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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 smart
by 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 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).