T42's idle ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 CPU

[w0qj]

Anyone know of any program that uses the T42's idle ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 CPU to do additional calculations, so effectively making your main Pentium M CPU faster (sort of a "dual core")?


Also, any way to force T42's idle ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 CPU to draw all 2D video (desktop, program interfaces, etc.) so that you can free up your main Pentium M's CPU cycles?

(Postings in this forum a while back mentioned that the ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 CPU works *only* on 3D work such as AutoCAD, 3D games, or PhotoShop. The rest of the time it is idle.)

[ddutta]

Some folks at Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have used the OpenGL libraries to write do some computing eg sorting etc.

[SpeckledJim]

The GPU (not a general purpose CPU) does both 2D and 3D. You'll see a huge difference in performance if you compare your normal ATI drivers to generic VGA drivers, which do all the hard work on the main CPU.

It is possible to use the 3D parts of the card, when they would otherwise be idle, to do non-graphics calculations. If you search the web you'll find a few research papers on the subject, and probably some example programs/source code. You couldn't easily modify existing programs to do it, though.

[SpeckledJim]

Some folks at Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have used the OpenGL libraries to write do some computing eg sorting etc.

I also saw a paper a while ago about using pixel shaders for audio signal processing. So these things can be done, but apart from the practicial difficulties of getting it working - transferring the data back and forth in a suitable form, and transforming the problem into a graphical one - graphics cards aren't all that well-suited for general purpose computing because they're optimised for speedy rendering rather than absolute numerical accuracy.

Vector supercomputers have been built from networked clusters of Playstation 2s, and although cool, it's not all that useful - the (very fast) vector units on the PS2 only support single-precision floating point, good enough for real-time 3D graphics and not much else.

[GoEatFood]

I read about a project trying to use XBOX's. to create a "super computer" it was more when xbox first had came out. I guess they were going to try to use all 3 processors on the xbox to make something great. don't know how it turned out. would be interesting to find out.