Tim Sweeney: GPGPU Software Uneconomical to Develop, GPUs Set to Disappear

[JeGX]

Link: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20090813235412_Tim_Sweeney_GPGPU_Software_Uneconomical_to_Develop_GPUs_Set_to_Disappear.html

Tim Sweeney, chief executive officer of Epic Games, said during his keynote at High Performance Graphics 2009 conference earlier this month that it is dramatically more expensive to develop software that relies on general purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) than to create a program that utilizes central processing units. He also re-iterated his earlier claims that the days of GPUs are counted.

According to Mr. Sweeney, if the cost (time, money, pain) to develop an efficient single-threaded algorithm for central processing unit is X, then it will cost two times more to develop a multithreaded version costs, three times more to develop Cell/PlayStation 3 version and ten times more to create a current GPGPU version. Meanwhile, considering the game budgets, over two times higher expenses are uneconomical for the majority of software companies.