May 28, 2009, 5:08 am
VentureBeat has published an interview with Bill Dally, who until recently was head of the CS department at Stanford, on his move to NVIDIA and his new role as chief scientist.
Now he has to be the chief visionary for the products that Nvidia will make in the future. His expertise is in parallel computing, which he believes will come to dominate the picture. If he’s right, we’ll see a shift of billions of dollars of sales from one part of the chip industry to another.
The interview is worth a quick read. An excerpt:
VB: What do you mean by that? Will we have just one chip in the PC in the future?
BD: However you package it, the PC of the future is going to be a heterogeneous machine. It could have a small number of cores (processing units) optimized for delivering performance on a single thread (or one operating program). You can think of these as latency processors. They are optimized for latency (the time it takes to go back and forth in an interaction). Then there will be a lot of cores optimized to deliver throughput (how many tasks can be done in a given time). Today, these throughput processors are the GPU. Over time, the GPU is evolving to be a more general-purpose throughput computing engine that is used in places beyond where it is used today.
