4 ms·

> The way they work under the hood has changed fundamentally maybe 4 times in that span. How many times since we got shaders? And when exactly? I bet each chan

> The way they work under the hood has changed fundamentally maybe 4 times in that span. How many times since we got shaders? And when exactly? I bet each change takes longer to come than the last. I mean, GPUs are increasingly general purpose nowadays. Sure they're optimised to specific kinds of embarrassingly parallel problems, but as more and more of their capabilities move out of the fixed pipeline to shaders, the need to change lessens.

corysama 17d ago
When I started what you did was nothing but set up DMA streams to set registers. DMA sets registers, hardware reacts by rasterizing triangles. In the GeForce3 era, the registers got complicated enough they resembled tiny "pixel shaders", but under the hood it was still a small struct held in registers. Vertex shaders were 1 to 128 asm instructions executed strictly linearly. In the G80 era we got "general purpose shaders." But, they still depend heavily on the fix function pipeline for their dispatch/scheduling and I/O. These days, everything is basically a dressed-up compute shader. The shared-memory SRAM is front-and-center in your attention. Dispatch and scheduling are manual and complicated. GPUs are transitioning into tensor evaluators. So, maybe today we can start considering talking about planning committee meetings about stability. But, what I've observed is that this has been a request for a few decades now. And, in hindsight it would not have worked out in the past. Moving forward, maybe it would work out OK today for a while. But, I don't see the rate of change in GPUs slowing down any time soon. Wouldn't be surprised if we're racing towards some Cerebras + Tensor Cores + FPGA near future.