Posts tagged ‘Sqrt’

Taking the square root of a floating point number is essential in many engineering applications. Whether you are doing nBody simulations, simulating molecules, or linear algebra, the ability to accurately and quickly perform thousands or even millions of square root operations is essential. Unfortunately, the square root functions on most CPUs are very time consuming, even with specialized SSE instructions. Fortunately enough, GPUs have specialized hardware to perform such square root operations extremely fast. CUDA, NVidia’s solution to extremely high performance parallel computing, puts the onboard specialized hardware to full use, and easily outperforms modern Intel or AMD CPUs by a factor of over a hundred.

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