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Hardware survey
Numsgil:
--- Quote from: Peter on May 13, 2013, 01:07:47 PM ---
--- Quote from: Numsgil on May 12, 2013, 06:46:24 PM ---For the GPU, you have to physically copy the data from RAM to the card before you can do any calculations on it, which can take a LONG time. Which might mean the GPU isn't any faster than the CPU, but it should still let you go much wider (ie: have more bots in the sim).
--- End quote ---
Might mean that darwinbots could run quicker in on a AMD system then intel in the near future. AMD's Kaveri system is going to use unified addressing space, pointers can then be shared between GPU and CPU. Similar to the PS4 system coming out later this year.
--- End quote ---
Intel's also aiming for this sort of thing with its Skylake architecture supposedly, which is due out sometime in 2015.
But I'm a bit skeptical about the technology for consumer level hardware. My guess is that you end up with an on-chip GPU, which limits the power the GPU can have. More than likely it just means that integrated video cards are going to be better, but for high end power you'll still use dedicated GPU cards.
Peter:
--- Quote from: Numsgil on May 13, 2013, 02:10:07 PM ---
--- Quote from: Peter on May 13, 2013, 01:07:47 PM ---
--- Quote from: Numsgil on May 12, 2013, 06:46:24 PM ---For the GPU, you have to physically copy the data from RAM to the card before you can do any calculations on it, which can take a LONG time. Which might mean the GPU isn't any faster than the CPU, but it should still let you go much wider (ie: have more bots in the sim).
--- End quote ---
Might mean that darwinbots could run quicker in on a AMD system then intel in the near future. AMD's Kaveri system is going to use unified addressing space, pointers can then be shared between GPU and CPU. Similar to the PS4 system coming out later this year.
--- End quote ---
Intel's also aiming for this sort of thing with its Skylake architecture supposedly, which is due out sometime in 2015.
But I'm a bit skeptical about the technology for consumer level hardware. My guess is that you end up with an on-chip GPU, which limits the power the GPU can have. More than likely it just means that integrated video cards are going to be better, but for high end power you'll still use dedicated GPU cards.
--- End quote ---
Currently you're right. The current AMD trinity is pretty much aimed at budget PC's, far from high end. CPU nor GPU is special, but it got a pretty good price. The AMD A10 GPU is mostly limited by the DDR3 ram. Kaveri will support GDDR5, that'll bring the on-chip speed closer to dedicated GPU's. I assume more improvements will be made to get the gap smaller along the years. Might take a while till a GPU/CPU chip can be called 'high end', but I'm sure it'll arrive at some point.
theblaze:
Just a P4, but want an upgrade to a 4-GPU 7950 setup to mine bitcoin
Peter:
Might be good to remark budget processors like the Pentium G don't support AVX. I though all new processors would have the new instruction sets, but turns out they don't.
Numsgil:
Ah, good to know. I'll program around the idea that there's some N-width SIMD style operations, but just leave the loops themselves scalar at the moment. It makes for reasonably fast code even using the slow FPU, and makes it easy-ish to add support for proper SIMD and AVX down the line.
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