NV30 and R300 Explored
Tech Report has a lengthy and interesting article about next-gen videocard chipsets, mainly ATI's R300 and NVidia's NV30. We're looking at some really advanced GPUs now and Tech Report tries to compare the two (kinda hard as the NV30 isn't officially announced) and also looks if they can replace a renderfarm of something like Pixar.
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radula
replyMy next PC will be all GPUs, special sound chips, special ram chips, and a really cheap CPU so they can all talk together.
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Define special...
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"Advanced"
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Check out my Parhelia development board!
http://chryx.shacknet.nu/matroxtyper.jpg
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Someone set up me the massive FPGA and dynamically compiled hardware.
I still get a geek hardon thinking about the cool stuff which could result from the stuff I learned about in my degree's hardware compilation course.
You load your game and it sees you have x million gates available and compiles, into hardware, two custom 3D pre-processors (since more than two won't fit in your available gates) and a custom AI processor and uses the CPU, videocard and soundcard to do everything else... Spooge! Then you exit the game and the processors are destroyed and the gates are available for something else to use.
It's probably a few years off, if the idea ever really takes off at all, but they've already got C-like languages (with a few restrictions, since you can't have things like infinite recursion in physical hardware) where you write your program and it compiles it into a list of components (logic gates) which can either be used as a blueprint for building hardware in the traditional sense or as input to an FPGA which is basically a giant array of potential gates which you set to act like any configuration of logic gates you want, within the size limits of the FPGA.
But general purpose CPUs are not going away anytime soon, even with fancy graphics and sound chips taking off some of the load (in the rare cases they're actually used; my Audigy can decompress mp3 files but, as far as I know, it never has in my machine since I'm not using Creative's media player :-)).
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