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mbpark · 01-11-2009, 08:44 PM

Creative Labs is involved. They're well known for PR gaffes (think of their latest driver fiasco and their not-so-good financial shape).

They're also known as being quite hostile to developers (closed SDKs), while NVidia, ATi, and IBM are working on OpenCL support.

Don't get me wrong, 3DLabs is a great company, but this isn't exactly groundbreaking. This is roughly the same technology that NVidia and AMD are already working on (CUDA for NVidia and ATi Stream), and a variation of what IBM has done with PowerPC/Altivec/Cell and their Blue Gene (which run on very low power PowerPC chips) processors. It also reminds me a bit of the AXE engine on the Freescale PowerPC based MPC5200 series of chips, but with dual ARM cores instead of one PPC core.

SGI has done a lot with this technology too, esp. with their RASC (Reconfigurable Application Specific Computing) technologies, which they've worked on extensively with Intel for full integration with Linux.

The difference is that NVidia has been open with CUDA, with many design wins. SGI has a ton of design wins out there, and has integration with Intel's compilers, which are widely considered to be some of the best in the industry. IBM has published what you need to develop for Cell to the Linux kernel already and can use multiple Linux distributions to code for it (Cell has 6-8 SPEs depending on the platform). The supercomputer used to cause the MD5 hash collision was based on Sony PS3s with Cell chips.

The point is that Creative is "creative", so to say, with their marketing. This sounds a lot like CUDA, RASC, Freescale AXE, Cell, or ATi Stream to me.

TW, funny that you mention the CMOS CPU worked on at RCA. My uncle was on that team

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01-11-2009, 08:44 PM	#11
mbpark Lecturer Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Carmel, Indiana Posts: 761	I have my reservations because... Creative Labs is involved. They're well known for PR gaffes (think of their latest driver fiasco and their not-so-good financial shape). They're also known as being quite hostile to developers (closed SDKs), while NVidia, ATi, and IBM are working on OpenCL support. Don't get me wrong, 3DLabs is a great company, but this isn't exactly groundbreaking. This is roughly the same technology that NVidia and AMD are already working on (CUDA for NVidia and ATi Stream), and a variation of what IBM has done with PowerPC/Altivec/Cell and their Blue Gene (which run on very low power PowerPC chips) processors. It also reminds me a bit of the AXE engine on the Freescale PowerPC based MPC5200 series of chips, but with dual ARM cores instead of one PPC core. SGI has done a lot with this technology too, esp. with their RASC (Reconfigurable Application Specific Computing) technologies, which they've worked on extensively with Intel for full integration with Linux. The difference is that NVidia has been open with CUDA, with many design wins. SGI has a ton of design wins out there, and has integration with Intel's compilers, which are widely considered to be some of the best in the industry. IBM has published what you need to develop for Cell to the Linux kernel already and can use multiple Linux distributions to code for it (Cell has 6-8 SPEs depending on the platform). The supercomputer used to cause the MD5 hash collision was based on Sony PS3s with Cell chips. The point is that Creative is "creative", so to say, with their marketing. This sounds a lot like CUDA, RASC, Freescale AXE, Cell, or ATi Stream to me. TW, funny that you mention the CMOS CPU worked on at RCA. My uncle was on that team .