State of the art

[Gooijen, Henk]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org 
> [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Paul Koning
> Sent: vrijdag 23 september 2005 15:31
> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
> Cc: cctech at classiccmp.org
> Subject: Re: State of the art
> 
> >>>>> "Chuck" == Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> writes:
> 
>  Chuck> I was catching up on my reading and came across an 
> interesting  Chuck> article in the September 2005 IEEE 
> Computer Society "Computer"
>  Chuck> magazine.  The gist of the particular article was 
> that the  Chuck> graphics processors on many high-end PC 
> video cards are  Chuck> overlooked for applications requiring 
> heavy number-crunching.
>  Chuck> What caught my eye was the chart that illustrated 
> that the  Chuck> Nvidia G70 graphics processor now performs 
> at about 170  Chuck> GFlops!  (A dual-core Pentium 4 running 
> at 3 GHz, by contrast,  Chuck> will do about 20 GFlops).
> 
> 20 GFlops with a 3 GHz processor?  How can that be -- that 
> would require 3 FP functional units per core, each issuing 
> one instruction per clock cycle.  Did you mean 2 GFlops?
> 
>  Chuck> Granted, this is 32-bit vector floating point 
> arithmetic, but  Chuck> the raw numbers are pretty stunning.
> 
> Sure is.
> 
> There may be as many as three processors tucked away in your 
> PC that are more powerful (though more narrowly focused) than 
> the main processor.  The graphics engine is one -- the other 
> two are the digital signal processing engines in the disk 
> read channel and (if you have one) the Gigabit Ethernet interface.
> 
> There's a group somewhere (can't remember the name or URL) 
> working on developing parallel processing algorithms that run 
> on your graphics card -- essentially treating it as a vector 
> coprocessor for your PC.
> 
>      paul


...  and then there is a nice DSP on the modern soundcards.
HAM radio amateurs use the soundcard DSP to decode those chirpy signals
you can hear on short wave. Even signals burried in "noise" produce text
on your screen.  A good example is MixW, but there are several!

- Henk, PA8PDP.