On Sun, 12 Apr 2009, Guy K. Kloss wrote: > > * Potential to implement additional acceleration for rendering (e. g. using > the GPU to perform transformations).
GPUs have a reputation being much faster than host CPUs at certain floating point tasks but it is not clear how this will carry on into the future. I have a continuing fear that excessive reliance on GPUs will be very bad for the world of free open source software. Free open source software should be quite portable and not tied to specific proprietary hardware. If the software is not portable or is tied to specific proprietary hardware then innovation and competition dwindles. If the design allows the GPU to be added via a "shim" layer without requiring that a 3rd party library always be present, then that would be fine. Current GPUs are expensive, power hungry, noisy, (relatively) low-tech, and are an adjunct to the system architecture. It makes much more sense to add GPU type capabilities to multi-core CPUs so it may be that GPUs will go away, just like other co-processors have done over the years. Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: High Quality Requirements in a Collaborative Environment. Download a free trial of Rational Requirements Composer Now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/www-ibm-com _______________________________________________ Lcms-user mailing list Lcms-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lcms-user
