Abstract

Why is Graphics Hardware so Fast?

Pat Hanrahan
Stanford University

Recently NVIDIA has claimed that their graphics processors (or GPUs) are improving at a rate three times faster than Moore's Law for processors. A $25 GPU is rated from 50-100 gigaflops and approximately 1 teraop (8-bit ops). Alongside this increase in performance is new functionality. The most recent innovation is user-programmable vertex and fragment stages that allow GPUs to compute a wide range of new visual effects enabling movie-quality games. Announced chips have as many as 200 programmable floating point units operating in parallel. The result is that the latest generation of commodity graphics and game chips are powerful data-parallel computers. Why are these graphics processors so fast? Will the future performance of GPUs continue to increase faster than CPUs? And, if so, what are the implications for computing?

Biography

Pat Hanrahan is the CANON USA Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University where he teaches computer graphics. His current research involves visualization, image synthesis, and graphics systems and architectures. Before joining Stanford he was a faculty member at Princeton. He has also worked at Pixar where he developed developed volume rendering software and was the chief architect of the RenderMan(TM) Interface - a protocol that allows modeling programs to describe scenes to high quality rendering programs. Previous to Pixar he directed the 3D computer graphics group in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at New York Institute of Technology. Professor Hanrahan has received three university teaching awards. He has received an Academy Award for Science and Technology, the Spirit of America Creativity Award, the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, and was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Back to Distinguished Lecture Series - Fall 2002 / Spring 2003 Schedule