3 ms·

I don’t understand this “stick to your guns(CPU)” mentality. With Moore’s law dominating any ideas about software optimization, the mantra of “wait until the C

by gessha 4y ago

I don’t understand this “stick to your guns(CPU)” mentality. With Moore’s law dominating any ideas about software optimization, the mantra of “wait until the CPU is twice as fast in two years” has dominated the industry for long enough. Not everything needs to fit in an idealistic CPU and we should allow for more complex computational machinery. Let’s allow for new hardware, new programming paradigms, new ways of thinking.

ggm 4y ago
This is kind-of a-historical. It worked, as long as Moores law worked. The special purpose h/w bought speedup for "now" and within a tick-tock cycle was overtaken by general purpose CPU, unless there was countervailing investment in that special purpose hardware: which happened to be basically the GPU and almosty nothing else. FPGA's and ASIC were tuned to do highly specific tasks, and then wound up being much the same: prove it in an FPGA, make an ASIC, then see it move on-die as the VLSI matures. Now Moores law has bottomed out, specific purpose processing asynchronously makes more sense. I just don't like it, the same way angry old men growl at the moon at night.
- vidarh 4y ago
  There was only a very narrow time window where a single-CPU-without-special-purpose-h/w dominated. The 8-bit era and before relied heavily on co-processors. Sometimes they were the same or similar to the main CPU - e.g. the Commodore 64 floppy drive had a CPU as powerful as the main CPU of the machine, and you could run code on it - but it took special effort to target them. The most successful 16-bit home computers had co-processors and special purpose hw (e.g. the Amiga had it's copper and blitter, but some models also had a 6502-compatible core controlling the keyboard, and many SCSI controllers at the time had full CPU's - mine had a Z80). The PC got cheap by relying on the CPU to be able to control most things in an age where special purpose hardware was expensive due to low volumes (the Amiga "only" sold about 5 million across multiple models), but it didn't take long before a typical PC started getting micro-controllers and full on CPUs everywhere (e.g. in your hard drive [1]) because the CPU speed as mostly not gotten fast enough. Just for a short window of maybe a decade it got fast enough to outpace the cost of low volume special purpose HW. [1] http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack

by gessha 4y ago

ggm 4y ago

This is kind-of a-historical. It worked, as long as Moores law worked. The special purpose h/w bought speedup for "now" and within a tick-tock cycle was overtaken by general purpose CPU, unless there was countervailing investment in that special purpose hardware: which happened to be basically the GPU and almosty nothing else. FPGA's and ASIC were tuned to do highly specific tasks, and then wound up being much the same: prove it in an FPGA, make an ASIC, then see it move on-die as the VLSI matures. Now Moores law has bottomed out, specific purpose processing asynchronously makes more sense. I just don't like it, the same way angry old men growl at the moon at night.

vidarh 4y ago
There was only a very narrow time window where a single-CPU-without-special-purpose-h/w dominated. The 8-bit era and before relied heavily on co-processors. Sometimes they were the same or similar to the main CPU - e.g. the Commodore 64 floppy drive had a CPU as powerful as the main CPU of the machine, and you could run code on it - but it took special effort to target them. The most successful 16-bit home computers had co-processors and special purpose hw (e.g. the Amiga had it's copper and blitter, but some models also had a 6502-compatible core controlling the keyboard, and many SCSI controllers at the time had full CPU's - mine had a Z80). The PC got cheap by relying on the CPU to be able to control most things in an age where special purpose hardware was expensive due to low volumes (the Amiga "only" sold about 5 million across multiple models), but it didn't take long before a typical PC started getting micro-controllers and full on CPUs everywhere (e.g. in your hard drive [1]) because the CPU speed as mostly not gotten fast enough. Just for a short window of maybe a decade it got fast enough to outpace the cost of low volume special purpose HW. [1] http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack