Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A CPU that runs entirely on GPU

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 144 posts

Re: A CPU that runs entirely on GPU

#91

Post by junon »

volemo wrote: post #34
bob1029 wrote: post #28

A fun experiment but I wonder how many out there seriously think we could ever completely rid ourselves of the CPU. It seems to be a rising sentiment. The cost of communicating information through space is dealt with in fundamentally different ways here. On the CPU it is addressed directly. The actual latency is minimized as much as possible, usually by predicting the future in various ways and keeping the spatial ex…

I see us not getting rid of CPU, but CPU and GPU being eventually consolidated in one system of heterogeneous computing units.

We're getting there already with e.g. Grace-Blackwell chips.

Re: A CPU that runs entirely on GPU

#92

Post by Nevermark »

Time to benchmark Doom.

Now we know future genius models won't even need CPUs, just tensor/rectifier circuits. If they need a CPU, they will just imagine them.

A low-bit model with adaptive sparse execution might even be able to imagine with performance. Effectively, neural PGA capability.

Re: A CPU that runs entirely on GPU

#93

Post by pklausler »

spot5010 wrote: post #80
bob1029 wrote: post #28

A fun experiment but I wonder how many out there seriously think we could ever completely rid ourselves of the CPU. It seems to be a rising sentiment. The cost of communicating information through space is dealt with in fundamentally different ways here. On the CPU it is addressed directly. The actual latency is minimized as much as possible, usually by predicting the future in various ways and keeping the spatial ex…

I don't think we get rid of the CPU. But the relationship will be inverted. Instead of the CPU calling the GPU, it might be that the GPU becomes the central controller and builds programs and calls the CPU to execute tasks.

Sounds reminiscent of the CDC 6600, a big fast compute processor with a simple peripheral processor whose barreled threads ran lots of the O/S and took care of I/O and other necessary support functions.

Re: A CPU that runs entirely on GPU

#94

Post by zephen »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #77
jagged-chisel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Much like “RISC is gonna replace everything” - it didn’t. Because the CPU makers incorporated lessons from RISC into their designs. I can see the same happening to the CPU. It will just take on the appropriate functionality to keep all the compute in the same chip. It’s gonna take awhile because Nvidia et al like their moats.

CISC only survived because CPUs now dedicate a ton of silicon to decoding the CISC stream into RISC-y microcode. RISC CPUs can avoid this completely, but it turns out backwards compatibility was important to the market and the transistor cost of "instruction decode" just adds like +1 pipeline depth or something.

> CPUs now dedicate a ton of silicon to decoding the CISC stream into RISC-y microcode.

In absolute terms, this is true. But in relative terms, you're talking less than 1% of the die area on a modern, heavily cached, heavily speculative, heavily predictive CPU.

Re: A CPU that runs entirely on GPU

#96

Post by activestore »

lstevens14 wrote: post #74
robertcprice1 wrote: post #67

Hey everyone thank you taking a look at my project. This was purely just a “can I do it” type deal, but ultimately my goal is to make a running OS purely on GPU, or one composed of learned systems.

Hi! I think that the idea is certainly a fun one. There is a long history of trying to make a good parallel operating system. I do not think that any of the projects succeeded though. This article is a good read if you are interested in that. I am not sure why the economics of parallel computer operating systems have not worked out so far. I think it most likely has to do with the operating systems that we have being…

The Blue Gene Active Storage project demonstrated compute in highly parallel “storage” where storage was HPC memory. It could work for the relationship between CPU and GPU, FPGA, etc.

https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/jsc/downloads/slides/bgas-bof/b...

Re: A CPU that runs entirely on GPU

#97

Post by koolala »

kruffalon wrote: post #82
koolala wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tool call is like 100,000,000x slower isnt it?

No idea really, but if it is speed related I would have thought that OP would have used faster rather than importance to try and make their point.

It's both. Being dirrctly a part of it makes it integrated into its intelligence for training and operation.

Re: A CPU that runs entirely on GPU

#99

Post by palmotea »

RandyOrion wrote: post #98

Cool. However, one still need CPU to send commands to GPU in order to let GPU do CPU things.

> Cool. However, one still need CPU to send commands to GPU in order to let GPU do CPU things.

Doesn't the Raspberry Pi's GPU boot up first, and then the GPU initializes the CPU?

With this technology, we've eliminated the need for that superfluous second step.

Post reply on HN