The GPU
has seen an amazing jump in power over the past few years. It has moved
from just processing graphics to handling more general types of computations.
This general purpose computing on a GPU has been dubbed
GPGPU (General Purpose
GPU). If the computation matches the computational model that the GPU
provides a tremendous speedup is possible.
However, lately OSes have been learning to take advantage of using the
GPU for their own graphics operations. Mac OS X tries to offload as much
of the fancy graphics effects on their desktop by giving it to the GPU
to process. This is great as it leaves the main CPU free for the OS
and other applications to process more.
But if GPGPU and OSes are both using the GPU very intensely this seems
to suggest that the GPU would become a contended resource in future
computing environments. The rather straightforward answer to people
wanting to take advantage of GPU computing in this case is to buy another
GPU and use that as the co-processor and leave the main GPU for handling
the desktop. But in a 1 GPU only environment I wonder if the resource
contention will become heavier in the future…
