> > Are there any parallel boards that can be added on to PCs at > > affordable prices? (I mean having the potential to be on > > Not really. You can cluster PCs just fine though, especially if you > can live with GBit Ethernet. I'm hearing Infiniband port costs are > falling very nicely, and will become commodity rather soon.
It doesn't sound plausible that ordinary people will buy clusters in a popular way. Clusters of course are a good solution for developers, but I'm talking about "bringing parallel power to the masses". > FPGA accelerators are good, but you can't feed them fast enough. FPGA with > onboard memory might be pretty optimal. This sounds promising, especially because of lower R&D costs. > > every PC ) If not, what's the reason they have not been made? > > Because there's no market. A market can be created. It's probably because of the risks of dealing with highly complex architectures that people have not figured out how to do it. > > They could offer complementary functionality to current CPUs. > > You can actually use some of newer GPU for nigh-all-purpose crunch, > but the extra gain in performance is not worth specialized code and > tracking short hardware upgrades. Thanks for the info. I found this article (2003): http://www.computer.org/computer/homepage/1003/entertainment/ "The GPU Enters Computing's Mainstream" and it says that current GPUs do not support branching and pointers, which makes them limited as general purpose platforms. But they are interesting and certainly have the potential to evolve into future parallel platforms. YKY ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
