As a slight side note, GPUs have been (and mostly still are) used for high performance workloads where squeezing as much useful 'work' per cycle is the order of the day. CUDA et al still hasn't hit the mainstream fully and is pretty niche. Unfortunately PHP being an interpreted language isn't going to be as efficient (yet? :-) ) as C or machine code and therefore you will lose some/alot of the advantage of going GPU.
However that is not a reason not to have a go (fork maybe?), something cool may come about from it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
--
James Butler
Sent from my iPhone
-----Original Message-----
From: Scott MacVicar [mailto:scott@macvicar.net]
Sent: Friday, November 12, 2010 8:22 AM
To: Stefan Marr
Cc: Kenan Sulayman; PHP internals
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] GPU AccelerationWhat's not constructive about it? Seems pretty constructive to me. The original
poster has done research into the issue already.What research are you referring to? I must have missed that.
There's no magic with GPUs. There are good reasons why few applications/infrastructure components use them. GPUs can be useful for very specific workloads but not necessarily general purpose app server.
Btw there are also some workloads that could benefit from leveraging some of the x86 extensions around encryption, vector computation, ...
So it boils down to being more specific re: where you think it could benefit and why.
AndiThe reason most things don't exist is that no one has a patch for it. If it doesn't
core in core then it heads into a PECL module or lives as a patch on some site.
PHP doesn't have anything significant that would benefit from a GPU right
now.
As a more realistic goal, (1) APC should become a standard part of the PHP
distro, and later (2) part of the Zend Engine. Once this is done, (3) the
next step is JIT, and few months ago there was some work done on LLVM for
this, but I never heard about it since. And only then, esoteric things like
running on the GPU can be realistically pondered.
So, long way ahead...
Stan Vass
PHP doesn't have anything significant that would benefit from a GPU right
now.As a more realistic goal, (1) APC should become a standard part of the PHP
distro, and later (2) part of the Zend Engine. Once this is done, (3) the
next step is JIT, and few months ago there was some work done on LLVM for
this, but I never heard about it since. And only then, esoteric things like
running on the GPU can be realistically pondered.So, long way ahead...
Agreed.
--
Jonah H. Harris
Blog: http://www.oracle-internals.com/