Graphic Chips

Using Graphics Chips for General Purpose Computing

Introduction

As graphics chips become more powerful, new ways of harnessing that power are beginning to take shape. While typical CPUs can process one single stream of commands per core, a modern graphics chip can process hundreds of simple floating point operations at the same time. The benefits of this translate directly into many applications where thousands of complex vector equations are required to be performed every second.

Compute Cores

To understand how an application can make use of this architecture, it is necessary to understand how the architecture is laid out. Consider first what a graphics processor is required to do. Every time the computer screen refreshes itself (-60-80 times per second) the graphics chip needs to transform a 3-dimensional image and project it onto a 2dimensional surface. This translation is done for each pixel on the screen. Given a resolution of 1280x1024, that is over 1.3 million pixels per screen or 104 million pixels per second.

To make this happen as fast as possible, modern graphics chips have introduced an architecture made up of hundreds of compute cores. Each core works independently to carry out the computations required for a single pixel. Working in parallel, these pipelines process hundreds of pixels at the same time.

This same architecture can be used to perform rapid mathematical calculations for a myriad of applications.

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 Graphic Chips