I've been through the same iterations you talked about, writing game graphics in MacOS Classic QuickDraw, then OS X Cocoa, then OpenGL, then ES2, now Unity...

I've been through the same iterations you talked about, writing game graphics in MacOS Classic QuickDraw, then OS X Cocoa, then OpenGL, then ES2, now Unity... IMHO this is all going the wrong direction. I'm strongly against SIMD as a pattern because it makes things hard to generalize. The fact that we don't even know the architectures of the video cards we use every day is a huge red flag. I mean, that's the point we're trying to get to with abstractions, but SIMD exacerbated the pain by being so opinionated. The reason all of this is going in such strange (informal) directions is that video cards are proprietary and the money is in photorealistic rasterization. It's working along one branch of the tree of possible architectures. Then CUDA and TensorFlow etc are attempts to overlay other narrow generalizations over that and IMHO aren't nearly as good of approaches as MATLAB/Octave/Erlang/Go, etc. I've said this many times, but I'd prefer to have an array of general purpose CPUs, at least 256 and their number should roughly double in a predictable way every year or two. Then we could have abstractions over that that handle data locality or cache coherency (if needed... it most likely isn't). A chip like that would be trivial to use for ray tracing, for example. We're going to continue seeing this uninspired churn burning out developers until there is a viable high-core CPU to compete with GPUs.