David Kirk, Nvidia’s Chief Scientist, interviewed by the guys at bit-tech.net.

Read the full interview HERE.

Here are some snippets of this 8-page interview:

– page1
“Kirk’s role within Nvidia sounds many times simpler than it actually is: he oversees technology progression and he is responsible for creating the next generation of graphics. He’s not just working on tomorrow’s technology, but he’s also working on what’s coming out the day after that, too.”
“I think that if you look at any kind of computational problem that has a lot of parallelism and a lot of data, the GPU is an architecture that is better suited than that. It’s possible that you could make the CPUs more GPU-like, but then you run the risk of them being less good at what they’re good at now”
“The reason for that is because GPUs and CPUs are very different. If you built a hybrid of the two, it would do both kinds of tasks poorly instead of doing both well,”

– page 2:
“Nvidia has talked about hardware support for double precision in the past—especially when Tesla launched—but there are no shipping GPUs supporting it in hardware yet”
“our next products will support double precision.”
“David talked about expanding CUDA other hardware vendors, and the fact that this is going to require them to implement support for C.”
“current ATI hardware cannot run C code, so the question is: has Nvidia talked with competitors (like ATI) about running C on their hardware?”

– page 3:
“It amazes me that people adopted Cell [the pseudo eight-core processor used in the PS3] because they needed to run things several times faster. GPUs are hundreds of times faster so really if the argument was right then, it’s really right now.”

Continue reading »