Open-Source GPU Used For Research (binghamton.edu) 28
Theovon writes: For quite some time now, "open hardware" enthusiasts have had access to a number of open source CPUs, including OpenRISC. However, it wasn't until recently that there has been any kind of open source GPU. In 2014, the Vertical Research Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced MIAOW. MIAOW is in many ways a clone of the AMD Southern Islands architecture and can even run some of the same binary code. Unfortunately, MIAOW is missing some key components such as video and memory systems, making it not currently possible to implement fully in hardware. For this, Nyuzi comes to the rescue. Nyuzi (formerly Nyami) has been in development since 2010 and is a fully functional open source GPU inspired by Larrabee. Although architecturally different from the SIMT architectures from AMD and Nvidia, researchers at Binghamton University and several other places have already used it to conduct research on GPUs. A paper (PDF) was published in March 2015 about this processor (one of the authors was the original founder of the Open Graphics Project), and Nyuzi (homepage) can be downloaded from GitHub.
Re: A most unfortunate name (Score:2)
Wrong audience (Score:1)
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I don't know where they got you new kids, but I don't remember changing any paradigms. Some of us are backwards compatible and still doing things the old way, still thinking about tech, still running weird software on breadboards and wishing we had breadboard GPUs.
Kids these days, and their astronomology obsessions.
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I think it's interesting. Does that mean you are calling me an old fart, you whiny little punk? Get off my lawn!
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Too different things (Score:2)
they claim nvidia use switch on stall, but it is pretty well known their gpus switch thread after each cycle to avoid pipeline stalls.
"claim switch on stall" = refers to some of the top level documentation that explains that having as much (wraps) threads as possible in flight will hide any latency due to memory access. If one wraps stalls another will hide the latency.
"Cycle threads after each cycle" = you're refering to a different section of Nvidia documentation (I think it was the annexes about fine/tuning optimisation) where the whole thing about "warps/half-warps" and the gory details there of are explain. (If I remember correctly -
What a misleading article. (Score:3, Informative)
If you go to the web site and actually read the article, you'll see that there's no hardware - it's just a "synthesizable gpu architectural model that you can download from github". This is just about modeling a gpu architecture, and seeing how the simulated model can be improved. Considering the cost of fabbing a one-off piece of silicon, ...
The paper, "Nyami: A Synthesizable GPU Architectural Model for General-Purpose and Graphics-Specific Workloads" appeared in International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software
Now you know why there are no pictures. "Pics or it didn't happen" :-)
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This is just about modeling a gpu architecture...
There's a HUGE difference between a simulator like GPGPU-SIM and something like this, which is doing actual RTL and gate-level simulation using the actual Verilog RTL.
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FPGAs don't simply run "binary programs" like a CPU. You dynamically alter the physical properties of the gates to produce functional if temporary versions ASICs.
A chair built out of Lego is still a chair.
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The HDL behavioral models are synthesized and then routed (just like a PCB) by the FPGA vendor software for your specific FPGA chip. What's running on your FPGA are hardware blocks (DDR controllers, multipliers, PLLs, block RAMs, LUTs), interconnected between each other by real wires. Nothing else can be further from a browser and an OS.
More info, pics, youtube, about Nyami/Nyuzi (Score:2, Informative)
I googled this and found this from an OGML discussion going on about this GPU. There are some screenshots and even a youtube video.
Since 2010, Jeff Bush ( github [github.com], blog [blogspot.com]) has been working on an Apache-licensed open source GPU (github [github.com], home page [nyuzi.org], wiki [github.com]), and he has a few other interesting github projects as well (link [github.com], link [github.com], link [github.com]). The Nyuzi Processor is a fully functional GPU. It is written in synthesizable Verilog, has a functional compiler toolchain [github.com], and comes with test suites, benchmarks, the software com
A good progression (Score:1)
I remember a few year back i was a member of the OGP group.
The group was able to do a development platform for the hardware. Also a demo code was made to support VGA and a first iteration of a fix GPU was made.
At the end we were a few working on a spec for the Programmable GPU, before starting to code it to test.
What was released was another project in collaboration with the leader of the OGP. For those who don't get what the news mean :
-It's a programmable GPU
-It can be turned into hardware
-People can thin