> required Assembly programming Demoscene skill level to make good use of them Yeah, but writing efficient CUDA kernels, or D3D compute shaders, is not particu

> required Assembly programming Demoscene skill level to make good use of them Yeah, but writing efficient CUDA kernels, or D3D compute shaders, is not particularly straightforward either. At least GPU cores have direct access to global memory but still, for good throughput that memory access needs to be coalesced. Then there’re manually managed groupshared memory, atomics, wave/warp intrinsics in D3D12/CUDA, and now these special low-precision matrix multiplication instructions for AI. People accepted all that complexity because performance is too good to ignore, both flops/dollar and flops/watt. Contemporary mainstream GPUs were just better than SPEs on Cell, or AVX-512 on Xeon Phis. Specifically, PS3 (2006) delivered up to 200 GFlops FP32, first-generation Xeon Phi (incredibly expensive devices released in 2010) 750 GFlops, but GeForce 460 (released in 2010 for the price of $200) delivered up to 900 GFlops.