Nvidia is not shy about the benefits of its CUDA platform. They are also not shy about taking shots at Intel when given the chance. In a feature article on Forbes, NVIDIA chief scientist and vice president Bill Dally said that while CPU speeds have increased, the overall processing power has not followed Moore’s law.
According to Forbes, via Slashgear, ”as a result, the CPU scaling predicted by Moore’s Law is now dead”. Dally then goes on to promote the CUDA platform that NVIDIA is currently selling as the future.
“Going forward, the critical need is to build energy-efficient parallel computers, sometimes called throughput computers, in which many processing cores, each optimized for efficiency, not serial speed, work together on the solution of a problem. A fundamental advantage of parallel computers is that they efficiently turn more transistors into more performance. Doubling the number of processors causes many programs to go twice as fast. In contrast, doubling the number of transistors in a serial CPU results in a very modest increase in performance–at a tremendous expense in energy.”
The basis of the argument is that current CPUs draw too much power and there will soon be a wall where the exuberant power consumption of current processors will no longer be beneficial to performance. While this may be true, Intel has built its massive empire around Moore’s law and it seems unlikely that they will suddenly abandon their business model in favor of a competing technology.
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