| It's closer to regular multi-core CPU computing than GPU computing. It's general purpose cores. What sets it apart is that the cores are tiny, with little per-core memory (though all cores can transparently access each-others memory as well as main memory), and so the architecture is well suited for scaling up the number of cores with quite low power consumption. So for problems that can be parallelized reasonably well, but with more complex data dependencies than what a GPU is good for, this might be a good fit. I'd put it somewhere in the middle between GPU's (for embarrassingly parallel tasks) and general purpose CPU's with high throughput per core. Also, this looks like it'd be possible to fit in the power envelope of really small embedded systems, like e.g. cellphones and tablets.... Before more developers have these systems, it'll be hard to say how useful they'll be, but the architecture looks exciting. That's why I supported it - I really want to see how this type of architecture can be exploited, and whether or not it'll prove to be cost effective and/or simpler to work with than GPU's for the right type of problems. |