"Alexander Staubo" <alex@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On 6/16/07, Tom Allison <tom@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> It might make an interesting project, but I would be really depressed >> if I had to go buy an NVidia card instead of investing in more RAM to >> optimize my performance! <g> > Why does it matter what kind of hardware you can (not "have to") buy > to give your database a performance boost? With a GPU, you would have > one more component that you could upgrade to improve performance; > that's more possibilities, not less. I only see a problem with a > database that would *require* a GPU to achieve adequate performance, > or to function at all, but that's not what this thread is about. Too often, arguments of this sort disregard the opportunity costs of development going in one direction vs another. If we make any significant effort to make Postgres use a GPU, that's development effort spent on that rather than some other optimization; and more effort, ongoing indefinitely, to maintain that code; and perhaps the code will preclude other possible optimizations or features because of assumptions wired into it. So you can't just claim that using a GPU might be interesting; you have to persuade people that it's more interesting than other places where we could spend our performance-improvement efforts. regards, tom lane
