From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <94dacb4b1569c9a8fbd0afce950a4436@ladd.quanstro.net> References: <969a33151abb4d97c8e84351602bfc85@gmx.de> <94dacb4b1569c9a8fbd0afce950a4436@ladd.quanstro.net> Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2011 02:57:28 +0000 Message-ID: From: Josh Marshall To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=0016363ba07267f1d704a5166172 Subject: Re: [9fans] Hey, new to this. Trying to get plan9 to work in a VM. Topicbox-Message-UUID: ecc3f868-ead6-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 --0016363ba07267f1d704a5166172 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Well, two reasons come to my mind immediately. First, I'd be cool. Second, the wattage you listed is the max wattage, not the idle or light load wattage which would likely be used. Per processing element, GPUs use less power, and you get more processing power per watt than a CPU under certain loads. Further more, this would greatly increase the available processing power to system, could spur a change in model for GPUs to a processor bank which does distributed work for the whole system, including graphics and the real video card could change to something extrmely abstract which only takes in an image and converts it to a signal for the display(s). So, in short, more system power, and could have long term benifit to hardware development, abstraction, and model change. This concept could be taken as far as to bring all processing off specialized areas for general purpose use, allowing potentially for an internally distributed system with high regularity, fault tolerance, etc. That's on the far end, but not to be totally discounted. Also, I'd like to do something interesting with my free time. On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 6:36 PM, erik quanstrom wrote: > > Finally for this, what would it take to have the GPU treated as a > processor > > bank for idling and tasks not requiring a full CPU core? > > leaving trifling software problems tiny running general-purpose > code on a special-purpose bit of haradware and running multiple > cpu arches in the same machine aside, why wouldn't you prefer > to idle the gpu, since it usually less power-efficient than your cpu? > pci-sig is working on 300+w pcie power for gpus. > > - erik > > --0016363ba07267f1d704a5166172 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Well, two reasons come to my mind immediately.=A0 First, I'd be cool.= =A0 Second, the wattage you listed is the max wattage, not the idle or ligh= t load wattage which would likely be used.=A0 Per processing element, GPUs = use less power, and you get more processing power per watt than a CPU under= certain loads.=A0 Further more, this would greatly increase the available = processing power to system, could spur a change in model for GPUs to a proc= essor bank which does distributed work for the whole system, including grap= hics and the real video card could change to something extrmely abstract wh= ich only takes in an image and converts it to a signal for the display(s).<= br>
So, in short, more system power, and could have long term benifit to ha= rdware development, abstraction, and model change.

This concept coul= d be taken as far as to bring all processing off specialized areas for gene= ral purpose use, allowing potentially for an internally distributed system = with high regularity, fault tolerance, etc.=A0 That's on the far end, b= ut not to be totally discounted.

Also, I'd like to do something interesting with my free time.
On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 6:36 PM, erik quanstrom= <quanstro@qu= anstro.net> wrote:
> Finally for this, what would it take to have the GPU treated as a pro= cessor
> bank for idling and tasks not requiring a full CPU core?

leaving trifling software problems tiny running general-purpose
code on a special-purpose bit of haradware and running multiple
cpu arches in the same machine aside, why wouldn't you prefer
to idle the gpu, since it usually less power-efficient than your cpu?
pci-sig is working on 300+w pcie power for gpus.

- erik


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