What if there was an adapter that made a regular motherboard into a graphics card. Plugging into a pci or agp slot sort of like a bridge. With a few minor adjustments to the other motherboard such as a memory less vga pci card that just displays the finished product of the motherboard. And maybe a 16mb flash drive that holds only the initialization program and plugs into ide slot. A new case would be neede to hold the two power supplies and motherboards required. This thing would be no bigger than some peoples normal giant rigs.

Maybe even possible, but why? It's much simpler to use a simple program that would make CPU emulate a GPU and to share RAM.

The thing is, that GPU's are much faster then CPU's and these emulations wouldn't be worth trying. It would be much, much more useful when someone could make a program that would make the emulation from GPU to CPU possible. For example, 10% of some mighty Radeon/NV used for 2D display and the other 90% for system as a backup power to the CPU...

That would be indeed a very expensive and slow Video Subsystem.

All Video manufacturers have extremely powerful Emulators (complete Clusters) to test new designs before they are put in silicon.

Despite being more powerful than 25 High-End PC's, they're still very slow, useful only for fundamental testing and bug-tracing.

wrote on 29.06.06 at 11:02:40:

[...] The thing is, that GPU's are much faster then CPU's [...]

No, it's only specialised for computing graphics. ;)

CPUs are "allrounders" so they can compute everything, GPUs are constructed for computing graphics, no more and no less.
Emulation of a chipdesign at another chipdesign is always slower than computing the special tasks by the specialised chips, even if the chips which emulate the specialised chips are much higher clocked (an Athlon 64 @ 2.6 GHz is dramatically slower than a Radeon X1900XT if you let it compute graphics).

In terms of GigaFlops, modern GPU's achieve about 10 to 25 times the performance of CPU's.

(fastest x86 get to about 10-15 GFlops peak, a 1900XT GPU achieves upto 180 GFlops peak with its massive parallelism)

CPU's can do everything, but slow. GPU's are limited in feature set, but perform it extremely fast. Fully specialized circuits (DSP's for example) perform their tasks even much faster...