GPGPU Explained: How Your GPU is Taking Over CPU Tasks

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Slimebeast said:

Soleron said:

Slimebeast said:

Soleron said:

 

Intel's Sandy Bridge hardware decoder, which will be on most future CPUs, outperforms very high-end GPUs on video decoding while using a hundredth of the power. That's a major task the industry hoped GPUs would be useful for that could better be served by fixed hardware.

How can a CPU be that much faster than a GPU at decoding video?

Because it isn't using the general CPU hardware, it's using a tiny fixed-function piece of hardware (a hundredth of the die size or so) that's sole job is to decode.

Wow I had no idea such a thing existed. I wouldn't have imagined you could have such an advantage with a specialized mini-chip (chip-within-a-chip or whatever it is).

You've seen the same thing in Pc expansion cards over the years.  When CPU power was at a premium, external soundcards had hardware acceleration to offload processor usage.  Custom processors are quite common in the history of the PC, traditionally over the years functions that were on seperate expansion cards have moved to the motherboard, then to either the northbridge or southbridge and now they're getting moved into the CPU die. Of course sometimes a hardware accelerated function become negligible performance hit so the specialised processing chips get dropped altogether.