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I think most people takes the wrong lesson from 432 and IA64. The problem wasn't that hardware was dependent on software, it's that the chips exposed too much o
by gok 8y ago
I think most people takes the wrong lesson from 432 and IA64. The problem wasn't that hardware was dependent on software, it's that the chips exposed too much of their internals to would-be adopters. GPUs are also extremely dependent on software/compilers, but few people have to care about that because Intel/AMD/Nvidia don't expose the internal ISA of any of their chips.
- jcranmer 8y agoThat's not exactly true. The main advantage GPUs have is they are not general-purpose, they are accelerators. NVidia made GPGPU successful by saying "throw away your C/C++ code and use this entirely new language (more appropriate for the hardware) to program this thing", and backing that up with impressive performance improvements. Intel failed with Xeon Phi because, essentially, they promised you wouldn't have to rewrite your code to get the performance improvements, but the performance improvements were anemic if you didn't rewrite code.
- gok 8y agoCUDA is now 11 years old, older than x86 was when the 860 came out. Internally the GPUs today are radically different but they run the same software.