Industrial trend

I’ve been afraid of writing in the business category for a while mainly because of the confidentiality and NDA problems that things might create, but the more I write, the more I understand what I can write about… Basically, nothing about the company I work for and just the industry in general. There’s still plenty of topics.
With the coming of DirectX 10 and the scalable programmable floating point GPU which both Nvidia and ATI are pushing out, an interesting dilemma presented itself to numerous people at different jobs. The biggest question on most people’s mind are: what can we do with this?

For the scientific community (Matlab for example), it means that you now have a very powerful processor at your disposable to do number crunching. Codes doesn’t need as much optimization and rounding because the floating point processor can take care of that. So less development time in figuring out the best way to write a program.

But more interestingly of a dilemma is the fact that each computer has two places to do processing now. One on the graphic card for math and one on the CPU for IO and decision making. I say SETI and FOLD@HOME should start taking advantage of these idle mflops that’s going to sit on everyone’s home computer, idling most of the time.

With that in mind, people in the industry like me will be the first ones to start hacking and writing programs that runs and manages both processors. Once it gets big enough someone will create a standard API for the communication process between them. Motherboard manufacturers are best situated to do so since hardware arbitrage should prove to be the most efficient. That or Intel acquires Nvidia merging GPU and CPU together forever.