Monday, January 10, 2011

CES 2011 Shocking News: nVidias goes CPU via ARM

Project Denver: Lets see how it goes!
From my perspective, nVidia has always become a smooth talker without any action at all. Their last most awesome video featuring the Mythbuster duo, shocked the world of computing. But thats like years ago yet the GPU computation is far from real. But in CES 2011, they made another spectacular announcement: they (finally) goes CPU by adopting ARM. Yep, ARM, not Intel *tsk tsk*


What does it mean? The death of x86? Nope. But I hope so. Intel domination with its x86 architecture is a hell for High Performance Computing (HPC) Community. It slows down a lot lately since we reached the 3-4 GHz processor limit. But GPU power goes beyond the speed. They went parallel even before Intel went parallel. Right now the power of GPU is tremendously above CPU. The problem is its implementation is slower than a dead grandma. Not much speed achievement done lately in software industry compared to what the hardware said. And I'm guessing nVidia realize that GPU implementation wont be easy as 1, 2, 3. So they develop the gate: lets build a CPU that can bridge the gap. 

This is breakthrough since it may disable the x86 curse. Hopefully they can implement it correctly. With MS blessing via Windows 8 ARM compatible, developers will join the march more faithfully. But again, its a long long way to the heaven. Right now my focus still on AMD and its Fusion project!

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