As there is a fair amount of people who crunch for DC, and who find the competition against other users make them go out and buy machines for the purpose. Might it not be a good idea for Intel or other chip manufacturers to develop a super crunching chip specifically optimized in design and function (plenty of L2 cache for a start, and a beast of a FPU) to eat it's way through a particular DC project app? Or even a multi-purpose one for several app's?

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As there is a fair amount of people who crunch for DC, and who find the competition against other users make them go out and buy machines for the purpose. Might it not be a good idea for Intel or other chip manufacturers to develop a super crunching chip specifically optimized in design and function (plenty of L2 cache for a start, and a beast of a FPU) to eat it's way through a particular DC project app? Or even a multi-purpose one for several app's?

They did.

The optimisation is called......

ALTIVEC

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It would be excellent, but I doubt financially viable.
Money is the problem here (again).

There are processors around designed for very specific tasks, cheap to make, used by lots but don't really do much or have the flexibility needed to alter programs significantly as they develop. You would need to design a new processor (as is done) but the general public just wouldn't buy it.

Even Consoles for games, while they do/did a specific purpose are not flexbible enough for the mojority of projects.

If Intel couldn't even get the Itanium (very fast at Seti iirc, well old seti anyway) into the show in a large scale, then it would be hard.

It would need the 'project' to come up with the CPU and get the fabs to create it for them.
IBM may be the one to start this as they support WCG, do spin out research works etc..

But yes it would be nice, though GPU/PPU may be what we start getting in time.
(though why not use the SoundCards, should be pretty good at noise signals ;))

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Team mauisun.org

If you want noise try integrated audio on the MB...geez!

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If you want noise try integrated audio on the MB...geez!

Not sure but the integrated are not usually programmable (as such) processors like the Audigy/X-Fi and the ilk style cards (maybe nvidia's old soundstream APU...) for things like Seti signals 'noise signals' ;)

Though I was reading something yesterday (magazine) about Intels newer (maybe nvidia helped) combined processor where in effect intel make the heavy demand multi cored fpu and nvidia do the pretty graphics part and since the the cpu and graphics and sound etc.. are all becoming very fpu they can juggle all the differnt part between the core.. some way of and I'm a little scetchy of exact details. BUT that would give DC the FPU's you suggest.

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Team mauisun.org

I don't think sound processors need to be very powerful, The most load they have is to do 3D sound and that is like Pentium III level power.
Thus combined CPU/GPU you speak of, does it mention anything about real time ray-tracing, cos that would be impressive :)

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I don't think sound processors need to be very powerful, The most load they have is to do 3D sound and that is like Pentium III level power.
Thus combined CPU/GPU you speak of, does it mention anything about real time ray-tracing, cos that would be impressive :)

Not powerful (in the GPU scale of things), but good and dedicated to what they do (sound processing). You don't buy a x86 processor to do dedicated FFT transfers or HD video encoding (though you could but it is not efficient at it.)

As for Ray-tracing in real time, would be good :-) need to look in to it some more, maybe Who? has more information he's allowed to say.

I've been way too busy to keep up with online rumours or what people are doing with processors (x86 style, GPU, APU etc). Been even longer to keep up with the audio side of things.

What ever happened to the mad rush on PPU, lol.

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Team mauisun.org

Dunno, aegia brough one out but it's only connected to a PCI bus :s
I've heard somewhere that they're thinking of integrating a PPU onto a GPU chip, I think ATI's trying to get there first, but trouble is, game programmers need to integrate the physics code into their games. I think that's why it's taking time, no real sense of unity between them all.

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