Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc) [LWN.net]

Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc)

Posted Aug 24, 2007 12:42 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc) by drag
Parent article: Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc)

A fairly good article
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070604-clearing-up...

With Nvidia/AMD/Intel the general trend seems to go towards including these GPUs on the CPU die and making them more general purpose.

Intel seems to be taking the angle of extending x86 (similar to mmx) and making it include GPU-like features were Nvidia/AMD seem to be aiming at making their GPUs more general purpose.

And they are all also aiming for the HPC market.
All in all it's very similar to IBM's Cell stuff, but each are doing it in their own special ways. Nvidia is taking the GPU approach vs IBM's custom highly-risc 'vector' cpu cores.

The scary thing about AMD/ATI and Nvidia is that instead of openning up their hardware for programmers that they are hiding their interfaces behind proprietary software libraries and development environments.

Nvidia has their CUDA environment for C-for-GPUs and AMD has their CTM.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html
http://ati.amd.com/products/streamprocessor/specs.html

Intel wants to have x86-like, AMD and Nvidia seem to want to use slick and easy-to-use interfaces to abstract away their rapidly-changing GPUs. Something like that. I don't know.

If this trend continues then to be able to even access the all the CPU cores on future systems could be very problematic for Linux. What can you do if your cpu requires proprietary drivers?

I don't understand all of this, I am realy no low-level programmer, but I think it's definately something worth keeping my eye on.

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