HANDS ON GUIDE

1 - It’s a supercomputer idea done with cheap PC hardware

Stream processing has its origins long before the PC was invented - it began back in the 60s, on supercomputers computers

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Behind GPGPU is the idea of stream processing, hence ATi’s branding of its implementation. However, stream processing wasn’t invented by ATi. In fact, it has its origins long before the PC was invented. With the arrival of vector or array processing on supercomputers during the 1960s it became possible to run mathematical operations on more than one piece of data at a time. This meant the processor could do lots more work per clock cycle.

One of the most famous implementations of this is the Cray-1, the first example of which was installed at America’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Huge performance gains became available, but only in tasks that could be broken down into repetitive operations. This technology has made its way into CPUs as steadily more sophisticated forms of Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), such as MMX, 3DNow!, and then the successive flavours of SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions). So CPUs already have modest stream processing abilities in their floating point units (FPU), which are now considerably more sophisticated than simple maths coprocessors. Sony’s Cell processor takes the idea one step further, combining a single PowerPC processor with eight vector units. But graphics cards hold much greater potential, since they’re heavily optimised for the repetitive operations of 3D rendering. GPGPU is not so much something new, as supercomputer technology done with cheap PC peripherals.

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