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IMO CPUs are dead for all devices not laptops, in 5 years that might not even be true. Bespoke accelerators & flexible fabrics will dominate.
by omgJustTest 3y ago
IMO CPUs are dead for all devices not laptops, in 5 years that might not even be true.
Bespoke accelerators & flexible fabrics will dominate.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- daveguy 3y agoCan you give some examples? Are you just talking about GPUs? Those are only for massively parallel workloads. You need a CPU for literally everything else. Not familiar with flexible fabrics, so maybe I'm missing something there.
- jsheard 3y agoThey mean FPGAs I guess? They're certainly flexible but incredibly expensive for almost any purpose where a general purpose CPU or GPU could also get the job done, and incredibly expensive compared to a mass produced ASIC that does the same thing, so they're always going to be a niche thing mainly for expensive low volume products.
- synergy20 3y agowhich has a software problem, totally non portable
- dotnet00 3y agoComplete opposite of the direction things have been moving in. Unless you're arguing that something that does general purpose computation, but also has special hardware/instructions to accelerate certain tasks, is no longer a CPU (in which case we haven't used CPUs for a while now, hardware accelerated encryption has been essentially standard on most CPUs for a while).
- klelatti 3y agoDon't agree with the parent comment but we haven't really been moving in the opposite direction with special purpose instructions either. Look at a modern smartphone SoC (eg [1]) how much of that die is CPU even with caches? And as ML becomes more important it's only going in one direction. [1] https://www.semianalysis.com/p/apple-a15-die-shot-and-annotation https://www.semianalysis.com/p/apple-a15-die-shot-and-annota...
- cptskippy 3y agoI wouldn't say we're moving at all. This is how it's always been. Hardware Manufacturers introduce new hardware or instructions all the time and software framework developers create abstractions around it. Sometimes the hardware goes away but the framework remains (e.g. PhysX, OpenGL), and sometimes the software remains proprietary (e.g. CUDA, Metal). Some operating systems provide Hardware Abstraction layers that allow for different implementations of hardware to support an OS interface. Sometimes this is done by the compiler to optimize operations to the hardware (e.g. x87, MMX, SSE, AVX).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- omgJustTest 3y agoCrazily people still expect stuff to continue as normal after ChatGPT, Vision Pro, Stable Diffusion, etc. This is not going to be linear improvement processes... and people are not thinking of single camera, single sensor, single purpose uints. The only thing that makes sense to put it all together is something that is either completely necessary or completely flexible. Come back in a year & reflect on this!
- snakeyjake 3y ago>Bespoke accelerators & flexible fabrics will dominate. To me anything beyond a simple integer ALU is a bespoke accelerator so this has been the norm for a long time.
- taskforcegemini 3y agomore like everything but laptops. most laptop cpus are good enough nowadays for most peoples workload, so looking for a good cpu is one of the less important factors in buying a new laptop.