[varelse]

Mea culpa on the die size...

That said, this is where the R&D done by AMD and NVIDIA have expanded what is amenable to running on a GPU. Specifically, instructions like vote and fast atomic ops can alleviate a lot of branching in algorithms that would otherwise be divergent. It's not a panacea, but it works surprisingly well, and it's causing the universe of algorithms that run well on GPUs to grow IMO.

What I worry about with Parallela is that by having only scalar cores, and lots of them, it has solved issues with branch divergence in exchange for potential collisions reading from and writing data to memory. The ideal balance of SIMD width versus cores count is a question AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are all investigating right now. But again, ~26M transistors - no room for SIMD...