Chief scientist of Nvidia Corp., William Dally, expects graphics processors to become more general purpose and get rather extreme performance in the coming years. In addition, Mr. Dally emphasized importance of further parallelism in graphics processors and implied that in future graphics processing units should transit to MIMD architecture.

The head of research at Nvidia said in an interview with Hardware.fr web-site that graphics chips will get 20TFLOPs performance in 2015, which is about twenty times higher compared to modern graphics processors, such as ATI Radeon HD 4890 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 285. In general, this means that every two years graphics processors will double their performance, a not really high pace, considering the fact that in the recent years GPUs doubled their floating point operations performance every year.

In addition, Mr. Dally expects future GPUs to be more effective at the level of parallelism: they will be able to execute multiple instructions at once asynchronously, a feature that is not available on today’s GPUs, but is supported by Intel's forthcoming Larrabee. In fact, there were reports that Nvidia’s next-generation graphics chips (NV60, GT300, etc) already feature MIMD (Multiple Instruction stream, Multiple Data stream) architecture.

Unfortunately, Mr. Dally, who joined Nvidia in January ’09, did not reveal much regarding Nvidia’s future plans or products, but again emphasized importance of CUDA (compute unified device architecture) programming model and (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU).

Tags: Nvidia, Geforce, NV60, GT300, G300