4 ms·

I don't agree with the tone of the article. Doing complex functions in hardware is a lot cheaper, often by 100X, compared to doing them in software. As an extr

I don't agree with the tone of the article. Doing complex functions in hardware is a lot cheaper, often by 100X, compared to doing them in software. As an extreme case, to do a simple 32-bit add, you light up tens of millions of transistors if the addition goes through a CPU pipeline. The adder itself of course only requires a few transistors... Saying that "specialization saves dispatching costs" is minimizing the savings by orders of magnitude. Of course, the article is correct in pointing out that hardware doesn't make things free. [source: my day job]

_yosefk 8y ago
TFA author. How does the word "dispatching" hint at the order of magnitude of anything? What orders of magnitude do depend on is your competition. Outdoing a CPU at operation X is easier than outdoing a GPU at X [assuming the GPU does X reasonably well] which is easier than outdoing a DSP at X [assuming the DSP does X reasonably well]. If your competition is reasonably optimized programmable accelerators, your opportunities to beat it start shrinking. Source: my day job
- alain94040 8y ago
  For me, dispatching refers to a very specific piece of the CPU micro-architecture, by far not the most complex or largest area. So by focusing on "dispatching", you make it sound like the overhead is small. Maybe you meant to use another word. My point stands that from a silicon area perspective, 99% of the CPU is overhead when all you need is a fixed function. Based on your background, I know you know that. A lot of details in the article show that you know what you are talking about and have specific use cases in mind. I can guess those and for those the article is correct.