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From: Paul Lalonde <plalonde@telus.net>
Subject: Re: [9fans] nvidia scrolling performance
Date: Fri,  5 May 2006 10:30:14 -0700
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
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I'm going to claim there is a difference.  The GPU handles all the  
threading issues needed to deal with the parallelism the GPU offers,  
at the cost of a restricted programming model (some random-access  
reads, no random access writes); the SPU offers a more general  
computing model, but you have to handle all the memory movement and  
syncrhonization issues.
You can choose to use the SPU as a GPU with many more registers and  
some extra random-access storage, but more general models can be  
applied, and useful.

Paul

On 5-May-06, at 10:07 AM, Ronald G Minnich wrote:

> Paul Lalonde wrote:
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>> Aw, but I'd claim all that fancy 3-D graphics stuff is real   
>> computation :-)
>> But yeah, GPU abuse for general purpose computation is just plain   
>> scary.  I thank my lucky stars that there is plenty of FLOPS to  
>> go  around in the Cell's SPUs.
>
> uh, there's no real difference between GPU computation and SPU  
> computation, saving there's more of them SPUs. All the problems apply.
>
> ron

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