4 ms·

Complete opposite of the direction things have been moving in. Unless you're arguing that something that does general purpose computation, but also has special

Complete 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 ago
Don'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 ago
  I 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).
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omgJustTest 3y ago
Crazily 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!

klelatti 3y ago

Don'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 ago
I 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).

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omgJustTest 3y ago

Crazily 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!