GPU powered OS?

[Talamakara]

I was talking to a guy at work who was asking what i thought of a PC he was looking at. The conversation went of on many tangents to different aspects but eventually lead to graphics cards. In which he asked the usual "i'm not a gamer do i even need one" question. Of course i went through why even a base graphics card is a good idea etc.

However this got me thinking. What does my GPU do for me today? Besides games, I use it for things like folding@home, converting my DVDs into an easier accessible source. I could use my GPUs for bitcoin mining, graphic rendering etc, and with my Titans running SLI i've never really pushed them to the breaking point, but what off the wall thing could I make them do.

In the past I've run a RAM based systems from boot CDs (bartpe, ultiamte boot CD etc) and some of the newest ones can load windows right off a CD, so theoretically running this all in RAM. And maybe it was the matrix aligning itself into place at the right time, but later that day I had both a random article about running windows 10 off a usb drive and a youtube video on making a usb raid configuration entertain me. Which lead really to this question taking root.

Is it possible to load an Operating System (Windows, Chomecast, Linux... [yes i left OSX out]) onto a device either from a usb or even from a standard ssd drive install and use a GPU to run the OS instead of a CPU.

Or has my logic circuit fused my reality matrix? lol
 

 

[QueenDemetria]

Its not possible at this time.

GPU's just don't have the instruction sets to run operating systems, and vice versa.

[Lotus]

Imagine having the single-threaded performance of dogshit, and then having to deal with the overhead of a cluster of several thousand cores. Then add in the limited instruction set and you've got one helluva problem. GPU architecture just is NOT set up to handle anything but the most parallelized of workloads.

[VinsinityKT]

Umm, I'm going to go the short answer no because I don't believe OS are designed to run like that. Think of a GPU as a lot of tiny CPU. Also non gamers/content creators don't need GPU because all they will be doing is the basics so iGPU is enough for their needs.

[Enderman]

no, a GPU is a graphics processing unit, not a central processing unit

there are special "operating systems" however which can run on a GPU and communicate with your regular OS running on your CPU
xeon phi is an example of that
its got its own little OS which you load your programs on and run from there

[Talamakara]

That's kinda what i was thinking, but i thought I would ask.

[manikyath]

GPU's were made for one thing, and one thign only: numbercrunching (targetted at graphics and driving displays)

in some way a GPU is more like an ASIC than it is like a CPU.