Okay, so, GPUs are taking one more step towards being general purpose massively parallel machines. That's cool.
What would be even cooler though would be for GPU vendors to start giving us the user manual. An I mean the real user manual, that explains how to use their piece of metal when all you have is that piece of metal. That means a precise description of the wire protocols, the data format of the buffers we send to & get from the GPU, the ISA of the cores we have access to, the relevant performance characteristics…
In other words, enough information to write a state-of-the-art driver for any OS. That would be cool.
i really don't think you know what you're talking about. this isn't about better or worse. there are many many many workloads a GPU cannot at all implement (hint: anything with branches).
loup-vaillant · · focus · HN ↗
What would be even cooler though would be for GPU vendors to start giving us the user manual. An I mean the real user manual, that explains how to use their piece of metal when all you have is that piece of metal. That means a precise description of the wire protocols, the data format of the buffers we send to & get from the GPU, the ISA of the cores we have access to, the relevant performance characteristics…
In other words, enough information to write a state-of-the-art driver for any OS. That would be cool.
mathisfun123 · · focus · HN ↗
this has nothing to do with becoming more general purpose (GPUs will never be general purpose - it's literally physically impossible).
loup-vaillant · · focus · HN ↗
Well in that sense, neither will CPUs. Just like GPUs, some workloads are better left to other kinds of hardware.
mathisfun123 · · focus · HN ↗
loup-vaillant · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems2/part-iv-general-purpose-computation-gpus-primer/chapter-34-gpu-flow-control-idioms" rel="nofollow">https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems2/part-iv-genera...