to be possible! if you can surface mod GDD3 Ram onto ur pc, you should be able to do cpu-> gpu conversions.

i know it wouldnt understand anything the other parts of the card are telling it, but it would still work... even if it was a bit dodgey.

IvanV

I didn't say it would be totally impossible, but it would be highly inefficient! Otherwise, someone would have made such a card, as it wouldn't be more expensive than a regular high end graphic card. Take a look at the framerates in CPU tests in 3DMark...

Duranix

lol...

the cpu marks are low in 3Dmark because your computer has to run everything in the background, do the test, and do everything else it does at the same time. im sure if you got one cpu to act as a cpu and got one cpu to act as a cpu and do pure gpu work, it might be efficient

but yeah. im with you on that. it would be inefficient.

CDsDontBurn

go out and try it. Go buy yourself an x850xt pe, and a p4 3.46EE (altogether a total of about $2,000), and mod out both the card and CPU and tell us how it worked out for you . I'm quite confident in the results coming out bad .

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Matth

A more promising line, is the idea of making the GPU do the work of the CPU (or some of it) - if you can represent some computation as a graphic function that the GPU is fast at, you could hand it off to the GPU (maybe in an offscreen surface), and then get the result back, a bit like how the old FPU addon was used.

Essentially, the GPU does a lot of "donkey work", very VERY fast, though with DX8/DX9 capabilities, that operations they do are more complex.

The ordinary CPU can emulate every function of the GPU, but too damn slow to be of any use.

Rox271

LOOool thread.
Bah, sometime funny questions lead interesting achievements.
But still I doubt you can plug an Pentium in a graphic card, may be with a hammer?

Just to make things even more confusing, note that GPUs are fantastics DSPs and now they are used to produce sound effects as well. Here http://www.gpgpu.org/

Son_of_Thunder

it would be cooler to have a "do it yourself" card where you could buy the main board and then add and upgrade your gpu and ram

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CDsDontBurn

I think Gateway used to do this with some of their older video cards (modded from ATI and nVidia to be proprietary to Gateway of course). You were able to add in pc100/133 notebook memory to increase the amount of video memory to the video card.

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