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I think it was Joel McCormack who wrote a paper (context: X11 display servers) that basically said that in the long run, dumb frame buffers were probably better

by kjs3 7y ago

I think it was Joel McCormack who wrote a paper (context: X11 display servers) that basically said that in the long run, dumb frame buffers were probably better than dedicated graphics processors. He reasoned the general purpose processor guys were improving performance faster than the dedicated GPU folks were able to due to greater scale and resources. They were therefore able (eventually) to perform the same graphics primitives just as fast as the GPUs, and were using up all of the memory bandwidth anyway. That doesn't seem to be as true any more, and there were always corner cases (e.g. hardware accelerated mice sprites, I think, were always a win for various reasons), but it was an interesting debate back in the day.

jacquesm 7y ago
That all changed when high level primitives and floating point operations were moved to the graphics co-processor. SIMD at that level was a game changer. I wrote a graphics driver for the BBC Micro to use the Elektor 'GDP' as an output device, it totally blew the 8 bit CPU of the day out of the water. These things tend to oscillate, presumably one day there will be another generation of CPUs that is much closer to our current CPU/GPU combo that will outperform GPUs and then the cycle will start over again.
- kjs3 7y ago
  it totally blew the 8 bit CPU of the day out of the water I think the counterargument in this context would be "...until we all went to 16-bit processors.". But I understand the point you're making. These things tend to oscillate I think you're of course correct, and I don't think the original paper disputes that. What I think (without much research) has happened is that the period of that oscillation has dramatically expanded since the paper was written.