4 ms·

One can see it that way, granted. When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big cus

One can see it that way, granted. When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government, large corporations, etc. All our beloved consumer tech started out as absurdly high priced niche stuff for them. We've been sold the overflow capacity and binned parts. And that seems to be a more-or-less natural consequence of large purchasers signing large checks and entering predictable contracts. Individual consumers are very price sensitive and fickle by comparison. From that perspective, anything that increases overall capacity should also increase the supply of binned parts and overflow. Which will eventually benefit consumers. Though the intervening market adjustment period may be painful (as we are seeing). Consumers have also benefited greatly from the shrinking of component sizes, as this has had the effect of increasing production capacity with fixed wafer volume.

HPsquared 11mo ago
Gaming drove the development of GPUs which led to the current AI boom. Smartphones drove small process nodes for power efficiency.
- timschmidt 11mo ago
  SGI and 3Dfx made high-end simulators for aerospace in the beginning. Gaming grew out of that. Even Intel's first GPU (the i740) came from GE Aerospace.
  - whizzter 11mo ago
    Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced chips, but arcade games like the Sega Model 1 (Virtua Racing) was via Virtua Fighter an inspiration for the Playstation, and before that there was crude games on both PC and Amiga. Games were always going to go 3d sooner or later, the real pressure of the high volume competitive market got us more and more capable chips until they were capable enough for the kind of computation needed for neural networks faster than a slow moving specialty market could have.
    - timschmidt 11mo ago
      > Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced chips Yes. That is my point. The customers willing to pay the high initial R+D costs opened up the potential for wider adoption. This is always the case. Even the gaming GPUs which have grown in popularity with consumers are derivatives of larger designs intended for research clusters, datacenters, aerospace, and military applications. No question that chip companies are happy to take consumers money. But I struggle to think of an example of a new technology which was invented and marketed to consumers first.
      - HPsquared 11mo ago
        It's symbiotic, I suppose.
      - whizzter 11mo ago
        Computers themselves were non-consumer to begin with, but the Personal Computer broke the technology moat to consumers before anything else and once that had passed it was mostly a matter of time imho. Many 3d games like doom, quake1, flight unlimited,etc ran purely on software rendering since CPU's were already providing enough oomph to render fairly useful 3d graphics in the mid 90s. CPU power was enough but consoles/arcades showed that there was more to be gotten (but nothing hindered games at that point). And already there, the capital investment for game consoles (Atari,NES,SNES,PS1,PS2, etc) and arcade games(like the above mentioned 3d games) were big enough to use custom chipsets not used or purposed for anything else (I think also that in the 80s/90s the barrier of entry to making competitive custom chips was a tad lower, just consider the cambrian explosions of firms during the 90s making x86 and later ARM chips). Yes, there was vendors that focused on the high end commercial customers, and yes many alumnis of those firms did contribute a ton of expertise towards what we have today. But if you look at what companies survived and pushed the envelope in the longer run it was almost always companies that competed in the consumer market, and it was only when those consumer chips needed even more advanced processing that we breached the point where the chips became capable of NN's. In fact I'd say that had the likes of SGI prevailed we would've had to wait longer for our GPU revolution. Flight simulators,etc were often focused on "larger/detailed" worlds, PS2-era chips with higher polycounts and more memory would have been fine for simulator developers for a long time (since more details in a military scenario would have been fine). Leisure games has always craved fidelity on a more "human" level, to implement "hacks" for stuff with custom dynamic lighting models, then global illumination, subsurface scattering,etc we've needed the arbitrary programmability since the raw power wasn't there (the most modern raytracing chips are _starting_ to approach that levels without too ugly hacks).
  - rasz 11mo ago
    3dfx didnt. They had a subsidiary? spinoff? Quantum3D that reused 3dfx commodity chips to build cards for simulators.
  - somenameforme 11mo ago
    Wolfenstein 3d was released before 3DFx existed, was purely CPU rendered, and generally considered the father of modern 3d shooters. Even without the scientific computing angle, GPUs would have been developed for gaming simply because it was a good idea that clearly had a big market.
Aurornis 11mo ago
> When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government, large corporations, etc. Perfectly stated. I think comments like the one above come from a mentality that the individual consumer should be the center of the computing universe and big purchasers should be forced to live with the leftovers. What's really happening is the big companies are doing R&D at incredible rates and we're getting huge benefits by drafting along as consumers. We wouldn't have incredible GPUs in our gaming systems and even cell phones if the primary market for these things was retail entertainment purchases that people make every 5 years.
- codebje 11mo ago
  The iPhone wasn't designed or marketed to large corporations. 3dfx didn't invent the voodoo for B2B sales. IBM didn't branch out from international business machines to the personal computer for business sales. The compact disc wasn't invented for corporate storage. Computing didn't take off until it shrank from the giant, unreliable beasts of machines owned by a small number of big corporations to the home computers of the 70s. There's a lot more of us than them. There's a gold rush market for GPUs and DRAM. It won't last forever, but while it does high volume sales at high margins will dominate supply. GPUs are still inflated from the crypto rush, too.
  - thaumasiotes 11mo ago
    > The iPhone wasn't designed or marketed to large corporations. The iPhone isn't exactly a consumer computation device. From that perspective, it does less work at a higher cost.
    - codebje 11mo ago
      I'm sorry, but I'm not sure if you're implying you dislike Apple's approach to what the user is allowed to do, or suggesting we should only talk about general purpose computing devices. If it's the latter, sure, the iPhone's not an innovation in that space, discard it from my list of examples. If it's the former, I'll give you that too, but it was still the first of its kind, by a large margin. (I remember the huge window in which phone companies desperately put out feature phones with sub-par touch screens, completely missing the value to consumers. The iPod Touch should've been warning enough... and should've been (one of) my signal(s) to buy Apple stock, I guess :-)
Spooky23 11mo ago
100%. We’ve seen crazy swings in RAM prices before. A colleague who worked with me about 10 years ago on a VDI project ran some numbers and showed that if a Time Machine were available, we could have brought like 4 loaded MacBook Pros back and replaced a $1M HP 3PAR ssd array :)

HPsquared 11mo ago

Gaming drove the development of GPUs which led to the current AI boom. Smartphones drove small process nodes for power efficiency.

timschmidt 11mo ago
SGI and 3Dfx made high-end simulators for aerospace in the beginning. Gaming grew out of that. Even Intel's first GPU (the i740) came from GE Aerospace.
- whizzter 11mo ago
  Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced chips, but arcade games like the Sega Model 1 (Virtua Racing) was via Virtua Fighter an inspiration for the Playstation, and before that there was crude games on both PC and Amiga. Games were always going to go 3d sooner or later, the real pressure of the high volume competitive market got us more and more capable chips until they were capable enough for the kind of computation needed for neural networks faster than a slow moving specialty market could have.
  - timschmidt 11mo ago
    > Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced chips Yes. That is my point. The customers willing to pay the high initial R+D costs opened up the potential for wider adoption. This is always the case. Even the gaming GPUs which have grown in popularity with consumers are derivatives of larger designs intended for research clusters, datacenters, aerospace, and military applications. No question that chip companies are happy to take consumers money. But I struggle to think of an example of a new technology which was invented and marketed to consumers first.
    - HPsquared 11mo ago
      It's symbiotic, I suppose.
    - whizzter 11mo ago
      Computers themselves were non-consumer to begin with, but the Personal Computer broke the technology moat to consumers before anything else and once that had passed it was mostly a matter of time imho. Many 3d games like doom, quake1, flight unlimited,etc ran purely on software rendering since CPU's were already providing enough oomph to render fairly useful 3d graphics in the mid 90s. CPU power was enough but consoles/arcades showed that there was more to be gotten (but nothing hindered games at that point). And already there, the capital investment for game consoles (Atari,NES,SNES,PS1,PS2, etc) and arcade games(like the above mentioned 3d games) were big enough to use custom chipsets not used or purposed for anything else (I think also that in the 80s/90s the barrier of entry to making competitive custom chips was a tad lower, just consider the cambrian explosions of firms during the 90s making x86 and later ARM chips). Yes, there was vendors that focused on the high end commercial customers, and yes many alumnis of those firms did contribute a ton of expertise towards what we have today. But if you look at what companies survived and pushed the envelope in the longer run it was almost always companies that competed in the consumer market, and it was only when those consumer chips needed even more advanced processing that we breached the point where the chips became capable of NN's. In fact I'd say that had the likes of SGI prevailed we would've had to wait longer for our GPU revolution. Flight simulators,etc were often focused on "larger/detailed" worlds, PS2-era chips with higher polycounts and more memory would have been fine for simulator developers for a long time (since more details in a military scenario would have been fine). Leisure games has always craved fidelity on a more "human" level, to implement "hacks" for stuff with custom dynamic lighting models, then global illumination, subsurface scattering,etc we've needed the arbitrary programmability since the raw power wasn't there (the most modern raytracing chips are _starting_ to approach that levels without too ugly hacks).
- rasz 11mo ago
  3dfx didnt. They had a subsidiary? spinoff? Quantum3D that reused 3dfx commodity chips to build cards for simulators.
- somenameforme 11mo ago
  Wolfenstein 3d was released before 3DFx existed, was purely CPU rendered, and generally considered the father of modern 3d shooters. Even without the scientific computing angle, GPUs would have been developed for gaming simply because it was a good idea that clearly had a big market.

Aurornis 11mo ago

> When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government, large corporations, etc. Perfectly stated. I think comments like the one above come from a mentality that the individual consumer should be the center of the computing universe and big purchasers should be forced to live with the leftovers. What's really happening is the big companies are doing R&D at incredible rates and we're getting huge benefits by drafting along as consumers. We wouldn't have incredible GPUs in our gaming systems and even cell phones if the primary market for these things was retail entertainment purchases that people make every 5 years.

codebje 11mo ago
The iPhone wasn't designed or marketed to large corporations. 3dfx didn't invent the voodoo for B2B sales. IBM didn't branch out from international business machines to the personal computer for business sales. The compact disc wasn't invented for corporate storage. Computing didn't take off until it shrank from the giant, unreliable beasts of machines owned by a small number of big corporations to the home computers of the 70s. There's a lot more of us than them. There's a gold rush market for GPUs and DRAM. It won't last forever, but while it does high volume sales at high margins will dominate supply. GPUs are still inflated from the crypto rush, too.
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago
  > The iPhone wasn't designed or marketed to large corporations. The iPhone isn't exactly a consumer computation device. From that perspective, it does less work at a higher cost.
  - codebje 11mo ago
    I'm sorry, but I'm not sure if you're implying you dislike Apple's approach to what the user is allowed to do, or suggesting we should only talk about general purpose computing devices. If it's the latter, sure, the iPhone's not an innovation in that space, discard it from my list of examples. If it's the former, I'll give you that too, but it was still the first of its kind, by a large margin. (I remember the huge window in which phone companies desperately put out feature phones with sub-par touch screens, completely missing the value to consumers. The iPod Touch should've been warning enough... and should've been (one of) my signal(s) to buy Apple stock, I guess :-)

Spooky23 11mo ago

100%. We’ve seen crazy swings in RAM prices before. A colleague who worked with me about 10 years ago on a VDI project ran some numbers and showed that if a Time Machine were available, we could have brought like 4 loaded MacBook Pros back and replaced a $1M HP 3PAR ssd array :)