I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while. If you didn’t notice, Nvidia released their new GPUs a couple months back.
Whats new?
Well, they are 16 pipes of 32 bit goodness. How many transistors?
222 MILLION
Compare that to a P4, the latest and greatest from Intel. Most of the P4’s were 40-55 million transistors. The latest Prescott core has 125 millon on strained silicon an 90 nm.
This means that such a GPU is really a VERY INTERESTING processor. Imagine how many calculations all those floating point units can perform. Phenomenal.
The new demos coming out are extremely impressive as well! What eye candy.
I expect even more interesting architectures to come out over the next 10 years in the GPU space. Just for graphics alone, more needs to happen. Imagine collision detection or a modern non-immediate mode scene graph system all in the GPU.
You can now get these floating point monsters for about $200 and up. Nvidia just released the 6600 chips today.